My Third Christmas Card Of 2019

And it is a second image from the John Bolloten exhibition
of images of the poor and homeless which is travelling
across the UK at present; last seen in Belfast. 

The Offer I Can Refuse

When inequality is proof of success
and the greater the inequality
the more the success is heralded,
then remind me to want less
of what the gov't feels I should have.

If I can't share what I have
with those who have not
in my attempt at community
then what I have means less
than being told 'you have earned this'.

Reading The Past

The more technology advances
the more the human attention span
gets sucked in, towards television,
where an ever increasing density of pixels
combines with decreasing levels of content
as life and money flow down the drain of time.

But with the time it takes to write,
and time to absorb what is written
the greenest and most advanced
modern entertainment remains reading.

Robot Nation

Recently my local public library
installed drop boxes for returned books.
So the public no long had to stop
a member of staff to leave off
the books that they were finished with.

The library said 'It is an efficiency saving'
designed to free up the time of the staff,
so they can engage more with the public.

But returning books that had been borrowed
was one of the easiest ways the public had
of engaging with staff, and this came after
much else has been computerised before that.

Soon robots will be reinventing 'public service values'
by borrowing books from automated public libraries
where human beings are no longer involved.

Effectiveness

It takes a huge amount of money
and factories full of technology
to create the permanent gulf
between the billionaires
and the rest of us, so effectively
that the inequality it entails
is too much for us to resist. 

My Second Christmas Card Of 2019

Images like this of people who seem to exist without a name,
they could name themselves after the wind for all we know,
should be more common to us, but as a society gloss
and false surfaces have taken over, making sure reality is never seen. 

For A Better Quality Of Negativity

When you find the false cheer
that everyone shares to be exhausting
and it is the only cheer on offer
then there is an alternative;
a natural and unforced nihilism
where the more negative the logic
the more we want to grasp it,
which makes cheer it brings
seem all the more authentic.