Only Disconnect

Solipsism is the immersive experience
where we share our loneliness with others
and they share their loneliness with us,
all of us hoping to see our isolation halved.

When in reality it grows exponentially,
and by it's nature we are that last to see
how continually we connect the wrong way
to create bonds of trust that will last.

Beware Of The Malgorythms

When you go online, in search of thrills sublime
you won't know the digital footprint you leave
until the next time you are faced with a adverts
for products that you didn't think you wanted.

These adverts are what make your journey free
at the point you set out to it. With being a consumer
and there not only no such thing as 'a free lunch'.
When you most think that your life is 'free'
it will be what marketing departments munch on.

Sight For The Uninterested

Both blinkers and habits can help us
to avoid seeing what we think
we really don't need to see.

But more often than not both bind us
to seeing less than we ought to view
of the consequences of what we do.

The Past We Never Thought Was With Us

In recent years the public have been made aware
of the issue of institutional sexual child abuse,
to the point of mass burn out on the issue.
Misery memoirs citing abuse in amounts
of the vary between prurience and detail
are probably third on publishers lists,
behind 'I survived the Nazi death camps'
and all new celebrity autobiographies,
for supporting a sagging publishing industry.

But books published in the past, in the 1960's
rarely describe child abuse in any detail.
Though one book I read recently did.
and yes, it does involve Catholic clergy.
To understand what is going on
the reader has to read between the lines
of what was originally poetic prose....



'Father Gusewski had thick wavy hair,
black with the merest hint of grey.....

....Once when I was about thirteen,
he ran his small hairless hand down my back,
from my neck to the waist of my gym shorts,
but stopped there because my shorts
had no elastic band and I tied them with tapes.
I did not give the incident much thought,
Father Gusewski had won my sympathy
with his friendly, often boyish ways.
I can still remember his ironic benevolence;
so not another word about the occasional wanderings
of his hand; all perfectly harmless,
it was really my Catholic soul that he was looking for.'

From page 87 of  'Cat & Mouse'-Gunter Grass.
First published in German 1961, in English 1963.
Translation; Ralph Manheim. 

Future Signs Of Emptiness

When virtue is more signal than intent
the messages will increase in their urgency,
if only to make the fullness of the past
seem equal to the vacuum of the present,
as our morals go into terminal decline.

Some will ask where our morality went,
when it seems to be distinctly absent
and previously it seemed to be there.

But the new, now emptier, future
cannot be cancelled now it is summoned,
particularly when so many murmur
that it was hiding inside us, all along.

Thought For The Present Millennium

There can be few nations, if any at all,
that have not been found rape and racism
to be useful tools to raise their world ratings.  

Photo Set Of The Month November

A French pottery fair in Summer

with lots of bright and very expensive pottery.

Not everybody liked it.