Peak Patience

Recovery bubbles with form
And reform is forlorn,
Pawned to social relapse,
In lock-step with statistical
Scaffold’s collapse.

Aah, but Poverty is the new black.

Modern Babel is built
On old blood and derivatives,
Bonded and conned
Without mercy or guilt;
Trade is algoed for speed,
Predetermining need,
Unlike money’s velocity,
Creeping to low.

System D, growing strong;
Going long on ferocity.

Let no atrocity be without profit
Ensured by Insurance most certain
To be the next pop in a whole world of
Fiat legality –

Currency propped up
By flags of sheer fallacy.

Peak oil, peak water, peak credit
Indebted, indentured, incensed at
The big empty plate of the
Corporate state and its taste for
Full time become part-time or no time.

The time of peak patience
Is here and is mine.

As integrity spills with the drilling
And killing and spying condoned
By the meek and the willing
Drones’ efforts,
Postponing the end of the Act
And the imminent reckoning
Coming to all greedy cats –

And each species of life-leeching -crat…

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Bigot

You can keep your tiny boxes
To yourself, my fundamental fool
Along with all the certainty
In which you have been schooled
For if I thought obnoxious doctrine
Was a relevant life tool
I’d’ve gladly walked the catechism
Of my own accord

So you can take your pious overreach
And shove it where imagination
Festers in your whimsy, flimsy,
Soul-refining mind and wind your neck in
Lest the reckoning
You beckon in is thine;
You mind your own soul, chum
And I’ll take care of mine.

I can do without your pity
And your precious little wisdoms
And your judgemental prescriptions –
You can stick ’em with
Your nonsense conscience
Where the sun don’t shine
Because, despite your crude reproof
I know I’m fine.

Compliance

Here is the news
Of nil import and poor report,
So undermined by oversight,
Sound bites and pruned narration;
Truth is tuned by Power unelected,
Quite unchecked
By bleeding hearts,
Dark Arts
And timid Good appeasing
For its tabloid life.

I could, I should
I would have stood for you
They’ll plead, repentant,
(Aren’t they always?)
Right on cue
As cowards do
See doubt,
Hear nowt –

Speak out? (Fat chance!)
Do nothing dances
Tarantella, spelling
Fear unflinching
And insatiable desire

Evil, glancing, knells,
A choir of flames
Compliant, rising,
Greets the Invitation
Not-so-meant
But woven well to hellish end.
From the Abyss, the call is sent:
“The fire’s lit, come sit
With me, my dear old friends”

“Shout louder”? Labour, your voice should be audible near Space!

Your voice is a squeak.

Do you seriously think it’s acceptable for people to wait for you to get back into power, make some policies and battle it out at leisure in Parliament? What do you think will happen over two more years of division and degradation under this Coalition to vulnerable people whose advocacy you’re neglecting? What do you suppose happens to Society and Community while you faff – suspended animation?

You may not want to show your hand too soon with specific policies. I understand that argument but that is no excuse for your dire lack of gumption when it comes to challenging the Coalition on theirs, whether through the Houses of Parliament, the Press or Television. We knew they were ideologically callous nonsense; we knew how divisive they would become; and we knew from the last Tory Administration that they would also be false economies. So, why didn’t you? We’ve been shouting for half a Parliamentary Term, now. You’ve had plenty of opportunities and you have mostly squandered them.

Really… where the hell are you? Sitting around tables, reading the Daily Mail, panicking over how to use Right-wing thinking as the foundation of your own policies because you might lose votes if you don’t? You won’t win mine if you do. You should be refuting and shaming the Coalition’s reasoning behind their twisted, all-for-one principles at every opportunity – you will find easy pickings. It’s really not difficult unless, of course, you still subscribe to the Blatcherite view that got us into this state. Neoliberalism is uncivilised and, if your recent years in office haven’t taught you that much, then you don’t deserve to even be in Opposition. If you can’t oppose adequately, where on Earth do you think faith in your governance will come from?

You’ve also been ominously reticent in championing our righteous indignation over governmental and corporate surveillance. When you finally do squeak, it’s mostly out of concern for technicalities. Again, try addressing the reasons upon which all this monitoring is grounded and ‘legality’ and ‘security’ become political smokescreens for true motivations: power and control over others. This is obviously a difficult thing for you, given that you, too, must claim a huge heap of domestic paranoia and imperialistic foreign policy.

Aside from the fact that you seem unable to fully appreciate how irrevocably Blair changed the world for the worse with his neo-con Iraq escapade, have you forgotten such things as 92 days, ID cards, extraordinary rendition? We haven’t. Have you any intention of addressing your own oppressive nature? And what about the pathetically abusive relationship we seem to have with the US? We don’t appreciate it any more than your neoliberal sycophancy, you know.

So, have you got any plans for any more overseas adventures? Military sojourns, perhaps? Is preserving the cyber-military-industrial-complex still a priority for you, too?

Is your relationship with The City one of fear or love; blackmail or accord?

And how do you feel about parasitical corporatised agribusiness and the likes of Monsanto and Big Pharma? Have you also bought into their superficial sustenance as a way to feed and treat the world? How serious are you about an ethically sustainable world? Do you understand that that requires fair treatment of other countries as much as it does at home? Do you believe in land and resource grabbing or free trade and respectful relationships; nation ‘charity’ or self-sufficiency?

Do you think your own economic past and future are your only problem amongst the electorate? Think again.

You like to say you’ve learned from your years under Blair and Brown but you don’t show it.

Get a grip. Decide who you are and what you are for. Decide what sort of a country and People you want Britain to really be. Speak from principles and logic. Instead of ideology, try idealism and then transform it into common sense action. And stop fussing about members and votes until you can actually persuade us why we should bother. Try replacing desperate careerism with good old-fashioned altruistic service. If you act with integrity, speak truth to power, show understanding of the connectedness of our problems and true wisdom in their solutions, why, we may vote in our droves. Not just because we think you are slightly less evil than the Conservatives but because we have been offered a positive and meaningful way forward.

Be the beacon we need.

P.S. Get rid of Liam Byrne.

Labour Laborious

Labour, meek; Labour, weak
Labour long

And on and on

In everything it speaks
Hard work

And on…

Swan song?

Acquiesce
Serve less
And dazed most days –
Subject to haze

Oh, stupid!
Stupid

STUPID…
Frozen; muted

And moot

Labour, old; Labour, new
Principle polluted
Advocate’s imperative
Speeds into blue
Caveat convenience
Ensues

Embraced
By cowards, true

Initiating heart
Once bold
Hard won
And worn with pride

Complacent and
Unkempt
Unto contempt

Labour empty; Labour, rent
Red removed
Left dies
Shifts into cold
Neglect
Reflects intent

Its soul
Now bought and sold
And scattered lies
Ill-spent

Albion is calling

What shall we do with our country’s traitors
Bury ’em with their collaborators
Share out the spoils of the profit takers
Albion is calling

Hooray the nation rises
On all that it despises
Unite in enterprise for
Albion is calling

What shall we do with the people haters
Hang ’em up with their shills and wasters
Show them that we will not be placated
Albion is calling

Hooray the nation rises
On all that it despises
Unite in enterprise for
Albion is calling

What shall we do with the selfish wankers
Send them to Tyburn like olden gangsters
Peg ’em in rows down ye olde Embankment
Albion is calling

Hooray the nation rises
On all that it despises
Unite in enterprise for
Albion is calling

What shall we do with the greedy bastards
Send them to jail and become their masters
Before the country is just a carcass
Albion is calling

Hooray the nation rises
On all that it despises
Unite in enterprise for
Albion is calling

😉

Citizens Need Educating!

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve thought If only I’d learned this at school. Why was an issue of such import left for me to discover by curiosity, chance or urgent necessity? Obviously School can’t teach everything and, if it has done its true job properly, it doesn’t need to. But the times I’ve realised and felt a fury at how much and how often I was betrayed by an education system which neglected to give its future adults a foundational grasp at least, of economics and finance, civil, criminal and constitutional law and our democratic and electoral processes. It’s just not acceptable that these matters were offered only as extra subjects and only in some secondary schools or by virtue of individual choice in higher education. That they are still not compulsory staples of our State devised curriculum, as much as are Mathematics, English and the Sciences, shows such a profound oversight, one has to wonder: by how much is it deliberate..?

Citizen Ed has been on the curriculum for a few years and this was long overdue, so it is a tragedy that the subjects within it are still at the discretion of individual educators and that Gove’s hand in the governmental guidelines makes ripe the potential for conveying propagandist and doctrinal thought.

To me, such matters to which we are all subject should be first facilitated as facts and the motivation and principles specific to their forming. Their emotive good or usefulness should not be the basis of teaching but the point and substance of subsequent exploration and debate which encourages, not just independent and critical thought, but also helps develop the emotional intelligence and self-awareness of an individual. Overlap between fact and opinion is dangerous when a being doesn’t know there is a distinction or how and where to discern the difference.

As adults, how much more difficult would it be for politicians and journalists to fool around with our lives if we commonly understood the same facts and felt we had arrived at genuinely informed opinions, however diverse; if we could collectively recognise the gaping holes between ideologies and theories and their implementation? Social and political discourse would then have to rely on honesty and persuasion instead of emotional blackmail and spin. Imagine that!

To that end and because apparently, it’s never too late, I would like for the BBC (an obvious choice, I think) to be the noble public servant to which it so professes and aspires and commission and broadcast, at peak viewing time, a series of educative programmes which cover these very subjects: economics and finance, civil, criminal and constitutional law and our democratic and electoral processes – as they pertain to us both domestically and internationally. So, yes, that also means things European, the UN, the IMF, the WTO, etc, etc, etc. I want them explained to me as though I were about twelve: simple, straightforward, clear and objective – what they are, what they mean, what they’re for, how they work and their very considerable relationships to each other.

Go on, BBC! Patronise me sufficiently so as to smoke out the farce, the irregularities, the hypocrisy and the bare-faced nerve of politicians and their media mouthpieces.

Dear Troll…

What’s that, fellow being?
Your feelings are more
Important than are mine?
You should have said so
Earlier! It would have
Saved a lot of time
If I had known the
Cause of your frustration
Was more justified; the
Pain you feel much greater
And your need to castigate
So righteous that you’d
Seek me out in frenzy
Just to smite me with your
Zealous indignation!
Oh, poor lamb!
Devoid of contemplation,
No imagination spare for
More than empathy to
Self – so unaware or lacking
Care that in competing,
All the bleating proves
Is your ability to scorn a road
You do not know
Walked by another’s shoes.

Troll Soul

Some random pest whose
Best is still pathetic ego,
Faux outrage and disproportion:
Has to get it off its chest –
Show what a messed up
Nasty piece of work it is –
So much the jerk,
It cannot get a grip
For, nothing satiates
Quite like the hate
That spills and flows
So freely from that soggy
Mass between its ears
When it appears from
Shadows, clad in some
Hot, uninvited rage, all
Self-provoked and singing;
Seeks a public stage
For its own swill, to crow
And vent its base and
Tragic psyche – all intent
By personal appeal
To censor Will until its stunted
Little troll soul is repealed.

Culling Badges

It’s not only black and white
It is political spite and paranoia
The need to weed the weird
The poor, the frail – the ‘other’
By some code of colour
Sometimes literal
Aways sought from lofty towers
Bought on the back of disdain
And primitive accumulation
Gaining fresh momentum
Hiding behind crises to excuse
The lack of reason and
The casting out of
Common human decency.

What does it take to pass this
‘Quality Control’?
Smooth, pale skin?
All four limbs?
Income to buy luxury and whim?

The more the two point four recedes
So cowards and bigots do compete
Unto the annals of dumb atrophy.

Give us our signs –
Mark us out with
Designated brooches
Of social and of monetary worth.
The Ages know the culling goes
The smoother for the cage.

What colour will my badge be
When you come for me?
Abort the dawn and mourn:
For now inclusion
Tolerance
Patience and
Compassion
Are no more –

Are dead:
Fear and suspicion reign instead.