Reckoning

Press before leader
Leader before party
Party before country
Country before planet
And myriad fuck-ups
Face off

Woods and trees

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]

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bet the World

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.

fire and fury

Fire and fury blazing,
Skin in the game schemes,
Glazed, flaming orange,
Power frankly keen,
As though it burned,
Mid-circles, in a furnace
Fit to raze,
With an arsenal, he swore,
The likes of which this world
Has never seen before

 

”And as I said they will be met with fire, fury and frankly, power… the likes of which this world has never been seen before.” ~ Donald J Trump, 8/8/2017

New cans; old worms

Global or local, big or small picture, humans are politically riven with both justifiable and manufactured agendas. Whether as bolsters to old conflicts or newly perceived correlations, contemporary symptoms become the causes of tomorrow, especially when they are misunderstood and mishandled. There and here brews a god almighty convergence of violent complaint. New cans; old worms. History’s harvest.

Some people are still actively relishing the disturbing fragility of our times; they have waited so long, worked so hard for the potential of such days as these. They are the nihilists and the dispossessed, seeking retribution for the state of their lives, real, imagined and relative.

So they pour scorn and claim betrayal as a means to myriad, dissonant ends and invest in the cathartic revenge pictures and nebulous promises of restitution painted by charlatans and incompetents who take the righteous, justifiable indignation of the Commons and genetically modify it with conspiracies, ideological wishes and expedient scapegoats. Free-market patriotism.

Their default strategy is blanket blame by demographic whack-a-mole. They lump together all the characters, functions and effects of establishment, class and information in much the same paranoid, misinformed way as people who think that all drugs are all the same – just BAD, man. Their solution, the Brexit/Trump effect, is no better reasoned than cutting off your right arm because it might make the left one stronger. They turn creative destruction into throwing out, not just the proverbial baby, along with the scummy recycled bath water but also the actual bath.

They became those for whom no proof was either possible or necessary, even in the face of indisputable facts. Until, suddenly, it is. All that certainty was merely prologue to their next sense of betrayal, delivered, wholly predictably, by the capriciousness and ineptitude of their own brokers. And Hell on Earth hath no fury like a co-saboteur scorned.

The sane world watches, nervously, holding its breath.

Becalmed

Into vacuity pours every salivating nihilist
To vault bridges and dance the day invisible.

The disarmed pray
As hedonists look away
And the powerful wring their hands.

All prey, standing side-on;
Humanity, becalmed and haunted, waits
For spark and wind to wake the auditors.

rots from the head

Humans lose the plot
Hold on so tight
Their grip is lost

The World rots
From the head
And magma hearts
Burn every thread

But, stop?

Too late:
All scars
And binary stars oblige

Veils lift as curtains fall
In thrall to Will and Fate
And thresholds all
Capitulate.

 

Once upon a pattern clear

Once upon a pattern clear
A tessellation did appear
All History looming now and near
In shapes exacting airy fear

Here, every wretched thought and whim
All hate and spite invested in
And chaos wished and bigots’ sins
Came through the ethers, answering

And welcomed in, did bond in might
To relish in an appetite
For magnifying fight and flight
Attracted by their own limelight

And like for like to like all grew
As panic bade is wont to do
In particles, the Trickster moved
Into the Mind and counted coup

So too, the outer rim awoke
Prepared to share the cosmic joke
Respecting what the people spoke:
As humans will, so be it mote

Promoted of his network tools
The Trickster fixed another spool
Delighted with his wicked jewels
And the promiscuity of fools…

Time and tide (Everybody out!)

Everybody out!
There’s a reckoning to come
Punch out; time’s ticking

Britons to the quick
There’s a kicking to be done
And con men to rout

We shall overcome
Grab your pitchforks, everyone
Tide is turning fast

One collective push
And the tower tumbles down
And the crown is passed

Time and tide are now
All together we are in
No doubt we can win

Democratic clout
Bring social justice in with
Everybody out!

The Cons are done

The Tories are imploding
The con is really showing

Your spin has spun
You’ve come undone

The Tories are in turmoil
See their party mind boil

The time has come
You’re overdone

The Con men are exploding
With outbursts of unloading

Your Treasured One
Can’t do his sums

The spectacle they’re making
Is self-perpetuating

You’ve had your fun
Your time is done

For six long years you faked it
And now we see you naked

You should be gone
So just do one