'The Wrong Parents.... '

I was ten when I spoke to a child psychiatrist,
and I only once did I see him in his surgery.

He asked me lots of questions
and just as Mother wanted me to,
as soon as I was sent to the play room
I forgot what he asked and what I answered.

It was her turn next and she took a long time
which I did not mind
-as soon as I was in the play room
on my own I enjoyed the space
by making things with the huge lego set,
which was bigger than the set
I was now disallowed from getting out
in the parental house-playing with it there
took up too much room and what I did
was of no interest to anyone else
when dad wanted the house to be as tidy
as the studios of the television
that he wanted us to watch 
because the television was his plaything.

It is now most of fifty years since I saw the psychiatrist,
in his office and I can picture him still, he was stout
and wore a three piece suit
and had' salt and  pepper goatee beard and 'tache,
and I wanted, but was stopped, from sitting on his knee
-I was 'too old and too big' for that treatment. 

I forget his name and I no longer care
what he said about me, to my mother.
But I know what he said to me about dad and her
before I was officially declared 'maladjusted'
-'Son, you were given the wrong parents.....  '.

Kierkagaard Never Lived Through a Pandemic

But for good and ill he knew terror
and anguish in his everyday life,
as other people proved their foolishness to him
in their misuse of commonplace reason.

Where he found faith to be about an obedience
that was deep thought out, and highly personal,
he also found people around him had no interest.

And for us today we find it hard to believe,
less in the Christianity that he aspired to believe in,
more in how easy it is for any of us to become the carriers
 of the virus, Covid 19, in which it is even harder 
 to obey the rules that stop it spreading.

But the example and absurdity of Kierkagaard's life
could have warned us that to not trust other people
we have first to learn to not trust jn ourselves....

 

My First New Year Card

I think it was meant to illustrate what the last year
has been like, seemingly a climb through the darkness
where you have to have faith when you put one foot
in front of the next on the slow shuffle up the steps,
whilst near-blindly hoping you were looking forward..... 

 

'Sunny' People

must surely have very thick skins
to remain so even tempered
when the bad weather
of other people's moods
is out there and trying to get to them.  

Democrazy (3)

Conservatives might be the political party
in your country most ready to steal an election
through data slicing the electorate, overspending
on publicity and plain telling lies so fast
that nobody can tell they are lies until long after.

But even if they fail to get elected 
they will still be the first and best to teach other parties
how to break the rules for getting elected
on a similarly false prospectus.     

 

'The Love of Money Is...... '

 It is said that..... 

'election campaigns are fought in poetry whereas governance happens as prose.'.

If that is true, for even a few countries
then there is no poetry like the money
that is raised to fight a campaign with.

And if the huge amounts of money
that pay for political advertising
are as poetic as country can get
whilst choosing who should be in office
then it does not matter who is elected
the country is well past being redeemable.

Any government that loves only money
whatever the prose style of it's rule 
is the new root, more entrenched, of all evil.

  

Picture Set Of The Month - January

Rural Ireland is well known

 

for the houses left abandoned

with trees growing out of their roofs

which leave passing travellers to imagine
what sort of life might still be led there
if the buildings were repaired and made habitable.