fact, opinion and poetry (not airy-fairy)


Wednesday 31 October 2012

Hallowe'en - or normal service?

On Hallowe'en the Devil walks,
Or so we're told by those who mock
Both humanist and Church's flock.
In New York they may think it true:
A hurricane went howling through.
Come ghosts and ghouls just once a year,
At other times we need not fear?
Then what is Gideon George Osborne?

A spectre who haunts the land,
He makes his ghastly demands:
A sacking here, a cutback there,
He drives the people to despair.
Far more than any apparition,
He spreads stark fear without contrition,
And rolls back the frontiers of the state.
He's the vehicle of rich men's hate.

For him it's all a jolly joke,
While those he ruins cough and choke.
The nation's debt gives him the chance
To lead us on a Devil's dance.
Murdoch's henchmen spread his lie
They care not if the poor folk die.
The Daily Wail expounds his views,
They hack at us and call it news.

Mental illness is now banned,
Depressed folk's stipends are shit-canned.
If they are able just to move
Their lack of fitness they can't prove.
The Iron Canceller is glad
Of things that make the righteous sad.
The poor are never poor enough,
The rich just pile up useless stuff.

Monday 29 October 2012

Roadworks

The roads are never good enough,
They always find some other stuff
That must be placed beneath the ground
So streets are turned to useless mounds.

Just when it seems the work will end,
It's time to dig it up again.
They care not for road users moans,
They just deploy more plastic cones.

The road 'improvements' never end,
The chaos drives us round the bend.
We inch and creep and curse and swear,
So late it moves us to despair.

What 'vantage could we ever gain
To compensate for all this pain?
We chug for miles past closed-off lane,
Yet somehow see no working men.

Sunday 28 October 2012

Lunatics in Collision

In the centre of Leicester, in recent times there has been a funny old beggar with a beard, who plays tunes through a child's plastic trumpet. At some point, I had realised that this man was not only begging for money, but also promoting some kind of deranged version of Christianity. Multi-tasking, in the modern style.
      On Saturday, I saw him putting away his stuff quite early in the afternoon, which surprised me. Suddenly he turned round and shouted: “It's idiotic! You are the ones that will perish!”. Or some such lunatic nonsense. I stared at him in bafflement. Then I became aware that he was shouting at the Hare Krishna people over at the Clock Tower, who were chanting and jingling their bells. “Hare Krishna, Hare Rama,” etc. They had him outnumbered. And they had an amplifier.
      Lunatics in collision. Or at least eccentrics. On this occasion the Krishna people were all Asian. Usually they are a mixture of white and brown. They were chanting away relentlessly, and seemed to have worn the old man down, possibly without even noticing him. They too are begging for money.
      Is there a relationship between lunacy and religion? Some atheistic people have thought so, but it seems to me there is a relationship between lunacy and everything. At any time, a certain proportion of humanity are suffering from mental illnesses, and they naturally interact with everything that the sane people do. Just in a different way.

Monday 22 October 2012

The Weight of the World

The harshness of the world is there;
It bends our minds towards despair.
Yet since we cannot make things well,
Should we on all this cruelty dwell?

To ponder distant hardship's yoke,
Was not the way of ancient folk.
They knew naught of what lay beyond
Hearth and home and village pond.

To think too much on evil's banes,
Our brain's resources slowly drains.
To contemplate the tyrants' ways,
The groundwork for deep sadness lays.

In simple ways to take our shelter,
Protects us from the Devil's smelter;
Or else we might succumb to rage,
In fury we might quickly age.

So grant us peaceful meditation,
In Christian style or else in Asian;
Let joy infuse our total being,
A quiet refuge from sorrow seeing.

A friend recently told me of a new scientific theory that depression is caused by excessive rumination:
http://damiengwalter.com/2012/06/01/look-after-your-brain-they-dont-issue-new-ones/
 The brain becomes depleted of crucial chemicals and ceases to function well. There may be something in this. Older theories link depression to anger, especially at oneself. It has also been linked to unexpressed grief.
There is certainly reason to think that we think ourselves into depression, at least to some extent. If we think about positive things, we should be happy. Of course it is not simple. There is a genetic element, and pollution and dental mercury also play a role. Meditation certainly helps.

Sunday 21 October 2012

A Perfect World?

Today I heard someone say that the world is perfect, that all that is wrong with it is the greed and lust for power of mankind. The only cure is for us to obey The Spiritual Laws.
     But what are they?
     And what about rabies? Rabies has long troubled me, not because I am likely to catch it, but because it seems such an unjust thing for someone to suffer from. It destroys the brain, robbing people of whatever good qualities they may have possessed.
     I am not convinced that perfection exists among the Ten Thousand Things. The world of phenomena seems delicately balanced between chaos and order. Thermodynamics warns us that disorder is constantly increasing toward a condition of maximum probability (entropy). At the end of time, the cosmos will be a uniform brown sludge.
     Civilisation as we know it has existed for only a few thousand years among the 4,500,000,000 that the Earth has existed for. Advanced civilisation for only a couple of centuries. It is based on rapidly depleting mineral ores. We are living in atypical times, of transient character.
     Greed for wealth is one thing, but part of our problem is a greed for knowledge. Specifically for a grand scheme that we can fool ourselves means we know everything that matters. A kind of mental mastery of the world. Men of both science and religion have long sought this Holy Grail. It is a vanity, a chimera.
     We must learn to live with only one certainty, or we befuddle ourselves.
     This is not intended as a counsel of despair, but of acceptance.
     Recommended reading: Tao Te Ching.

Saturday 20 October 2012

The Aged Smoker

He lifts his hand to take a puff,
Then starts to cough and cough and cough.
His face becomes a darkish red,
He looks like he may soon be dead.
As soon as he ceases to hack,
He takes another desperate drag.
He's dying for a fag.

Based on a man I saw sitting outside the Age Concern, in the centre of Leicester. They have a kind of 'smoker's garden' there.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

At Attenborough

The River Trent is wide and deep,
Its swirling waters secrets keep.
Who knows what lies down in the ooze,
Below the turgid murky flows.
Scudding clouds bring light then shade,
As I stroll slow from glade to glade.
Between the trees I catch a glimpse
Of birds who doze or dry their wings.

On the towpath cycles hurtle,
I stand writing, then must scuttle.
The ringing bell fear-filled portent
Of speeding cyclist quite intent.
Apologies that are not meant
Spill from their curling lips.

People walk and idly chatter
Of business start-up or computer.
They fail to leave their world behind;
Mundane cares deprive their mind
Of the peace they came to find.

Sunday 14 October 2012

The Holy Spirit


Does Spirit flow from out to in,
Or lies it always deep within?
I'm not sure that I really care,
So long as it dispels despair.

If doctrine is the work of man,
Why don't we throw it in the can?
In silence we the truth shall find,
It is the fruit of quiet mind. 



In the Judeo/Christian/Islamic tradition, the Holy Spirit is injected into us by God, sort of like a doctor injecting a patient with a cure.
In the tradition of the East, it lies always at the heart of our being, and needs merely (!) to be uncovered by ridding ourselves of layers of illusion, through meditation etc. 

This is version 2 of this poem, which flows more smoothly IMO.
Line 6 might have said "flush it down the can", if I could overcome my aversion to Americanisation of the language. Of course it's still a bit Yankish, but 'can' rhymes and 'bin' doesn't.

This work achieved publication in 'Our Quaker Voices' a magazine of East Midlands Quakers. My first published poem! The big time beckons :-) 



Thursday 11 October 2012

Tea and Harmony

In the spirit of reclaiming poetry from the intellectuals, here's one that definitely isn't intellectual: 

Why do we sit drinking tea?
Is it really good for me?
Hired men of science make grand claims,
But profit is their actual aim.
A caffeine buzz is what we crave,
To turn it down is really brave.
To bond the group is the true goal,
It melds the parts into a whole.
So jealous egos fade away!
We hope that tea brings harmony.