Blessed Are The Failures

in life, theirs is the will,
the inheritance if they live long enough,
to see beyond 'success' and survive
the short term visions of other people.

From The Past To The Present, And Into The Future

all for greater ease in building empires
through forever bleeding the life out of spirituality.

To Know Yourself Is To Question Labels

Only 'Out and proud' gay men and lesbians
declare that they 'knew their sexuality since birth'.
I don't how they be so certain,
particularly when they are in such a small minority.
My uncertainty is not from a lack of empathy
with their lives, though I loathe the word lifestyle.
No, my problem is how with their sense of self belief
comes a sense of predestination, a determinism
they have unknowingly stolen, not merely borrowed,
from fundamentalist Christianity,
and from that ancient arch-critic of all sexuality, St Paul.
I accept that we all need surety. But to defend ourselves
by stealing the most brittle and inflexible arguments
of our enemies is to reverse ourselves into the loneliest
and most ignorant of intellectual cul-de-sacs.
Who in their maturity would want to do that?

Power Will Corrupt

-the number of lies we accept from each other confirms this.
But because they are lies we don't know whether they multiply,
in the manner of compound interest, to be transformed into myth.
Or they simply add up until we forget what have said and lived out,
and we forget the people we wear out, whereupon we leave the scene
to burn somebody else out, somewhere else,
and  reinvent ourselves further exhaustion.

Listening vs Talking

When Robin Williams died I said nothing.
I had nothing to add to the miasma of media comment,
or the recycled quips and quotes that poured forth
for further recycling, until they lost all their value.
I will say here what I say when I hear news of 'peace talks',
the recognition of the need for which is battered proof of discord.
Whether the subject is communal disagreement
or personal depression everyone says 'We should talk more'.
But I say we should talk less, and learn to listen better.
Listening well rarely does anyone harm and improves life. 

Conflict Is Us

I was all of sixteen when for the only time ever
I asked a teacher of religious studies
about the conflict between Darwinism
and Creationism. Like you would expect
she gave an answer that I can't remember.
And for several quite solid reasons too-
the first and biggest of these was that at the time.
I wanted to be an aggressive youth, to be partisan.
Not that I knew words like that back then.
The second was that I had long been labelled
'a maladjusted child' and I therefore found
being actually listened to very difficult-
I had struggled hard against so many people
doing things for me, in my name without ever
taking the time to listen to who I was
or explain why what they did for themselves
was best for me too, that I was deaf whilst hearing.
Now, finally, I understand the hardest
and most mature reason why Darwinism
and Creationism create such dispute between them
-on differing time scales both advocate a history
where the winners vie to live out their victories
through the remains of those they have vanquished,
whilst shrinking from thinking how soon
their own bones and lives will argued over.

Modern Democracy Is A Form Of Asylum

and all the above are reasons for being accepted as insane enough to want to vote.