Showing posts with label poem. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poem. Show all posts

Snow Globe

At Christmas families are reunited
Even those members you’d prefer weren’t invited
We stress over food, presents and reindeer sighted
                Then convince ourselves it’s a holiday.
When recalling childhood memories, though
It’s not the obtrusive fairy light glow
Or even going out to play in the snow;
                These aren’t the sensations that stay.
It’s watching the joy on small surprised faces
And hiding presents in imaginative places.
It’s still (in March) finding pine needle traces
                And four o clock starts on the day.
And as the wheel turns with each passing year
And fewer of the older generation are here
Best wishes seem bluer and much less sincere
At least, it can feel that way.
Atheists exercise gluttonous proclivity
While Christians celebrate the nativity
And merchants are anxious about consumer inactivity
                And old folk on their own alone stay.
Perhaps instead of the giving of stuff
We should realize the giving of time is enough
Spend some of your working with folk sleeping rough
                Prevent police from taking their things away.
Each year the Belarusian children come
For a time of laughter and presents and fun
Without your support this could never be done
                This is the spirit of the season at play.
Give what is needed and where it’s deserved
Forget any grudges, forgive what’s occurred
Nurture warm feelings when they are stirred

                Don’t let sadness turn red and green memories grey.

31



My body is my body. I’m not bothered what you think of it.
It’s carried me through all these years no matter what I’ve thrown at it.
The marks on my flesh; the scars on my organs
They’re trophies from my battles with the metaphoric gorgons.

I’m feeling freed from the cycles of love and hate and love and hate
Now I’ve relinquished thinking on self-comparative debate.
Some people get my name wrong and they pronounce Georgina
But I’m not diminutive in stature or demeanor.
Dubbed as weird, mad, aggressive and crazy
Because the clarity I see, to them, is hazy.
Censored by illiterati, told I’m inappropriate.
Asked if I was born with bollocks, labeled frigid, called a slut.

I’m conscious of all my decisions, chosen to remember them
At times when I am finding out if they were right or they were wrong.
I don’t claim omniscience. I hold intelligence in awe
I’d rather know I’m ignorant and perfectly flawed
For the journey’s earning’s learning in its absolute form
And it gives your seasons reasons for your earthly sojourn.
They say “Don’t get her started” and “Not again, here we go”
When engaging in discussion and opinion of their point is low.
This is my elixir, though. This heady mix of raw debate.
With sowing of seeds and the joy to watch them germinate.

Frustrated by the limitations I cannot see
That seem to bind most others to a life semi-free
With their worries of decorum or etiquette or saving face.
I’d like to rip their blinkers off, put Technicolor in their place.
You’ll never know what you could be if you never try
And then you’ll blink and you’ll be at the end of your life.
I’ve seen too many dreamers go to holes in the ground
And damsels in distress choosing to wait to be found
By princes preoccupied with kissing the seeming dead.
I can’t understand why they don’t rescue themselves instead.

I love Lara, Xena, Tank Girl and Janeway
For standing up and counting, for doing things their own way.
Ignoring real heroines, a culture habitual.
The women on that list were completely fictional.

I’m not sold on the Lady myth. Keep your expectations.
Sell them to someone who’ll accept that degradation.
Do you want your daughters to grow up with choice?
Then encourage them to speak in an authorative voice.
Teach everyone to accept that “no means no”
But it also means “stop asking” and “leave me alone!”
If someone cannot answer it’s still not consent
And you don’t get to decide what unconscious people meant.
Those lines that you claim are blurred beyond compare
Are clear as Autumn air, no matter what clothes you wear.

Attraction’s not a circumstance of pink and blue
So stop trying to squeeze a right foot in a left hand shoe.
I stole that line from Carroll, from the Man Upon A Gate
But unlike him I know that there is too much to relate.
For the journey’s earning’s learning in its absolute form
And it gives your seasons reasons for your Earthly sojourn.
There is too much to discover for to ever be bored
And you’ll find its only you who is even keeping score.
So accept your physicality and mistakes of the past
For your time here is limited and goes pretty fast.
Do you honestly want your last thought to be

“I didn’t spend enough time just being me”?

Inspiration

That intake of breath
Of fresh
Air.
Bringer of new ideas
Unfair
-ly mined
By a dozen minds
Or more.
These spores of thought
Are cultivated
Through mediums and means
Averages avoided in passionate extremes.
We find it
All
In scattered places.
Lost and founds
Fractals
Faces
Forms of clouds and outer space;

Equally in the grotesque.

Sparks flare catching
Clutching
At life.

Kindled by contemplation
Fuelled by frustration
Ventilated by imagination
Tempered by the midnight oils
As we watch our best laid plans

Burn.
We learn.
We turn to disciplines unschooled.
We spool our nets far and wide
Outside our comfort quarters.
Research has shown us one path
But doubt is crazy paving.
Stop saving for that rainy day
And discover for yourself,
your truth.
“I think therefore I am”
Is all we really know.
Why spend your precious life collecting objects just for show?

It’s not the breaths you take,
It’s the breaths that’re taken from you
It’s the things you make them feel
It’s the ones who matter and mind

It’s a million people just like me
Telling a million people how to see
The world, the truth, society
As if there’s just one
answer.
As if I somehow know better.
In my oh-so-limited life.
 I don’t
and never will have
The answer.

All is confusion.
All is loss.

Why try to mold this chaos
 after your image
When your image is only
Breath in frost.

You cannot force the muse
Or trick her into her prettiest dance.
You cannot even ask her for help
For fear of her reprisals.

Abandonment comes naturally to one so self-involved.
And artists such as we all are are not sufficiently evolved
to survive such isolation.

Frost bites back.


Coming of a Different Age

Strength is shown in many places:
bitten lips; grey gaunt faces;
blistered hands and leathered heel pads;
resistance of ugly school fads;
standing next to a pariah;
rescuing victims from a fire,
but the most extreme example of this
is true compassionate forgiveness.
And this loss I feel deflates me but with no sense of giving up.
Just filed away, in mothballs, covered and carefully hung up
at the back of my wardrobe with your old red checked shirt
its brutal gesticulations told the history of our hurt.

Arms dangle now in darkness,
frayed, threadbare, faded.
Rubbing shoulders with my first date jeans.
Both are uncomfortable. Unwearable.
Costumes of dead characters.
Self-interested adversaries
deprived of the fight.
Victories have never been so hollow.
Generations realigned.

I don't like being found.
Lost girls never have to grow up.

To everything / There is a season

A heavy hand is on the earth,
restricting smell and sight and breath.
Euphoria of Summers passed.
Winter's bite delayed.
Withdrawl of energy and light.
Debits paid in credit's drought.
Hushful loss of thoughtful feathers.
Warmth beckoned,
we await the return of life.
Chapped knuckles crack in damp environs.
Long-gone the Spring of sun-hot step.
Sator Arepo tenet opera
rotas, rotas, rotas.




This was inspired by a combination of the weather in Maughold at about 3 o clock today (overcast, oppressive, heavy aired, birdless) and a conversation I had with fellow TEDxDouglas-er, Michael Daniels.

Michael's talk was on magic squares. I had heard of them in Latin, but not in numbers. It was fascinating to listen to and really engaged me from start to finish. I love language and spend so much of my time based in linguistics and medical thought patterns that it was like going on an adventure holiday into unfamiliar terrain. The world of mathematics is a foreign country to me and Michael was our charming guide.

I love the people I met at TEDxDouglas and the way it made me feel; hopeful and inspired.

Thank you to everyone involved, especially the volunteers.  This Island has really blossomed this year. It's an honour to be a part of it.

"At the second stroke the time sponsored by experience will be..."

The passage of time has never been stranger than now.
Objectively, I know that we still orbit the same mass of energy.
We still rise in the same light, live in the same dark
and watch the trees metronomic renaissance every Spring.
But the last few have trumpeted past as elephant-mice.
Events eclipsing the passage of time like never before.

And before...

There was a time that to you, every day before this one was yesterday.
There was a time when all days that follow today were tomorrow.
Then came the signifiers: "One tomorrow"; "Our yesterdays".
Now greatly extended we say "The Olden Days" and "Dinosaur Time"
and "50 hundred million years in the future!"
But the one that broke my heart was this:

"We saw Amalie and Isla there and Amalie had broken her dress on one of these" [wrought iron gate post]

"Oh, did you see them? When?"

"Before. When **** could still walk"





This was inspired by my son and a poem by my sister. She blogs over at www.bookwormsandcoffeemonsters.com on all sort of things and has just had one of her short stories accepted by a very exciting magazine. That's her story, though. I'll let her tell it.

You know I love you, right?

Not a Popular Opinion


I’m culturally appropriating.
You’re rating my passion
through the eyes of a career gold digger
looking for meaning unwritten,
themes and motifs and meta imagery.

I say what I see.
I’m on catchphrase constantly.
I’m good, but I’m not the one.
I’m frustrated by what I've become.

<sigh> narcissistic ramblings…
This child that went brambling
Now sips prosecco listening
To pseudo-socialist expressions espoused
By folk who don’t want to work.

“The system’s not working”
But you use it to support you.
You don’t earn any wages but bemoan the ways things are
while you profit from the sweat of others who are.
Thing is, I agree, things aren't the way they should be
but I find it hard to take you seriously.

You see, when I drag my bones out of bed
and pay all my bills and work ‘til I’m dead
You’re still sleeping.
You’re reaping your meager existence
from the aches in my muscles.
And honestly, I know there are some who can’t work,
They’re too sick, they’re too hurt by the weight of their age
But when you rage that your cheques not through
That the world’s not fair,
That it owes something to you
I can’t help it.
I’d like to give the help that you’ve received
To someone who knows what it’s like to really need.
A refugee.
Someone who wants to work,
Wants to support their family.

It’s not a popular opinion, I won’t earn any friends with this.
And honestly, there are some who will call me a hypocrite.
I claimed money when I first had my son.
Was made redundant when they noticed my bump.
It’s not legal, but neither was the war in Iraq
And we all know that that situation’s coming back.
Zero hour contracts, 50 hour working weeks
Flush the weak from a system that rewards the wolves.
There’s no paid overtime, we’re on Victorian rules.

Now, here I sit eating quince and cardamom jam
And my old punk friends wonder who I think I am
With my fancy little accent and shoes that have no holes
Now there’s middle class flab on my working class bones.
But my ideals haven’t changed, I still think we should protect
The vulnerable among us, give our elders our respect.
Speak to me statistically, romance me with the cold hard facts.
I don’t want to hear recycled bigotry, especially if it’s Murdoch Media backed.

I believe in the freedom of education.
I believe in the N.H.S
I believe that if you tell one generation
They’re doomed, you’re dooming all the rest.
I believe in the power of discussion.
I believe in empathy.
I believe that the kindness of strangers
Shows truthful humanity.

The amount of tax unpaid is now 30 times the money claimed
And yet the papers tell us that it’s benefits to blame
For why the cupboards empty and the pension pot is bare.
They tell that the CEOs don’t have enough to share.

Now.
I don’t work in finance.
I failed economics.
But I did work in promotions and
I know my demographics.
These pigeon holes we box us in, through judgement and research
And the one you’ve chosen causes my causes to be smirched.
And objectively I know there are so damn few of you
That the cost of it is almost worth forking out
Just so the folk who want to work
Don’t have to deal with you!
So when I’m fighting for the corner of the ones who need the aid
I would appreciate it greatly if out of my way you stayed.
You can pass you life in this way, you’ll find no judgment in me,
But please do consider if this help you really need.
Or if it would be better going to a refugee.
Someone who knows what it’s like to really need.

It’s not a popular opinion.
I won’t earn any friends with this.
But in this situation,

Empathy wouldn’t go amiss.

Humanity is a Virus


Lady Gaia blew the sleep sand from her dust encrusted eye.
Rippling verdantly she turned, serene in what she felt and why.
Intrigued she watched as her leaf-locks dis-re-dis-reappeared
in pixel squares. She raised a brow and thought, ‘That’s weird’.

She sought Ra’s malady-monger opinion.
He squinted and told her to stop thinking
about string theory and quantum bunkum
and try to get more sleep.

So she ignored it as best she could,
 although she began to feel strange.
Her friends were kind enough not to mention
her face was becoming quite changed.
Malodorous gases clouded her vistas,
she developed orbital detritus.
Even poor Luna’s surface wasn’t spared;
a sad case of environmentitis.

Jupiter came concerned for his friend
and of the terrisy he might catch,
raised the alarm and Lady Gaia
to Ra was swiftly dispatched.
With somberly professional flair
and a touch of harsh halitosis
he pronounced what she was scared to hear,
a terminal diagnosis.

“I’m sorry, my dear. It is clear you have caught
an industrialized case of the humans.
There are things we can try, but to you I can’t lie;
The prognosis is millennia not aeons.
As a titration resource I’ll give you a course
of anti-anthropotics.
It’ll slow them a while, come back when you feel
a definite change in your tropics.”

So Gaia took the microbes with great sad apprehension
and loosed them through her fleas and on her water’s surface tension.

The first wave seemed to go quite well
and the tooled-up apes retreated
in the face of the poxy buboes swell
and their fruitless attempts to treat it.
Gaia felt buoyed by this seeming improvement
and decided to contact direct
these creatures hell bent on destructive denuding
and persuade them this path to reject.
She consulted humble Roodrelac
The universal mediator.
(his heroism know no bounds.
We’ll discuss his story later).
He inspired her with native thoughts
of harmonic shamanism.
Persuaded her to try his spores
To help improve her vision.

She’d never felt so overwhelmed with new connections formed
A flood of shared experience and a flickering sense of divorce.
She returned to Ra: “I’ve found a way! I’ve heard it really works!
I can guide them through my inner strength and corrupt their own networks!”

“What quackery! It’s never proven. It’s just the placebo effect
The truth is some planets have natural immunity, or some we’ve come to suspect.
It’s a treatment nearly no one survives and the physical costs are most dreadful.
It’s still being tested, it’s not even licensed. It’s hippy-dippy and experimental.”

“Go on.” Said Gaia, her eye a whirl of desert storm sand concentration.

“They say that within them is coded a course of ultimate auto-extinction.
Apparently if you encourage their enhanced neuronic evolution
beyond the pace of their cellular form they will drown in their self-made pollution.”

Gaia looked shocked.
It hadn’t occurred that she’d have to get worse to get better.
She wanted to weep
But the glittering hope in her core
Wouldn’t let her.

Now she has fifty year checkups with Ra and he’s writing a ground breaking study.
Proving conclusively the treatment was real.
We wouldn’t want to prove him wrong.

Would we?


Garnering Respect

Iconoclasts
have come, at last
to save us from this drudgery.
This too-easy, this clear to see
hegemony.
But icons as they are say what
They want and not
the truths we seek;
brutally bleak, more earnest than just
freakishly banal.
Their hype and zeitgeist distort the swarm
redefine the form of normality.
Crudely mis-marketing misogyny and misandry
as pride.
Another cardboard enemy
a Goldstein drawn among us to deride.

A different one allows themselves to be
unformed; unsure; walks clumsily.
This unvarnished personality
without polished paid publicity is kept
as curiosity, held up as sideline eccentric
to reject
at will.

And they will.

Using nebulous concepts like
Standards, or
Breeding, or
Culture
as excuses to slaughter to the screeching of vultures
or whatever altar serves best the purpose being pushed.
And the person being crushed by such faltering disservice
does not stop being a person when you’re hungry for their blush.

Objects made of people will ultimately fail.
“Neither use nor ornament”; it’s the old wives’ sliding scale.
Old wives, old knives, old scores to settle.
Metal measures mettle but the meter always morphs.

Intangible out-fluences – diluting stimulations
Reactionary conflation of the story you would tell
Intrinsic expectation of how disgracefully you fell
from the pedestal they put you on, the one you didn’t build.
It grew beneath your feet in the instant you stood still.

Starlet in the spotlights, frozen, blind, wide-eyed.
Demanding penance for your daring to have a private life.
Sordid little details now publicly discussed.
Using terms like “unladylike” and “ashamed” and “disgust”.

Hold your head up high, dear; fear is something they’ve not earned.
Their weak attempt to dampen your flame that brightly burns
Is just a pissing contest. You’re treading on their toes.

The days of rule by bully-force are coming to a close.

Sick Leave

Poverty struck me down with spore shot, seething
in the only air I could afford to breathe.
Setting up time bombs in my bronchioles.
Taxing my very breath.
Taking pictures and asking for help, moving furniture around,
open windows, light the stove - it didn't do the trick.
Beyond that we looked for a new home on slightly drier ground.
Who can afford lawyers when you're not paid when you're off sick?
It's a trap! It's a trap! This breadline game.
But if you accept the social all of society, you will blame
for dwindling public funding and cuts to the NHS
instead of looking to those with good health and their booming business.
Those who'll never have to live on coffee and dry Frosties.
Who can afford to pay for a dentist for the inevitable cavities.
Whose toilet has never frozen. Who can afford to socialise.
Who've never had to pin their hopes on their slum landlord's obvious lies.
Having climbed with tooth and nail from this awful bone-cold trap
the scars it left upon my lungs are the ominous short-cut back.
Without sick-leave we're all hel in this precarious state.
This is the poverty burden.
This is the 99%'s fate.


DISCLAIMER: My current landlady is an absolute gem and it's actually in response to her fantastic reaction to our garden that I've written this. She's magnificently pro-active and I feel very lucky to being doing business with her. Xxxx

Univocalism for Mark Grist

Go boldly, Vox; not long.
Toll for joy or glow for glory.
Now, hop off.
On words.
On show.
On story.
Form worlds from orbs of sorrow.
Grow onyx onto frost.
Yon lofty owl or shock prof,
do good for song-boys lost.
Hold on to shows on Rocks, bro,
of R-words - protocol shot.
Of rosy-fond folk of whom
Monty's (not oddly) not forgot.

Family

Her face I wear.
His character I carry
in this body of recycled proportions.
Structures of lost-long generations
speaking to me in languages I never learnt.

The product of all of these
plus a smattering of circumstance.

Their gifts:
Empathy; humour; love of information.
Their curses:
Impatience; aggression; a slew of possible mortalities.

Reflected in my son.
Mirrored in my sisters.
Shaded by their histories.
As a family we are one.

The Misty-Eyed Memoirs of Comic Sans

We all do things for money
When we’re naïve and young.
They told me I’d regret it.
They said the time would come
When I’d want to do something serious,
Wouldn't want to be bubbles and fun.
But I played to young boys magazines
And all their advice I shunned.

You see me now in knock off bins
And bootlegs DVDs.
I’m never on embossed invites,
But flyers for wannabes.
Not known for my straight talking style
But for my curves that please.
The suggestion is that of a good time –
One for which there isn't a fee.

The boys queue up to read Her now.
Just watch her rising star.
Taller, thinner, simpler than me.
I’m sure that she’ll go far.
I feel I should have warned her
Out the goodness of my heart
That the life of a typecast typeface

Will drive you to the bar.


(co-written by Tenby. Copyright and ownership asserted)

Wither Strength


These memory-threads, they've seen it all.
With sheer relief I watch them fall.
These tresses teased, consuming time
Created an image that was not mine.
Felt myself wither with the plait of each curl
Replaced with conservatories, patios,pearls.
Lachrymose points of fossilized light
Now passive aggressive and weak in a fight.
Almost as if my spirit was there,
Split at the ends and bleached and threadbare.
Menfolk seem saddened, “I preferred it before”
-          Historically, long and loose signified whore.
We have now the Vogue bob, the post-divorce crop
Meaning strong and professional. It’s a visual full stop.
Which brings me to Samson. I read with fresh eyes
The rewritten truth behind legendary lies.
It could never be seen that Delilah had strength
Or that it diminished as her hair grew in length.
She is painted as harlot, as betrayer, as thief
For disabling a terrorist who fought with mules teeth.
He destroyed a temple, killed thousands of men
But Delilah’s the villain? Pah! Think again.
His weakness for women she clearly exploited,
Earned his trust, passed her time and feigned her enjoyment
Over time introducing new tastes to his diet,
Soya, mint, coriander; she urged him, “Just try it.”
These anaphrodisiacs soon did the trick
And he gaped in dismay at his treacherous dick
As limply it hung there, refusing to play.
Delilah masked joy, knew the wrong words to say;
“What’s wrong with you Sammy? Are you not a man?
I've seen palm dates bigger. You’re reputation’s a sham”
And cruelly she laughed to drive the cut deeper
And insert in his subconscious brain a long sleeper.
Watching him crumble as once more she spoke:
“Your technique is shoddy and your cum face a joke”.
Her mission completed, her own head threads shorn,
Disguised as a man she escaped with the dawn.
To protect his secret and bury his shame
He shaved his own head and passed her the blame.
As excuses for impotence (don’t come) but go
This one is dramatic; distracting; for show.
And sad it is too, that his gore-fest career
Was ended through self-induced rumour mill fear
And not, as you thought, by his shiny bald pate.
Perhaps now a few more of you can relate
To a parable apropos basing your ego
On something as fragile as hair or libido.
And now you should know what’s important instead

Is the beauty and joy that’s found inside your head.

In TIAs

They call it a stroke, but a stroke's a caress,
A present borne through gentleness.
T'would be better to call it a bolt from the blue,
A malfunction of synapses- give it its due.
This burgalar of words.
This remover of movements.
Imprisoning souls in disconnected flesh.
Self-enforced censorship, unable to express.
The Orwellian Nightmare of frustra-lingua.
(feelings unnamed continue to exist)
Inside this less-than-lustrous figure
The personality refuses to cease and desist.
Surreal conversations
rebuild the connections
and help to recover the words.
It emerged to me
the best neuro-surgery
is performed in the theatre of the absurd.

Bis

Our Archduke's hard to pinpoint
But in rearview will come clear.
I'm watching repeats of the 20th
And foretelling the future in fear.
With the crash and the olympics
It's pricklingly familiar.
Persecution of strangers
Genocide and paedophilia.
We're making do and mending.
We're choosing heat or food.
There's a palpable discomfort
in the national mood.
We're policed and suspicious
with polarised media input.
The labour market's vicious
And available help's getting cut.
Can we collect Pandora's strays
before they run a-mock?
Or are the raptors swooping hard
and on this path we're locked?
We've forgotton the lessons we learned
And it's going to cost us dear.
I'm watching repeats of the 20th
And foretelling the future in fear.

The Dinner Ladies in the Chronic Canteen

"The dinner ladies in the chronic canteen
serve up portions; big, small and green.
They dole out rations of little yellow pills
and smartie-count to pay the bills"

Privy to knowledge that would make others squirm
We know how to be patient and when to be firm.
We sweat in the Summer and freeze in the Winter
but here is darkly comic. It's Irvine Welsh, not Pinter.
Our own peculiarities seem normal by comparison
to our regulars who haunt the place with dead eyes and abandonment.
Our unbecoming uniforms are shabby at their best
(and as there's nothing nice to say, I won't describe the rest).

"The dinner ladies in the chronic canteen
serve up portions; big, small and green.
They dole out rations of little yellow pills
and smartie-count to pay the bills".

For each and every script we cross, the most we can is done.
And amidst abuse, disease and death, that "thank you" is hard won.
We work to bones day in, day out and wake at four in the morning
from drug addled dreams from incidental exposure and professional doubts a-gnawing.
We face each day with optimism and a damn-strong caffiene crutch
to kick those clouding dreams away and whimsy into touch.
When an error costs a life we can't afford to drift along.
This is an "elementary service job"?
You couldn't be more wrong.

"The dinner ladies in the chronic canteen
serve up portions; big, small and green.
They dole out rations of little yellow pills
and smartie-count to pay the bills".

Dreamtime

I dreamed I swam down Tynwald Street
Upon a cloud of milk.
I smiled and waved to passers-by,
to mongers of all ilk.
I front-crawled over tiny men
who ran away in fear
and rained liquorice blackcurrants
on the Pearl Girl by Vermeer.
Tethered dogs all tipped their hats
and offered me their pipes.
I laughed to see the bird ballet
in Nora Batty tights.
I stopped outside the milliner
to joke with a singing saw
but treading milk makes butter
and I fell onto the floor.
My greasy coating sparked a thought,
I jumped into the sea
and butterflew myself away
to Elysium's blossomed lea.

Malcontented Walrus Man

Somehow he oozes free
from a car designed for a being
a fraction of his mass.
Ego-swollen, he appears to have made
an inescapable life jacket of his self importance.
His tiny, malice-filled head and disproportionately scrawny neck
are the knot on his body's balloon.
He patronises women
while imagining them naked.
Leering at their turned backs.
Sycophantic to their faces.
Bullying and deceitful
he counts tears and anguish as conquests.
I wonder, will he ever taste his own medicine?
Chaos and finger-pointing, gossip and harrasssment.
He does not deserve compassion.

Call To Arms



Every day I read the news with growing trepidation.
It’s regression on a massive scale. The end of civilisation.
We’re not punishing those that caused this mess with lies, with greed, with ego.
But blaming folk who’ve nothing done and warring with nations we don’t know.
What year is this? Who’s in control? Where is Lady Justice?
She’s bound and gagged in a divan bed. Ransomed for the fame of her captress.
Of equal weight (or so we’re told) to celebrities, diets and twerking.
The blood on her sword is only her own so clearly, this system’s not working.
The children that need us the most,
Tragically fall through the ‘net
And children are taken when good parents seek help and hysterical healthcare objects.
Open your eyes and ignore the damned press! They have profits to make, don’t you see?
Horrors that happen go unreported and affect us – that’s you - and it’s me.
I do not believe it is really so hard to lay aside neighbourly spite
And just keep an eye out, get involved and speak up if something just doesn’t seem right.
Notice the pensioned! They are people too and their stories are going untold.
As we focus on disposable incomes of youth and deny our own growing old.
I don’t have the answers. I’m not the Messiah (or even a naughty boy),
I am just one person, sick of the nonsense and sick of acting coy.
I’m not asking for money, or a signed petition, or change in far flung lands.
I’m saying your community needs you before it ends up in God-knows-whose hands.

Get involved. Take an interest. Speak up! Go out!

Disenfranchisement is dead.

Earnestness is the future!

And without it?

Total extinction instead.