Humility

I have never taken an IQ test.

I regard everyday life
in all it's complexities
as an intelligence test
that is enough for most folk.

What I have found most often
is that testing each other for empathy
would serve us a much much better. 

Another Loathsome Cliche

is 'I have mixed feelings about.....'
(add the subject here). Why so?

Because even as the phrase is about feelings
it always spoken in highly neutral tones.

Whoever uses it sends their audience
into instant and infinite boredom,
sufficient that when the speaker finishes
the audience can't remember what it was
that left the speaker so double minded.

Modern Communications

If all the mobile phones in the world
were arranged in the form of a tower,
and the words once spoken through them
turned into cement, the way the words
once cemented people to each other,
to bind the phones all together
we really would have an all new,
and digital, Tower of Babel.

Autumnal Thoughts

In Autumn in Southern France the figs ripen on the trees. 

In time they lose their plumpness and look like old men's testicles

Like old men's genitalia they lose their cover and ooze a bit.
 The more they ooze the better they taste.....

Telling Stories

is an ingrained habit for humans,
who clearly like to detain each other,
at length with expansive narratives.

The technology by which we do this
has vastly expanded our means of being entertained.

The problem is that as our stories get retold
many a story travels less well
than it's teller likes to think;
the less personal the means of conveyance
the tighter the script needs to be
to refresh it's audience properly.

But in our deathly self absorption
we continue to insist we are 'entertaining'
with repeats of old stories that have become cliche.

God save you all from my when I become bored with myself
-you will spot it before I do.....

A Year Of Disapointments

will last longer than any other type of year.
The number of dates on the calendar
will be as fixed as they ever have been,
but the events that punctuate it's length
make sure that our sense of time stretches
ultimately losing all it's 'give',
until it has nothing left to give but emptiness,
and an old ache that passes for a pulse.

The heart is a very strong muscle
which can withstand a lot of stress.

But as a physical repository of memory
it will only carry so much despair voluntarily.

Absence Of Mind Does Not Mean Absence Of Words

Billions of souls live on their own,
in spite of their attempts at living together.
At best each soul is an unreliable narrator,
an unreliable navigator,
which knows little of it's own unreliability,
much less everyone else's.

How unreliable they all are together
is the sum of human confidence
about human omniscience over nature.