Words Are Never Just Words

Ask any experienced writer
and they will tell you that words
are not just marks made on a screen,
or on paper with an implement.

Seeing their potential for propaganda
Kipling said 'words are the most powerful
drugs known to man', though what counts
as 'a drug' has changed since his times.

William Burroughs, a writer of a later hue
who knew quite a lot about drugs said
'Language is a virus from outer space.'.
He appeared on television quite often
speaking his scabrous dry humour
with his uniquely cracked accent,
where he sounded like he meant it.

And when Samuel Beckett said
'words are all we have' did he admit
to himself how ill-used many of them were? 

The words of those without honour
get written on the walls of tenement halls
and in subways before they lapse into silence,
after the manner of Martin Luther who said
'The fewer the words the better the prayer.'.

The last words for today are to quote
dyslexic actor and author Henry Winkler,
'I live by two words: tenacity and gratitude'
as we all might when words confuse us.

Sir Roger Casement; An Appreciation

A friend of mine* once wrote the line
'nations are male and need to be screwed'
in one of his more compressed poems.

He never explained how to sodomise
a nation state, or where it's arsehole is.
He wrote nothing about how countries
stunted consensual sexual relationships
between men via taboo, which then laid
the ground for misinformed legislation.

What he was pointing towards
was how we need to free ourselves
for sexually oppressive norms
and laws if we want to live well.

Nobody did this better than Sir Roger Casement,
first in the 1911 report to the British government
about the misrule of the Belgian King, Leopold,
in The Congo where rubber was extracted
from the land and exported where no money
went back to the locals, who were slaves,
on a scale that caused absolute poverty
and suffering among the native population.

Casement died at the hands of the British state.
In 1916 his name was forever linked to diaries
in which he wrote of that which could not be spoken
namely homosexual activity with the locals
in the outposts of the empire empire in which he served.

He put as much reciprocity and generosity 
into the temporary same sex sexual relations
that he was offered, as he could give them.

When he got screwed by a local
it was reciprocity, not revenge.
No cruelty was intended in
what was a negotiated
consensual, local, relationship.

When others know nothing about the activity
it was because they did not care, rather than taboo,
just as his writing up the sexual activity in his diary
his to do in the privacy of his room and locker. 

His revenge on Empire was complete
when with his death he became the daddy**
of a modern free Ireland, just as to it's people
Ireland was 'Mother Ireland' a century before .

*fellow blogger and poet Anthony Weir

**In the 1990's the gay community developed a new stereotype
of the daddy or the bear. Older bearded gay men who liked men
of similar appearance, where there was often an inequality
to the long term attachments that were formed. But the trick
of the longevity in relationships became for the older one to repair
the lack of self esteem in the younger one, caused by poor male
parenting. The trick was for a more tender and respectful parity
to emerge between the two bearded men, one of whom would be
old enough to be the others father.   

The Lethal Life

Shot, burned, stabbed,
bludgeoned, gassed
drowned, crushed
and buried alive,
all these were ways that
Jews, Roma, Anarchists,
prostitutes, warm brothers*
and Communists amongst others
were those who died at the hands
of the Nazis in the many concentration camps
that they built in Germany and across Eastern Europe.

Nothing said and done now can return those folk
so they can lead the lives they once expected to have,
but what remembering the way they all died
does achieve is to remind those living now
of how lethal the human indifference to suffering is.

The Soviet Union was one of the Allies,
rather than among the axis powers.
Was this why the West said so little
about the forced labour/death camps
that the Soviet Union kept open,
1945-60, years after the last Nazi camps
were emptied to at best become museums?
Asking now how many lived and died
in the Soviet camps when the Soviets
were usually such good record keepers
is a good question that won't get an answer. 

Go out in peace, and make your peace active.

*the term that German gay men chose
to describe themselves to each other,
it was coined/chosen in Weimar Germany.  

Some Wooden Metaphors

We all grow up off-balance,
each degree to which we don't see
how unbalanced we all are is unique,
awkward proof of our individually.

We are more alike than we recognise
as we disguise the chips on our shoulder.

Shouldering that chip of guilt
at failing other people's hopes of us
is what makes the slope of the shoulder
that each of us has* ours to recognise
well before others point it out to us.

It takes patience to hew the life
we should have had, and still might
out of what we are given,
and improve our balance,
as does removing the motes** of sawdust
that cloud our vision  as unknowingly,
we advise others how to see themselves
in partial and unhelpful ways.

Pardon my dust when it guides other people in error.

*hence the expression 'a chip on the shoulder',
both as a psychological burden that somebody carries
and as a reference to wood stolen by a joiner
when their employer has not seen them steal it,
the slope in the shoulder coming from either
the weight of wood stolen or the guilt for same.

**From the gospel of Mathew Ch 7 v 1-5.  

  

Dangerous Times

If I were paid a royalty
for every time I have heard
variations on the phrase
'In these dangerous times'
from social commentators,
fearless in their use of cliche,
I would be a very rich man now.

That life is dangerous
and mass extinction
is never just a threat
is what makes it life.     

Memo To The Winners Of The Next Election

Because when the poor of the world are drawn by
the stability of wealthy countries, it is a stability
they would like to see in their own country,
and the stability they feel they would see
if their country had been as rich as yours 
has been for the length of time
that it has been wealthy.
    

 

Anti-Social

My gmail account has three headings
for communications directed to me,
Primary, Promotions, and Social.

Part of me feels that Google
missed a vital category; Anti-social.

I am unsure about the messages
that Mr Google would leave there. 
Communications from my family?
More likely over-familiar advertising
for companionship that was temporary
enough to keep me wanting more.

But then any message that met me
at my point of need would not be advertising, 
adverts inflate and promote want,
rather than define and meet needs.