Great Marketing Failures Of Our Time

The cooking with Buckfast cook book,
in which this popular tonic wine,
the recipe for which dates as far back
as the1880's, is used in the preparation
of different fruits and vegetables.
Alas, the sales of the wine went up
but sales of what to do with it 
other than swig it from the bottle 
whilst on the streets, and leave the bottle
lying about after, remained stubbornly low.
Update; I should have known that the idea
of The Buckfast recipe had been been taken up.
Here is a thirty minute radio programme
about the gentrification through food
of this bracing drink.

 

Fear Does Not Need Logic

What fear needs is cover
to hide behind, as it thrives
on faulty human synapses,
to drive their owners
to new levels of in(s)anity.

If there is reason in the cover
that it uses, that does not validate,
or invalidate, the use of reason;
it gives reason a bad reputation. 

Communal Disbelief

I would believe in community more
if I knew what it was for,
as it is, 'communities' seems to exist 
for the tabloid press
to make up stories about
which feed back to their readers
the worst in myth and misanthropy.

Instructions For Heavenly Objects

 

Short Term Relief

I was relieved when I read
in the broadsheet press
'Covid destroys tourism',
the story may not be new;
tourism has always destroyed
much more than it ever built up
and there had to be an exit from that,
somehow. But I had felt hard pressed
to find the upsides to what,
generally, is a bad situation.

Bad as it is,
the virus is more honest
than what it has destroyed.

Hugging Trees

was not a joke, nor was it lies
told by closed mind urbanites,
to diminish the impact
of the nascent hippie movements
that was mushrooming
underneath parents feet
in the small towns across England.

The original tree huggers,
were women in Northern India
who lived on the margins;
they were poor and depended
on the trees for how they lived.

They did not hug the trees
for the sake of it, but to save
themselves from an even greater
marginalisation and poverty,
as the male idea of the future
threatened not just them
and their dependents
and what they depended on.

They were tough women
who like most tough women
in a male centred world
whose strength and determination
was always being underestimated.   

Be Yourself Tonight

Call me shallow if you want to,
but when I hear the word 'deep'
as it is applied to relationships
I am unsure about how apt it is
for saying how we are for each other.

I have seen possessive people
'deepen' their relationships with others
where the other party does not see
how they are slowly being remade
to be the person their possessor
would like them to be. It scares me.

I like people enough
to not want to possess them,
but rather help them
to be more themselves,
as I hope they will do for me.