'It is Not For Me, It Is For The Others'

Shell company, shell country,
shell structure inside another
where all the drive is sucked out,
all the former life smothered.
As new rules were applied,
that nobody wanted for themselves
but the wealthiest all agreed
were fit to be applied to others.   

The Junk Life

I hear that the bad news in the UK
is that there are not enough lorry drivers
to distribute the mountains of materials
to support the national appetite for junk food
that UK citizens like to see as their proper choice.

What a small loss of choice it is,
beneath the surface of appearances.
The food stuffs that were once transported
were part of a false sense of well-being
that they pat each other on the back with,
as if such false reassurance were vital.

Maybe when the government
raises it's quota of home trained lorry drivers
then it will realise more what it wants them for,
and with that will come the desire
to see more clearly past the false cheer
of junk living fuelled by junk advertising,
in homage to life in America.   

A Sporting Chance?

I wonder when green energy,
and manufactures of healthier food,
will become the regular sponsors
of the international sports events
that come around every four years.

I wonder how much longer
it will take for the values of said sponsors
to infuse the organising of the events,
such that after the event is over
what is left of the sites has
a more productive better future?

I am not putting any bets
on such Utopian thinking,
not least because the win-win nature
of the technology and economy
would be so against the win-lose nature
of nation competing against nation,
where the very essence of the entertainment
is much too competitive for words.  

Faith In Change

As a Socialist I have to have faith
in the sort of government I hope for.

I see so little proof of what I want to see
that hope is the only way to see it;
so little else exists to sustain me
in the long dark night of Capitalist rule.

But I know that socialism
is like non-violent action,
it has to be spurred to flower
by injustice. And when it flowers
it changes a lot more than the slight
that spurred it into being,
which as it is changed denies
the source that made it change.

Non-violent protest existed long before
it first got a name, in colonial India,
a century ago as a response
to a government so detached
that as it became more violent
and spoke of 'maintaining the peace'
it fail to recognise that the resistance to it,
was born of the distance between
it's actions and it's words.

According to half-reputable sources
there have been some sixty two
non-violent uprisings since Gandhi
gave the idea a name and foundation,
many of which are ongoing.     
some of which completed their task.

But all change,
even change for the better
is always temporary,
though change for the worse
often feels more fixed. 

Do Countries Ever Learn From Their Pasts?

My answer to that is a very firm 'No',
particularly when they police the world
and have a sign on them which says
'Democracy for export, but not at home.'.

In the latest example of being driven by paradox 
(Republican) men in Texas have prohibited abortion,
a service in which women seek control of their bodies,
for every and any reason they want it,
not just after when they have been raped
or when the foetus will not live
and carrying it could end their lives.

This puts women who seek control of their fertility
in a similar position to the one that America
put makers of alcohol in over a hundred years ago.

We know what happened then,
the prohibition lasted thirteen years,
and continued after by criminal gangs,
who saw civil regulation and taxation
as 'against their interests' such that 
the biggest gangsters could only be caught
for laundering money and fraudulent accounting.

I look forward to women creating their own
enduring and altruistic networks
where they take care of each other
and resist the men who think they own the universe.

I look forward the slow breakdown
of contrarian patriarchal Politics from within.

 

Capitalism Reaches Peak Uselessness

Though it will reach higher peaks
of uselessness sometime soon. 

 

The Potency Of Very Cheap Music

Looking through the racks
of popular music CD's
on the Sunday market,
the best time I have to browse,
I see only things I don't want to buy
and I can't remember when last
I bought a CD from a stall
like the ones i see before me.

I realise that 'popular music'
puts poor poetry to indifferent music
on the hope that the combination
will transform both,
when usually it does not.
And when that does not work
then there is the hope of the sales pitch
to distinguish the music, 
from that which is similar
in the mono culture that is popular music.

As if the pitch of such majoritism
will do the trick and be an end in itself.

A conspiracy of silence would be better.