If you 'beat them at their own game'

 you lost before you started.

Affordable housing, UK.

You cannot get more 'en-suite'
than a pillow on the toilet-seat !

(You just have to be
both desperate and up-beat.)

Desirable residence ?

The sham of democracy.

To vote
for somebody you have never met
and do not know is utterly ridiculous.

"African Wild (or 'Painted') dogs
vote by sneezing,
deciding whether to hunt
based on a quorum of achoos.
When their leader – always female – dies,
they vote for her successor with eerie whoops and hoots.
They rarely fight and are particularly successful predators,
gleefully ripping apart live smaller prey
by each holding a limb and pulling in four directions."

https://www.theguardian.com/the-african-painted-dogs-that-vote-by-sneezing

A wise wolf said :

What you humans don’t realise
is that you cannot help or ‘save’ us -
no - but we could help and save you. 
Not that we’ll get the chance.

A guy commenting on a parrot-video on YouTube

wrote:
           I used to have a parrot that screamed
"HELP! THEY TURNED ME INTO A PARROT"

I am really a dog,
but nobody cares that I was turned into a human,
probably by anti-abortionists.

In a culture founded on unshared property,

all is loss, perceived as disaster.
Yet, as Elizabeth Bishop wrote :
the art of losing isn't hard to master.

A word to other serious feminists.

The Family
is the last bastion
of patriarchy.

 

Perhaps

our big brains are due
to having to figure out and remember
to whom we have told which lies,
and which people have told which lies
to us.

There are many shades

of hypocrisy,
but only one of transparency.

The Flip Side.

Cruelty
too often accompanies
sentimentality.

Google

who offer and facilitate this blog for free
are the paramount example of an entity
which 'knows the price of everything
and the value of nothing'.

All is Business - aided by Democracy.

 

Growing old

is like milk souring.
Oh, the redundancy of words !
I love sour milk
and curds.

'Conspiracy Theories'

are not really theories
but pronouncements. 
People who are attracted to them
are not wanting information,
simply confirmation of their prejudices. 
Moreover,  
they don't understand the randomness
of sickness or the lightning-strike.

I notice that I tend not to believe
people whose faces I do not like.

https://www.niemanlab.org/2021/01/the-enduring-allure-of-conspiracies

Young Cyanea Feeding

 by Alexander Seminov on FlickR

Existential.

My mind is process.
My brain is chemicals
and fractal pathways.
Words are air and marks upon a page.
I am almost nothing,
and soon will be
less than an absence.
So I am almost free.

Martin Heidegger said

that language is
The House of Being.
But, really, the structure oscillates
between a palace and a prison.

Life is like a joint.

 Two or three breath-intakes are enough.

"Of all perversions,

 chastity is the strangest,"
wrote priapic Anatole France.
Had he not heard of serial rapists,
necrophilia, pædophilia, bestiality,
binding tight another's balls
with a leather bootlace, 
and other forms of sexual cruelty ? 
Chastity is no perversion -
but perhaps a kind of grace.

(Though a lot depends on what you mean
by perversion, and by chastity.)

The very point of money

is to create and ensure
disparity among equals.

In memoriam mortuorum.

Every day, as I get out of bed
to open the shutters
I think of my dead,
my beautiful dead.
They come back in my dreams.
Why should I push them out of my head,
my beautiful dead ?

The first was my fierce grandmother's
beautiful corpse on her bed
whom I lay on and kissed in the hope 
that she'd wake up before her soul fled.
(I was ten at the time.)
I stroked all their corpses,
my beautiful dead -
my aunt and my mother, my dogs -
all except one who was murdered.
The last one I killed because he had killed
too many chickens and cats.
I buried him with his ball
in a tumbledown shed
in the wood by my house,
the last (so I hope) of my beautiful dead.

Ur rhyme.

Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation
Civilisation
infantilisation...

...until all the infants are dead.

Alternative History.

"Perhaps it was women rather than men
who instigated the segregation of women."

- Jean Genet: Un captif amoureux, 1986.

There are more micro-organisms

in a chemical-free, unploughed handful of loam
than there are humans on the planet.
Even now, 
Man's deadliest weapon against the world
remains the plough.

My dreams are full of people,

some of whom I never met before,
or shadowy, opaque;
some of whom are dead, or dogs,
others repeatedly.
And so I welcome solitude when I'm awake.

Antinatalists

are not, in any sense, barren
but are, in all senses, fallow.

Feeling good about being old.

I am tired.
Most of my life I have felt tired,
'no stamina' -
but now, in my eightieth year,
it feels almost natural.

Jesus and The Environment.

Jesus had nothing to say
on environmental issues;
though he wore sandals
he was not an 'eco-freak'.
But for millennia before and after him
Nature has been turning the other cheek.

If we are to judge people at all,

let us not do so 'positively'
according to wealth or fame,
but inversely
by (estimated) carbon footprint,
the smallest of which is committed
by beggars and the poor, who receive
only the shit of the suffering we consume,
and will soon have no earth to inherit.

My Enduring Naivety.

I still don't fully realise
that human people with sweet faces
are no more likely than others
to be sweet within.
And I still am very wary
of people with pale eyes.

If I had lived in the nineteen-twenties,

I might well and wholeheartedly have embraced Communism,
unaware that Lenin and Stalin (white males, like Marx)
had already destroyed it,
thus ensuring the terrible, temporary
triumph of Consumer Capitalism.

White Lives Matter

Far Too Much.

And if 'Caucasians' really had 'Superior Intelligence'
they would have stopped breeding long ago.

If art is self-indulgence,

as many people think,
science (however rigorous)
is self-indulgence, too,
even if subsumed in cosy group-indulgence.