Choose Your Battles Carefully

Because swallowing the unacceptable,
and accepting less is the choice for everyone
with a sense of sanity and proportion about life
and anyone prepared for the insanity of being
themselves at all costs deserves the end result.
  

 

As Prophets Predict

the future of the human race as being in space
I hope the adherents of these secular prophets
take the fullest account of the stuff that humans
are made of, the bacteria, elements, and DNA,
and last but not the least of these, the viruses
that limit the longevity of human life,
to keep the universe cleaner than they kept the earth. 

Powerful Invisible Friends

The poorest children in the world
don't go to school; amid their poverty
what they learn is how well poverty
make individuals, and individuality, invisible. 

What the educated world's young take home from school
reduces to either how to be a bully without seeming to be,
or how to withstand being bullied in plain sight,
when those who might stop it excuse it
-in the name of 'competition', or social Darwinism.

What unites both the bully and the bullied
is how much both states use fear and threat,
where the fear of a threat isolates the bullied in plain sight. 

I remember well the shouts in primary school,
where the bullied tries to say to his bully
'I will set my dad/big brother/the police on you'
as if said invisible person would defend them,
where mentioning the police was the weakest threat;
the police were viewed as people who would defend
their own before they would looked after anyone else.

The invisible friends of the bully were usually stronger
than the silent friends of the bullied, this imagined strength
became real life strength when the bully bullied harder
whereas the invisible witnesses of the weak bore witness
to the ineffectiveness of the weakness of the weaker boy.

Adult hierarchies were explained as those with the most
had earned it by making the invisible hand of the market
their powerful friend, until they tamely ate from it's hand,
more readily than anyone else was allowed to.

It was hard to argue against imaginary thinking like that. 

Who Do You Fit Around Awkwardly?

The image above presents the idea
of 'the humility tile' where those living
in the dwelling are warned against the pride
they invest in perfection when they see the floor.

  When I first saw the image the word
I saw was 'misfit', as if the tile was out of place
in the space it took up. But it fitted the space
very well, well enough to explain,
how we can be wrongly placed - socially - 
and how a workable imperfection
is the best we can ask for.

 

The Ultimate End Always Requires The Ultimate Means

When the end, the cause that is on our minds,
is The End, the apocalypse, then the means to it
requires the surrender of all we know we have done,
and all we started not realising we could not finish it
without us knowing whether the cause is right or wrong.

By then what we gave will be gone,
our faith cashed in for an unknown eternity,
where for all our brave words getting there
we cannot know where we expect to be.

It is unsurprising that men prefer to make
what and who they worship easily recognisable,
through the shorthand of ritual and repetition 
with much more alacrity than accept the unknown. 

The Fog Of Truth

When truths become so vital to us
that we have to kill for them,
or they cause the leaders of empires
to start trade wars that reduce trade
and peacetime life between countries,
then 'Wither division, to what effect?' 
will be the only question left for us to address.

For when belief becomes war,
then war will be what we believe,
and we will all be our own enemy
whilst becoming the enemy each other.

My Last New Year Card ; Life Is About Looking Up

The underside of a mushroom. Photo by Isabelle Soule.