On Ceasing To Be 'Religious'

When we break our last taboo
what will we have to do
to keep it broken? 
We have to keep look out,
for all the ways that secrecy
will use to reinvent its disguise. 

Pride Is Stolen Dignity

David Greaber wrote in his classic book
'Debt; the first 5000 years' of the slave owners
in the dim and distant past who were deferred to
by so many that 'their dignity lay in having too much
honour, an honour they stole from those they owned'.
How much honour is taken away unawares, nowadays,
from those on the lowest wages with the least security
of tenure by those who live in greatest ease
in the world,  where, by strange co-incidence
there the greatest waste as proof of wealth. 

On Wanting Less

In some of the less respectable circles
I keep my place in, for humility's sake,
I hear of what is known as 'Size queenery';
The praise and worship of those with more
who are bigger and fuller of the things people
say they like. When I hear such talk I smile
-I admire their ability to be so easily pleased,
but I live with a very different reality.

I misspent some my youth attending
different evangelical churches,
places where preachers competed with each other
for extracting more belief from their followers
by shouting how much bigger their God was
than the deities of the other churches.
They never realized that they all used
the same rhetoric, Each disowned the state,
and the law, history, and simple neighbourliness.
All of them depended on the queens shilling.
This was size queenery, christian style,
and like every other version of it
at root it was about never knowing
when it's ambition was going to be punctured.

I have no measure for loyalty,
but it is best when earned
through an attempted consistency
where thought connects to word,
words connect to actions,
and actions lead back to thought,
where the aim is simple solvency.

When we pine for less
we aim for the better.

A Life Through Fiction?

What sort of life is possible
when the popular understanding
is split by extremes; at one end
by fiction informed by a Therapy Culture
that we unknowingly misunderstand,
and which nobody could follow
because it magnifies suffering
for the sake of drama. At the other....
a humourless religious hagiography
that denies the complexity of life
through taking literally stories
about a past where life for nearly all
was as brutal as was materially poor,
and nothing like how it was described?

Signs Of Greater Age (32)

1-The quieter life is
the slower it seems to go,
until silence seems
like a very good thing.

2-The amounts of alcohol
required for a shared sense
of enjoyment gets less
as the years goes by,
so you can more sociable.

3-The reassurance of a bed
preheated with an electric blanket
can never be under estimated.

4-As the politicians get younger than you
so their arguments echo every election
that preceded them. You know more
than they do that their rhetoric is old rope
for hanging a new electorate. They can have
your attention because the old anger is gone.

Maritime Charity?

'Slavers throwing overboard the Dead and Dying-— Typhoon  coming on', also known  as 'The Slave Ship'-J. M. W. Turner.

What is presently happening on the high seas

between Libya and Italy looks nothing like this.

The ship sinking here was as grand as you'd expect

when The British Empire waived the rules
in a trade which found partners in every port and town.

But the logic of sick slaves being thrown overboard,

still in their chains, by their slavers because the boat

is worth more to insurers without them on it

than their lives were ever worth commercially

to those who would enslave them is being replayed.

As Organized Crime trafficks people for profit

out of the African Continent by filling boats

their insurance is built on how unseaworthy
the boats are-the traffickers take the money
knowing that many of the trafficked will die at sea,
and even more be drowned through their vessel
capsizing because of EU attempts at rescue.

This is the last stage in the estrangement
of those squeezed out by Islamic Anarchy,
using armed manufactured by the west
on one side and mafia capitalism telling lies
about the ease of life in mainland Europe
that immigrants were to expect on the other.

Europe is not called 'The Old Continent' for nothing.

How Much Slack

must we cut our enemies
before they hang us
then hang themselves?
For as much we have enemies
it was not our intent to create,
and did not ask for,
we must be as crafty as snakes
and as gentle as doves
to survive the unexpected.