Us And Them

I often feel out of my depth with other people.

When I meet people I don't know what to say
that would please them and make me their friend.
When I am obliged to speak the right words won't come.
Awkwardness takes over and blunts my speech.

Because of this I no longer expect to be wanted,
much less liked, though I can have a fine time on-line,
where pretending to like/be liked is the order of the day.

I console myself, up to a point, by concidering
the thousands of years through which dogs have befriended humans
and the humans have not recognized the depth of companionship on offer to them.

To their loss humans continually under-rate
how dogs find more companionship in us than we see in them.

Great Turn-Offs Of Our Time (4)

'I have listened very carefully....'
-it usually means that the speaker
has been careful to make sure
that they heard nothing
in the course of compiling
their government report
that challenged their prejudices.

No Time For The Past, No Time For The Present

When the lives we live discard all time for contemplation
then the pietism older people remember seems outdated,
because it was founded on a lack of entertainment technology.
Technology then makes itself the task of reinventing that past.

This is where our mass mis-remembering
of how the past actually worked makes kitsch inevitable,
which takes the grace out of the past and the present.

A Matter Of Carrot And Stick

Social class is a matter of carrot and stick.

Different carrots and different sticks
for the different social classes,
but familiar divisions between them.

We can still ask what we might be
but for these divisions?
And what shared life remains
between reward and punishment? 

Education

is the older and happily blind
leading the too-young-to-know
who actually can still see
into a blindness of mind
that for both is meant to pass for 'a life'.

Democracy Revised

What can we do when one person's 'gridlock'
becomes somebody else's 'accountability'?

When both behave like witnesses to an accident
and both have highly partial views
with wildly different accounts of how,
when, and where the democratic accident started?

However much they agree or disagree
the debate will make 'democracy' go on for longer....

The Unobservant Serviellance Society

Not that him being bored will stop him knowing more than you realize,
or help you know how best to be curious about him, to make him watch you less.
 Because we can all be bored and unobservant, all too easily......