The Best We Never Hear About

I wish I were paid a pension supplement
for every time I had to listen through anyone
on my radio who says that of some aspect
of their country, 'We are the best in the world
at [insert subject from food to bureaucracy here]',
where no other country is presented for comparison.

This repeated linguistic twitch is just that,
the narcissism of minor difference on a national scale
or chauvinism that goes beyond the pale of reason.

I would be happy for being poorer
for hearing far fewer public speakers
verbally inflating the value of their country
with superlatives any listener knows were wrong
where only the radio off switch could end them,   

Creatively Unwaged As I Am

World please stop me from being offered
second hand stuff that well meaning people
think it has more life in it, where they decide
that life is going to come from my having the item.

I have more than enough
that is second hand and serviceable
and mine to keep, that nobody else wants.
and I keep the space it is kept in open and tidy.

I don't mind being low in the pile
of social needs-if I were offered a job
I would not know what to do with it-
so living as I do now seems to be quite enough.

Apologies To The Dead

who can not longer acknowledge
their pardons from the living,
for when the would-be recipients
should have received them but didn't.

Such apologies were never sent
because they carried too many caveats
and excuses that defended their would-be senders,
the state sponsors of injustice down the ages
for their pardons to be delivered on time.

Perhaps when one of the dead becomes famous
for their contribution to the modern life
posthumous honours will be heaped upon them.
Where the givers will be honouring their forbearers
more than the martyred dead, for the injustice. 

The School Playground For Adults

I have been slow to appreciate and rank
the plethora of media outlets, many of which
are no more than random names to me,
Facebook, X, Bluesky, Instagram, Tik-Tok,
whatsapp, and al the rest in terms of their speed
at sharing voluminous levels of communications,
where clarity and inclusive humour of the message
are in the mind of the receiver. For whom being there
often reminds them of times in the school playground.

But I think I have got it now,
the measure of how fast we think
is how fast we can be seen to write. 

But when that measure includes how crude
and rude to each other we can be, what that amounts to
is how we use public media to disown the parts of us
we want to disown before people who know us in person.

I take the slower route, and know fewer people,
with whom I try to represent myself in the mass media
who I would want to be, if we were to meet in person.

Old Ruins Are The Best Ruins

I am used to the future being unevenly distributed,
by parents who bury their pasts in their child's present,
as if, for rich or poor, their past was their gift to the future.
Where 'We do what we know to do.' excuses a lot of error.

What is harder to return to, or forgive, is when the past
that is planted into the present makes finding forgiveness
harder for the defensiveness, and historic refusal to explain.

But there time will either heal,
or make us recognise the ruin
of old hopes for what they have become. 

As a friend said about the remains of buildings
where the birds and the wildlife are the visitors
who appear most 'The best of man is his ruins'.   

R.E.S.P.E,C.T. vs Leadership

Positive disagreement in a consensus
always requires respect to make it work
and yet respect, to those who seek to lead
because they lack humility, seems absurd,
feebleness itself compared with the ideal
in their heads, the structure of command
where they don't have to think, they know best.

And nobody knows they are right like they do:
for them consensus is what forms around them.

Given A Choice Of Dictator,

and Empires past and present I know
I am spoilt for choice. Even now
I can hardly imagine the measure
by which they should be ranked,
beyond  how reassuringly circular
the leaders' self-belief will be.

But looking at the living dictators
Trump, Putin, Kim Jong Il, and Erdogan
Erdogan started earliest as Mayor of Istanbul,
and has become President of Turkey
without the support of any political party,
thus he sees all the parties as enemies. 

Putin has been in power the next longest,
having been President or Prime Minister
of the Russian Empire since the year 2000,
and is now bending Russian time to drag
that empire and its neighbours back into a past
where rewriting everyday history was normal,
it was only modern propaganda that revealed
how freakish faking the past could become.

Kim Jong Il is the only hereditary dictator
among the infamous four, who has been
keeping his people dirt poor since 2011,

Lastly there is Trump and VP Vance
who inherited a complex but flawed
democratic state which they seek to reduce
to a fiefdom where their word is law
and everyone, but everybody, knows this.