It Is Less 'If' Than 'When' (1)

And confidence is never inevitable.

It Is Less A Matter Of 'If' Than 'When' (2)

and what we can take away with us less than we like to think.

Virtuous Non-Alignment

The Governments that are most 'joined up'-
cohesive and consistent in all their ministries-
will always be the most effective at oppressing
their population by internalising the pressure
to conform, and hide it from the worlds press.
Such a government is unlikely to trumpet abroad
the material gains for it's civil populous
beyond making a virtue of isolation from that cliche
'the community of nations' in a dishonest autonomy.
Whilst the rich in said country will continue
to enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else.
As civil law collapses so quietly we don't see it happen.

Promises Promises

When I was young and naive
I was taught how to write from the care home
everyone pretended was a boarding school
to my parents as part of my English grammar.
To make us more compliant to write
there was a mildly comic draft letter
we were taught never to imitate. It ran
'Dear Mother I am sending you a pound, but not this week'.

With hindsight the joke was very much on us,
we had insufficient money to send anywhere.
And we were kept at far greater cost
than ever we could have accounted for.

Now British citizens are facing a season
of resprayed/recycled electoral promises
and I remember that prototype letter.
I have to ask, did the men (it is mostly men),
who probably went to a proper boarding school,
now making the present politics of hope-deferred
for those with less ever know about that joke letter home?

It seems to me that they have adapted it,
word for word, in all their manifestos.

When Praise

and thanks seem cheap,
compared with money-or solvency-
we know more than words permit
that we have been turned inside out.
That is when accuracy
about the past is hard to find.

Putting the 'less' Into 'Hope' (2)

'One day we shall all die,
all other days we shall be alive'
- Per-Olof Enquist

'Don't take life too seriously
you won't come out of it alive
no matter what'-Henning Mankell

I Don't Know

when the phrase 'People should know their place [in life]'
lost its public currency and power to shame.
Anyone who says it now only ever says it in private.
As a phrase its declining value can be measured
against the rise of advertising as the presentation of choice.
Though that choice does mean 'no freedom from advertising'.
The place where we learn to know ourselves
should be the only place we should ever really accept.
Though I know we progress towards  there
only by serendipity, mistakes and experience.
If we come to know ourselves then we may know others.
That is the only way we will be truly accepted just as we are.