Middle Class Supermarket Sweep

I am one of millions who's mind turns off
when I hear the phrase 'cost of living crisis',
which is all over BBC radio like a rash,
often as not spoken by the middle classes.
They have plenty, and are unafraid of debt,
but are newly aware of how food price rises
can cut through their financial defences.

But, to my shame, I know I am like them.
The first place I look in the supermarket
is the short dated shelf where the goods
cost less and if they seem good to me,
then I will enjoy the variation in diet.

I write this. I know that many countries
are poor enough to not have supermarkets,
much less many branches of multiples
multi-national chains across each city,
each chain with a long distribution chain
that works food providers very hard.

They make life cheap and convenient,
so that people like me can worry less
about my means matching my ends,
as I try to hide my inconsequentiality.

Where 'The Fall' Never Happened

Because empty arguments that blame Adam and Eve
for the mess that the world is in at present cannot exist
there, But open questions about how 'God breathed'
Ada and Steve remain valid enquiries...
  

 

Sexual Labelling Theory As A Moebius Strip*

When I was growing up
there were three sexual labels,
'straight', 'gay' and 'lesbian'.
None of them were ever used;
to even think them implied choice,
something that had to be taken away
if society was to be cohesive and unified.

The word 'married' euphemised trust
and stood in for all three categories.
Marriage was the license to breed,
and make the carrier of the child
responsible for it's rearing. Breeding
was the only justification for sex.

Where sex education existed it explained,
rather poorly, how to breed whilst avoiding
the question 'Why would any young man
ever want to be a father given the distance
that fathers kept from their children?'.

If youths wanted to know anything about human biology
then it was 'What was good sexual technique that satisfied them?
Who has most of it?' and 'How often could they (consensually) practice it?'.

The unspoken reason for having children
was less to populate and subdue the earth,
the Biblical reason given in the Old Testament,
and more for men to compete with each other
to buy bigger houses and have better jobs
than each other, the better to make family
a class ridden, Darwinian, competition.   

All this went on without explanation;
any explanation would have to explain away
why so much of the past was so hideous.

Nowadays, we have 'heterosexual',
along with 'LBGTQI+', a/k/a 'everyone else'.
Where each letter directs young people
towards a sort of performative individuality,
where being companionable comes last, if it has any value at all.

A moebius strip is a loop with a twist in it,
in which following one surface will confusingly
land the follower in the reverse position to where
they started. Here explains it better than I can.  

I Once Had A Friend

who got medication for manic depression,
then refused to take it, though the pills
would have made him a better friend
than he proved to be, to me, in the end.

He ordered the meds only to prove
to whoever he needed to prove it to
that since he was ill, he should not
have to be made to look for work.

For him sex was the best medicine.
It was the cure he found for himself
when he was a teenager, long before
he ever thought about mental health,
before he knew how his moods altered.

I observed him through the ups and downs,
where he blamed everything and everyone,
but himself when events went wrong.

He swore by the good effect
of alfresco sex with strangers-
it was the best cheer he could find.

He regularly told me his adventures
and make sex sound like the weather.

He was half right when he pursued
his sexual interest in gay saunas- 
they were places where men regularly shed
the many pressures to appear to be normal,
by securing their everyday lives in a locker
and wearing just a towel, if that, for several hours.

I don't know if he was addicted to sex,
I do know that he was self deceiving
about his mental health, but he is surely
just one of many to be so deceived.

In the three years since I last saw him
I have been able to recognise myself afresh
with fewer friends but greater honesty. 

The Double Emptiness

When a parent dies, their children
has a final choice of what to miss;
more of the life they always wanted,
which was reliable and consistent
and life was that good it made them
want even more, the life that made
more of the same readily available.

Or the parents can promise a life
to the child that they can never deliver.
Where the more the child has to trust
in what the parents say should be there,
the more it remained around the corner,
and the more corners the child turns,
the more they miss the milestones of life.

The future that was meant to be
never was, and it never existed,
all trace of it slowly disappears. 

With the death of the parents,
the non-events of the child's lives,
and the lies they have been held to,
the end result will be doubly, triply, empty.
Such an emptiness will find truth in cynicism.

The Frustrations Of A Slow Learner

With sex, and 'coming out' to myself,
as with so many other subjects in life,
by the time I coined the questions
that might, if answered them right,
get me slightly ahead in the race
that was going on around me, 
I was too old to have anyone teach me
what I hadn't been taught much earlier.

It took having a life-partner to teach me
who I was and then only in skeletal form
of notes I wrote each in the diary I kept.
And then it was only with reading the diary
a long time after, when the partnership ended,
that I came to see in the shadows of the words
I once wrote in the moment who I actually was.

Now I live alone and see very few people,
I encounter more human life via the media,
and seeing few people comes more naturally
than I wish it did. I can repent of the errors
of my past, that I remember, at my leisure.

Is that what 'retirement' is for ? 

The Hope Of The End Of Shame

No amount of preparation
can prepare us for when others
make avoidance (of whatever)
the point and focus of their life,
and the point of our life around them.

Even after who we avoided life with
is long gone, and we become aware
of what they denied and how deeply
they denied it, what remains of our ability
to prepare for the future seems to be
slimmer picking than we expected.

By then the best consolation
is to see regret as absurd and pointless.
Shame does not come into it.