Visited by ghosts,
unholy hosts to yesterday,
with resurrected symbols,
making thimble-deep conjecture
into psychotropic nectar,
where old fading folks,
for token gestures,
trade away the days
they won’t see anyway,
except as sorry spectres
that will haunt tomorrow’s
hollow architecture.
When meaningful is meaningless
And meaningless is meaningful,
Political incorrectness has gone mad;
When the Government is synonymous
With conquering ignoramuses
Why are these Brexits still so fucking sad?
***
‘David Davis is still denying MPs a “meaningful vote” on Brexit’ – “Things can only get bitter.”
Why are Brexits so unhappy? They won. Scrutiny and accountability are fundamental to Sovereignty and Democracy. Well, it might be rather late in the Brexit day but that is exactly what is happening. Brexits said they were fighting to take back control but they are busily trying to give it away with no discernment, whatsoever. And they say it is the remoaners who are not patriotic…
Other words for people doing their jobs:
Saboteurs
Enemies of the people
Mutineers (£)
On Twitter, @ LeaveEUOfficial even précis a link to a ‘Westmonster’ post, today (I won’t dignify it with a direct link), with “The 15 Tory MPs who voted against enshrining the Brexit date into UK law are the cancer within their party and traitors to their country. Total disregard for the people’s democratic choice”
It’s that kind of crazy-arsed paranoia that started all this catastrophic crap.
In pride of place
That cut your nose to spite your face
And say you did not recognise it, anyway
Of all the scapegoats in your myth
Did make yourselves its greatest gift
Of value in the tale
***
”At the heart of all this is the political irony that defines our times: that the very thing so many places voted for makes any attempt at their area’s revival even less likely.” – John Harris (Guardian)
”So having advised investors to remove their money from the UK, the Rt. Hon. John [Brexiteer] Redwood told the UK government to go for ‘hard Brexit’”. – Frances Coppola (Forbes)
Brexiteer James Dyson says he wants to make it “easier to hire and fire” people and for the government to scrap corporation tax (Metro) – Then “warns government not to cut farm subsidies”, his total farming estate – Beeswax Dyson Farming – is the biggest in the UK (Farmers Weekly)
[”100 reasons why Brexit was a good thing” (Telegraph)] 🤷🏻♀️
The principle that’s principal
Is risible
Dirigible
The higher ones invisible
The way the Tories roll
Integrity neglected
Law and ethics disrespected
Fact and fiction self-selective
That’s the way the Tories roll
The gap in credibility
Is sizeable
Revisable
And utterly derivable
The way the Tories roll
Logic magic’ly fragmented
Half the party looks demented
Even sound as though they meant it
It’s a leading Tory role
Can’t tell their elbows from their arses
All hot air and whoopsie farces
Sinister, the stink that passes
Whereabouts the Tories roll
Crony ring of tooth and claw
Surviving on revolving doors
And carousels of dizzy poor
Sees Tories on a roll
With patronising platitudes
And breathtaking ineptitude
They then expect our gratitude
Oh, how the Tories roll!
Avoiding liability
Financial incivility
So hostile to humility
There’s no deniability
That Tory heads must roll
For the slope of plausibility
Grows slippery
With trickery
And, trip! There goes fuckwittery
How fast can Tories roll?
[November, 2015 – plus ça change…]
You who think themselves hunted by witches; who
need their empathy spoon-fed: you really cannot tell
if you have abused your power or pushed your luck?
You don’t understand where her boundaries are, anymore?
Why, poor lamb, they are where they have always been,
if you would only
stop getting your clues and taking your cues
from a world of patriarchal design.
Stop looking up for her. Stop looking down at her. She is
right here. Meet her eyes: she knows
you are both in a prison of Fathers’ makings
and there is a limit to how much she can keep saving you.
’”A rising tide lifts all boats” but others will run aground’
And if you have no boat, at all, eventually, you drown.
Conservatives: You down there: where’s your boat?
Libertarians: You’re gonna need a bigger boat. We have armbands to let.
Corbyn’s Labour: There will be only one boat.
Brexiteers: Come on in; the water’s lovely!
Hugh Muir on Capitalism: “a ‘better model’ is needed”. A better aphorism wouldn’t go amiss, either. And not the one about ladders.
Jacob Rees-Mogg
Proper Nanny-posh
Fiat eccentric
Rudimentary Tory tosh
Clueless windsock
Neocon rising
Into popular despot
Of inadequate pricing
He’s the cloying shadow fog
Of the quid pro nada
MoggMentum ad portas
To his alma martyr
He’s a Brexit Pollyanna
Always ultra polite
Bangs the patriotic hammer
Of his god and his Right
Augmented by faith
In his Latinate gob
Puts vicarious blame
On a bigoted god
With a silk hogwash
And the charm of a cilice
See him handing out the crosses
For his god of decrease
He’s the Passion police
Non sequitur ad ignorantum
Honi soit qui you like
But don’t think public office
Is a suitable site
Your antiquated affectations
Are exceedingly trite
And your unicorn worldview
Is a plasticised blight
Your opinion of the People
Is pompous in its spite
And Jacob, your ad hominem
Of god is pure shite.
Mon Dieu! amirite?
Obviously, he can believe what he wants and his freedom of speech, I would not seek to take away. Nonetheless, I am horrified that he is so popular with voters and that his popularity within the Conservative Party could give him access to real power.
We are, each, the embodiment of the human condition. Peoples to a person, unique and the same, our imperatives and characteristics overlapping and bumping into each other, relative and subject to a million and one contexts. We hardly know ourselves, even as we presume to categorise others and seek to negate or reshape them to fit our fleeting comfort.
We cherry-pick ‘n mix micro and macro for argument’s sake and we treat them as isolated systems when it comes to, well, systems. We confuse and conflate effects and correlations, assigning their causes according to tribal instincts, narrow, prescriptive framing and emotional whim. And yet how easily we forget that one thing leads to another. And not just the things we chose to pay attention to.
How we fuss. We scrutinise the heart out of each other, fixing on binary reductions of acceptability or threat. We sacrifice nuance and complexity to distortion and banality. We muddle and manipulate moral equivalence and use whataboutery as the first line of defence and conflate the superficial or irrelevant with the most profound. We take simple things and turn them into complex nightmares and get indignant or complacent when extra care and attention is an obvious requirement. We tie ourselves in neurotic knots and project, as though anything and everything might bring the human world to its knees at any moment and then we saunter, blithely on, as though we were either helpless or invincible.
We’re still fighting for universal respect for and application of human rights; still protesting for socio-economic justice and basic civil equalities. We’re still ascribing sub-human status, according to paranoia and political fancy; still elevating dross to celebrity; still coveting what we think exists over our neighbour’s fence. We’re still monopolising and squandering the resources of our one, beautiful planet; still arguing about whose God is greatest… And over and over we produce ego-riven conflicts and make wars in the name of Peace. We are already on our knees.
We think we see things as they really are but, really, we’re only seeing things as we are, whether we are aware of little more than events and selected details or transfixed by the enormity of the bigger picture. We don’t know when to speak up and when to mind our own business. We don’t recognise what we should and need to control or what we are allowing to have control over us. We don’t discriminate appropriately or effectively; we can’t discern wish from truth nor potential from reality. Some of us think it simpler to just try to control everything and everyone while others simply don’t care and others still haven’t even noticed.
And how we faff. We constantly tinker around the edges of problems, addressing the latest symptoms and ignoring their quite evident causes. This doesn’t just allow old symptoms to fester and their causes to become downgraded, over time, to ‘unfortunate’ but it also adds a whole other level of new causes. We seem hell-bent on rose-tinted nostalgia but we refuse to actively retrace our steps. We would rather pretend that we are merely adapting to forces beyond our control than reaping the consequences of so much that should have been avoided.
We don’t really look at the roots and common threads of our problems; not deeply; not wholly. We glimpse with darting, panicked eyes, wring our hands and do what we can with the skim. Just getting through the day. Lurching with our fingers crossed. But the skim has to go somewhere: it becomes another blanket burden to Society, to add to the already suffocating layers and it creates further opportunities for ideological and financial exploitation. Every burden provides another’s comfort blanket. It isn’t ethical or sustainable.
We live under a constant process of inadequate triage. Tinkering and skimming are default management settings. Like bailing out a distressed boat that was never really seaworthy. There is viable land and most of us have spotted it but the crew prefer that we keep bailing, even as the holes increase and the weather worsens. The crew is drunk on the short-term, shortsighted power of profitable crises. The officers and their minions tell us that that land over there is hostile and to bail faster, lest we run aground the only boat available for that long-promised rising tide to lift.
Between us, we have managed to undermine the subtle and make a virtue out of the dross. We’ve managed to fragment history and turn it into a blueprint for all manner of psychopathic algorithms and effectively reduced Imagination, Reason and Empathy to a small, closed circuit.
We are gullible sponges and cynical repellents, by context, by turn, susceptible to wish and self-fulfilling prophecy. We are sands, easily shifted; blades of grass, bending upon a fixed point. And as entrenched as granite.
[November 8, 2015 (with slight editing)]
~*~
Fear creates a feast
to suit the taste
of each invited guest
that takes a seat
and makes request,
to fill the belly of a beast.
We are what we eat.
[February 2016]
Man, in all his vanity,
so eager to compete,
has bet the World
to beat her at destruction to create,
by the design of an intelligence
he fakes.
On her back; on her knees
At the sink in bare feet
On a pedestal, silent, please
Dangerous angel
Too frigid; too bossy; too keen
Was his story; his glory
His magical chattel
From baby to wife
To invisible burden
Embattled; embargoed
Her scorn and her fury
Her life
As she rattles the bars
And beats hard on the ceilings
Deducing his god rod
Confuses his yardstick
The fairer sex feeling her Mars
As she’s peeling his story
Unsealing her future
In all types of footwear
And favourite bras.
juxtaposed 