The Oldest Of All Human Tools

Take your pick and don't shovel too hard with it,
 it is highly self limiting for everybody
to live in sexual monocultures.

 

Now That Is The Kind Of Book Burning I like

In 2011 BBC Northern Ireland
adapted the book 'Christopher And His Kind',
a memoir of life in 1930's Germany by Christopher Isherwood.

They filmed the script in Belfast.
This afforded the locals the glorious sight
of their City Hall shrouded in swastikas,
which raised many eyebrows
and caused many knowing smiles
about the sad state of provincial politics.

Better than that, a book burning scene
was part of the script. The BBC contacted
every local charity shop in Belfast asking
for all the books donated to them
that the public won't buy second hand,
because the print run is bigger than the author's talent.
The sort of  books where the publishers hope
was that the author's fame would sell
the book and disguise how leaden their prose was.

The BBC probably paid the charity shops
for these literary sloppy seconds by weight,
thus creating a win-win scene
in which one book infused with talent,
'Christopher and His Kind' became the means
of temporarily cleansing one small corner
of the world of books in which the hope
of translating talent into sales
was solely down to the publishers' PR department.

I forgot to ask, did the BBC's fires
also burn the deadly prose of 'Mein Kampf'?

The Ladies

I admire the best all have beards.
I only see them in pictures,
fully clothed, and never in the flesh.
I often wonder, do they have hairy chests?

Doctors And Nurses

In England, and beyond, 'doctors and nurses'
used to be a popular children's pastime
based around a naive curiosity about the human body.

In England, and beyond, basic health care
is free at the point of need for those who ask.

In countries where hospital care
is paid for via a costly health insurance
I wonder how this changes how children play.

Do they charge each other imaginary sums of money
through insurance companies, and learn how to haggle  

over what is wrong with them, making the game financial?

That would be one way of practicing maths
that would be less than fanciful.

Or would the game end when one declared
'I have not got any money'
to which the other replied
'Then there is nothing wrong with you.'?  

The Past Sure Is Tense

Parenting is the process
of parents passing off
their past nurture
as their gift to their children,
as if that past were the purest,
and most definitive, present
that some children
would be better without.

Walpurgis Night

Walpurgis Night by Paul Klee. 'Walpurgis night'
 is the transition from winter to spring,
when witches would gather in the mountains.

Adam And Eve

and their descendants,
with all their hopes
for a life beyond time
are God's vanity
publishing project
called 'Planet Earth'.