Notes In Lieu Of A Relationship

In the online world few questions
get more personal, or harder to ask,  
than that of 'relationship status'.

Online we are singular and alone,
we are our own 'avatars',
regardless of who we volunteer
to be attached to in our analogue life.

Saying 'It's complicated'
seems more more transparent
than saying 'It's personal',
both words add up to the same thing.

Full relationships are complex.
The fuller the relationship
the more it requires respect,
which is hard to find online.

The Panglossian Times

Advertising has always justified itself

not merely by the products it promotes
but through the reasoning it employs

as it manipulates symbol and image

for and to whoever will pay it to.

To liberals advertising boasts

of 'promotes social change', 

and 'empowering minorities' 

through selling them things.

How would feminism 

ever have advanced without it? 

To social conservatives 

advertising 'promotes individuality' 

by giving us singular examples

of heroism-remember the Milk Tray man?

How romantic was that? 
and he was always ultra tidy too

-unlike most women's husbands.

It was surely advertising that created

that sign of the 80's, 'the new man'.

It improves everyone's lives,
and it feeds the muse

by changing what is manufactured.
On television it pay for the news

like nothing else is willing to
even as it undermines objectivity

via mass manipulation.

Finally advertising now justifies

the repeats of millions of old programmes

which are shown on ropy nostalgia channels,
where the content is television's history

on repeat, as if it were the history of life

because life before film never happened.

How else would we remember the Nazis?

Majoritarianism

is the lunatics
taking over the asylum
and redefining sanity
by what pleases them.

Populist majoritarianism
is insanity with a higher approval rating. 

Stupid Seeks Cupid (It Never Ends)

When the people with the greatest wealth
make out that people who get by far less
are laden with an unacceptable envy,
for wanting greater financial security,
without ever asking how this envy arose
then it is clear that blindly seeking wealth
is the height of stupidity embracing cupidity
in the pursuit of a blind self interest
that does not even recognise itself.

 

There Was No Pride In My Community

Every generation in every country
has it's dividing lines, it's splits,
it's dived-them-to-rule-them politics
and those who were organised and anti.....

The politics that engaged with me,
that got me by the gut and went to the brain,
were those of being anti nuclear weapons.

We were a hardy bunch, we had to be
There were so few of us and the forces
against us had better media and defences.

One of my bigger errors of my ways
was that half of me was in lock down
-I was gay, ashamed, and in the closet
and my companions barely half knew it
and know nothing of how to help me out.

Nonetheless I did all I could 
as an under-educated secretary,
in an organisation in which
nobody wanted to hold office.

Recently I saw the film Pride and I cried
as the film showed me the brio with which
protest and change should be done
if it is to engage and cause a chain reaction.

I later realised that the energy in that story
came from it starting in the capital of my country
where there were far greater resources
and a better sense of rights and choices
than I could ever imagine might exist
in my low energy/low engagement life
that strove against and failed to defeat,
with the life I had in North Lincolnshire.

Untidy Minds

have always existed, hiding in plain sight
among the chaos they create to live with,
and among the false distinctions they make.

The easiest false distinction to spot
is the sober untidy mind vs the drunk.

The sober untidy mind will find beer cans
at some sight of great natural beauty
and say to themselves 'Drunken louts'
and 'They should know better than to do this'.

Not realising that drunken untidiness
is merely the drinkers untidy mind
unloading itself away from sobriety.
And sober untidy minds
operate just as much
from their unconscious.

Many a passenger in a fast car
throws cartons out the window
after enjoying the snacks
that were once in the packaging,
not knowing which hedgerow
the packet will land in. 
Not knowing which prior fast flung
piece of rubbish their package will join
in the high speed fly tipping competition.

There, there is no winner declared,
though the loser is the landscape
where the rubbish does not decay,
even slightly, and is waiting
for that conscientious human being
who will not pass by, but pick it up.   

Sight, And Life In The Present Tense

The 'now' that the blind live in
complete with all their aids and helpers
is much more in the present
than any tense that the sighted see,
where the visual of the now
is forever triggering
memories of different pasts
and speculation about the future.

And when did you last hear
of a blind person who had adapted
to life around the sighted being racist?