Uneasy Virtue

Recession happens approximately once every decade.
With every recession, and even between recessions,
the economy shrinks for many. money reprioritises
where it goes, making an uneasy virtue of being cheaper.

If when you become one of the many
who are valiantly resisting debt,
whilst pushing others there,
because stretched ends won't meet
don't expect others to thank you, 

Because when we rely on others
for what they leave behind,
for others to follow, or find,
then what we leave is a shrinkage.

The Economics Of Royalty

 appal me to the point
where I don't want to reason
why they work the way they do;
however they work they work
money is the least of it,
they work through a deference
which knows that if it were queried
it would prove indefensible.

The Rights And Wrongs Of Despair

It is a despair that common and familiar
that most people don't see it when it is
in front of them, and yet it is acute.
It remains an unknown unknown
whether Kierkegarrd suffered more,
for being more 'authentically' himself
whatever his company, or lack of it,
or whether his pain was better
when it felt more like the pains
that Kierkegaard speculated other people felt.  

 

A Warning From The Present

Now, where is the warning
about reliving the past?

 

The Hope Of Utopia

When I was a child I was slow to talk,
when I was attentive it went unnoticed.

My parents walked everywhere;
dad to work, and the pub, and back,
Mother to the shops or her allotment.
They had no interest in driving.

Mother was often laden, time was often short.
To make me walk faster she would tell me
stories about the lives of my extended family,
something that I felt distant from,
her stories brought the family closer.

To us both our promised 'utopia'
was to travel faster than we could walk.
This meant that rare thing; a ride in a car
driven by a rich relative or neighbour.

This happened most when a relative married
where Mother dad and I attended the wedding.
To get there we were driven in a relative's car,
Mother and I had to be quieter than dad
and he said nothing much to the driver.

Had Mother distracted me with conversation
then I might have felt less car sick less soon,
but dad always wanted us to 'just be quiet',
to hide his discomfort at the formal occasion.

Thus my best 'Utopia'
was when the journey was short;
the sooner I was out of the car
the better to taste the fresh air.

Even in the most utopian of Utopias,
where weddings and marriages are cause
for celebrations, wherever 'there' is,
people will worry 'Are we there yet?'.

When A Child Asks...

and chats with their Christian mother 

I like how God's first instruction in Eden 
to Adam and Eve was to name all the animals,
after all I named many of my toys, it must be the same.

But there are still some things I don't understand,
what language did Adam and Eve use to name the animals?   
And did Adam and Eve name for all the different Dinosaurs?
Did Adam and Eve label the threes and plants as well? 

Finally, did any of the animals disagree, or bargain,
with the names that Adam and Eve foisted on them?'

How is the mother to answer and not disappoint an intelligent child? 

Your A.I. President

of the universe may have less character
than we expect 'him' to have, it is up to us
to decide whether such a lack of character
is potentially criminal, benign, or ineffectual
then 'his' would be human equivalent.

When in doubt check in with his programming
and programmer and remember that humans
are just as much programmed creatures,
where often they praise each other for when
the programming 'goes wrong', and we call it
spontinaeity....