For That Tougher Journey

where the soul will be worn down before the soles will.....

When People Talk

of being 'self reliant' as if their independence
from others were their truest virtue, I wonder.
Who were their parents? Teachers? Influences?
Friends and lovers? Who were the civil servants
that cleared their tax avoidance? Which causes,
Political Parties, or institutions oppressed them?
Or liberated them into their present unforgiving shape?
Whoever these supportive sources were,
they are now being short changed through
the cheap talk that leaves them uncredited.

The Dignity Of Labour

may make you stand taller in the short term, but increased height
 will mean little in the end. With thanks to Hyuro

The Hypostatization* Of Work Through Language

Of all the media phrases that sicken me
one of the worst is 'They lost their job'.

It is used to describe the diminished remunerative choices
of an employee who is no longer in their previous
gainful employment, to suggest it was their choice
to give up on the money and withdraw their labour.
When clearly it wasn't. They no more 'lost their job',
than struggled against how their work took from them
all sense of play-until brittle and bitter, they snapped.
Just like the child who dislikes being pushed into school sport
enough to mislay their kit, because that is the only way
they can express their dislike of the hierarchies sport
and school imposes on them. Much to the annoyance
of their parents who are as competitive
as they are inattentive, driven and materialistic.

Much less did the job lose the employee.
A job is the intellectual property of an employer,
a role, and it is neither 'lost' or 'found' but it is withdrawn,
reshaped and redistributed from one individual to another
by it's owner, though some jobs will dissapear
when new technologies commit them to dustbin of history.

None of this will be commented on in a market place
where the height of honesty is the rareness
with which a successful person admits
that 'markets can fail' close enough
to a market actually failing,
and like the good Samaritan,
be moved to fix what has been broken.

The self employed can use the phrase
 'I lost my job' to accurately describe
the process-it was their job to lose,
but they are as adults we should object
most vehemently to the phrase being put
in the third person when used to describe them.


*the act of representing an abstraction (e.g. 'The market place') as a physical thing.

My Secret Passion

I thought I would tell the people
about my secret passion -
to clear the air
(I like to share)
besides, it was in fashion.

So first I told my doctor.
His words were not unkind
He said "I'm sure
we'll find a cure,"
and patted my behind.

And then I told my mother.
I thought she would be glad
She cried a lot
and said "Do not
say anything to Dad."

But still I told my father,
his lips began to foam.
He paced the floor
And cursed and swore
And said "You can't come home."

And then I told my cronies,
their attitude was critical.
They murmured "Dearie
this is dreary
Please don't get political."

And last I told my boyfriend.
It roused his deepest fears.
Before he fled
he turned and said,
"I draw the line at queers."

Logos Interruptus

When Shakespeare wrote his plays
they were his day job, his sonnets
were where his true self lay.
The older I get the more I understand
how for the modern ear the appeal
of his plays is how they record the coinage
of so many words that were new in his time.
Through the plays these words have stayed
in the language-one tenth of all the words he used.
Aside from his poetic vocation, what Shakespeare
really wanted to do was invent the short story-
think of the lacunae in his plots-
which he combined with writing a thesaurus,
but this troupe of actors kept interrupting him
before he could finish each story, and restitched
the word lists with the stories to dramatise them,
which is how they turned into his thirty seven plays.

What The Gods Of Education Did For Me

On the whole the formal education
wrought for me by my elders and betters
worked out quite well.
I got a first in accepting being lied to for decades.
Because I could not tell lies from truth.
I was blind to how I was deceived.
Because of this everything in life was mislabeled.
I also got A grades with commendations
in the subjects of Deep Despair,
Following directions which made me a loss-leader
for the profit of others, and finally
Being Absolutely Useless.
Best of all was the long term pass for The University Of Life
through the long term inability to be employable.
I got all this and more, much much more, in lieu
of a foundation fit for shinning up the greasy pole
with a movement that looked something like 'a career'.