Only In America

'My family made the pilgrimage to this town in 1999 just after we lost our cotton gin* to a corporate competitor, long after the town had transformed itself into a place for retired Chicagoans and Southern fundamentalists to buy cheap property where it was safe to keep and bear arms and brag about it. In the five years since we'd moved, my parents had leaned how to fit in with some of the Northerners, talk with a slightly nasal accent, smile less. People came here to change their live for the better, to live at a different pace, though later I would learn that a change of scenery would never change somebody like me..... '

'I hadn't felt truly natural since junior high, when I first saw my handsome neighbour walking his dog down the street: a moment that had me begging secretly for a leash. "I don't want to talk about it' I said

"Your friend what's-his-name didn't have a problem talking about it." Friend. The word sounded cavalier, without a trace of irony, landing smugly between the blinker's ticking like a hard fact. It made me want to want jerk the wheel in the wrong direction, slam the gas pedal and drive us into the side of the nearest building.".

*A cotton gin, or cotton engine, is a machine that quickly and easily separates cotton fibres from their seeds, enabling much greater productivity than manual cotton separation. 

Three quotes from the spare and haunting 'Boy Erased' by Garrard Conley.    

Our Just Deserts?

Soon the Church of England
will gather together yet again
to agree on the churches' stance
on the sexual mores of their members.

Once again they will declare
that the imperative to breed,
declared in the Old Testament,
as a key part of their creed.

What they refuse to accept,
is that humans have over-bred
and have over-run the planet
and that non-procreative sex
is the safest sex for the planet,
which would like to keep fewer of us
in far less luxury a lot better
than we presently expect.

So whilst the Church of England
aridly justifies desert values for breeding
let us resist; it will create too many of us
for the green brown and blue of the planet
to remain rich in their natural colours
and not be returned to inhospitable desert
that won't even support talking snakes
or any other primitive life forms.

Votes For Women

Because where the opinion of women
has to recognised then they might feel
more like their autonomy matters too.

 

Picture Set Of The Month - July - Women Fighting For The Vote

Between a hundred and thirty and one hundred years ago
English women protested for the universal franchise.
Many protested with extreme violence for equality
with men, others worked within the law.

 

Many suspended their protests
for the duration of the first world war
in the hope of being given the vote after.  

In 1918 they had partially succeeded
-as long as the women were married to men
who owned the property that the women lived in.
Only on July 2nd 1928 was the triumph of women
made complete, and then it was for women over 21.

Hypothetically Existent

Existential angst in science occurs more often
than scientists admit actually happens. 

 

It Was Forty Years Ago Today

That I was at this festival, for the second time.
Being there proved to me how much getting out
of Gainsborough, the place I was raised,
 was much easier than getting Gainsborough out of my head.
It was not like the 1960's, where if you could remember 
being there then it was a false memory. I remember the event,
the drugs, the music, the bootlegs, the Grateful dead T shirts
the barely alive sense of being there, because being alive 
meant feeling tense, and for three days I felt no tension.    

 

Consistency Inc

I won't be seeing 'the ABBAtars',
the computerised version of ABBA,
approved by the band themselves,
if they appear anywhere near me,
they don't need my admiration.

Though I shall respect how the project(ion)
has raised the profile of the band
whilst leaving them to their privacy.

But on my own I shall wonder,
how an intelligent computer
would analyse this spectacle?
From one machine to another
I can only imagine the joy
in the infinite consistency
each saw mirrored in the other.