On Listening To An Old Vinyl Record Of My Father Playing Gigges And Dompes Which Someone Had Uploaded To Youtube

I suppose it must have been 

The music that I used to hear in utero.

It reaches those parts other players can’t -

Heineken harpsichord harmony. 

Yet it doesn’t merely bathe my ears,

I’m not washed with some nostalgic flow

Of sentimental sadness, there are no tears.

The playing, crisp and clean,

Does not intermingle with ideas,

Does not influence my way of seeing.

Hearing him play Debussy on the piano,

That brings yearning for those carefree years,

But this is different, 

It’s as if my response is purely cellular,

As if this were the sound by which I came to grow,

The formation of my person,

From zygote to maturation,

And that now, as I hear,

I am re-formed, one crystal clear

Chord, drops into the saturated solution

Of my soul,

And chaos becomes order, in my entire being. 

“Every Revolution Evaporates, Leaving Only Bureaucratic Slime”. Franz Kafka

Brexit lies here,

The biggest, democratic

Revolution of our time,

We can just observe her outline, still,

Grecian beauty - the people’s will, 

But she’s about to disappear,

Covered, subsumed, consumed,

By bureaucratic slime.

To A Youthful Social Justice Warrior, Hoping To Change The World. (Two Quotes From Tolstoy)

“The two most powerful warriors are patience and time”.

“Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself”

If only you had patience and the time,

To change yourself and not the world, my dear,

You’d not demand enactment of this crime.

You’d think of things uplifting and sublime

And not of legislation, rule by fear,

If only you had patience and the time.

If all the hours before you, in your prime

Were spent in gaining knowledge year on year,

You’d not demand enactment of this crime,

And would be shocked by this dull pantomime,

This desire to make custom disappear.

If only you had patience and the time

To learn to see beyond the filth and grime

And bathe in one conservative idea,

You’d not demand enactment of this crime.

Nor wish to leave a vacuum where grows slime.

You’d wish to change yourself, your private sphere,

If only you had patience and the time

You’d not demand enactment of this crime. 

“We have arrived at an intellectual chaos”. Solzhenitsyn

“We have arrived at an intellectual chaos”.  Solzhenitsyn

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos, so,

how did we get here?

I think identity politics had much to do with it, though

Post Modernism came first, and won’t disappear.

Jaques Derrida was important and we fear

His influence is widespread in academia, where the verb to know

is regarded as blasphemous, along with concepts like being clear. 

We have arrived at an intellectual chaos, so, 

what are we going to do about it?  Intersectionality, seems to grow

into this vast sticky web, yet its proponents are all sincere,

they think that love of their fellow men, requires law, for it to show.

How did we get here?

How did they so misunderstand, Christ’s second commandment?  Why do they fear

freedom and seem desperate for legislation, what panic lies below

the surface of their thoughts that they’d take prison over being freer?

I think identity politics had much to do with it, though

that arose from this same impulse, libertarianism transmuted in to faux

outrage, which turned into this compulsion to clamp down, never to hear

the views of the other side. How far will it go?

Post Modernism came first, and won’t disappear

but each generation rejects what came before, each requires its own idea.

Does hope lie here? Or will the authoritarians borrow

the ways of the Medieval Church, Sharia, Soviet Russia, staying in or near

the seats of power, controlling the chaotic narrative, drowning us in slow

intellectual chaos.

“The name of ‘reform’ simply covers what is latently a process of the theft of the national heritage”

(Title quote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn)

Ah yes, why not strip all away, reform

The old, tear down the grey, the dull, reject

Each thing that’s gone before? Let’s not conform.

Let customs all be damned, let’s not select,

But smash the lot. Utopia requires

Tabula rasa, so let’s scratch out thought,

Religion, history, and start such fires

That there can be no hope of saving aught.

And we shall make men’s minds anew, so they

Shall never look to what has gone before,

Shall not consult an ancient wisdom, pray

To any higher power.  For less is more.

But let us act with guile, and be wise

Destruction needs a positive disguise.

Tuesday Evening Mid Feb.

It’s that ‘nearly half past five and not yet dark’ time,

That mud and soggy grass and flagstone slime time,

That skidding bringing in the coal and landing in the grime time,
And using washing powder with an enzyme.

It’s that soggy, fatty pancake drenched in lime time,

That acid reflux, Rennie crunching, writing rhyme time,

That wishing one could aim at the sublime time,

But finding that one can’t be arsed to climb. 

“When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness“. Alexis de Tocqueville

The spirit must not walk in darkness now;

A guide’s required to help us comprehend -

The Past illuminates, shows what we know:

To act in wisdom’s never to kowtow

To fashion which is worthless and pretend.

The spirit must not walk in darkness now

There’s no Utopia, its far off glow

Is marsh gas, which I cannot recommend.

The past illuminates, shows what we know:

Collective wisdom, customs will allow

interpretation, they will change and bend.

The spirit must not walk in darkness now

There is no need, it’s day, so why endow

black shadows with the nature of a friend?

The past illuminates, shows what we know:

We must hold fast to good, not disavow.

The future always is some antique blend.

The spirit must not walk in darkness now

The past illuminates, shows what we know. 

Do You Self Identify As Fat? (Tomorrow’s ‘Woman’s Hour’ Phone In)

Do you self identify as fat?

Phone us or get in touch by text,

Are you a lard arse, or what?

Is your self identification a pretext

For self obsession?

Do you think continually about your weight

While harping bitterly about those you hate,

Those who seem determined to teach you a lesson

About giving up binge eating and taking up exercise?

Are you eating away at yourself, while eating a way all day?

Or is your self identification,

A kind of self protection,

Do you feel you own your obesity and are wise

To its power, do you admire your flab while in the shower,

Marvelling at its roly-poly layers?

Are you Rubenesque?

Do you give thanks to those who portray us

As desirable, in our mounds of flesh, or think their work toxic,

Yourself grotesque,

Do you see weight as a force for good,

Are you truly one of us, one of the sisterhood,

Or just anorexic?

On The Need For Leadership

“Milton! thou shouldst be living at this hour:

England hath need of thee”, but then again

Any leader, in his prime, would do, strong men

With wisdom, wit and humour could empow’r

Us to act, to fight for justice, they’d not cower

Before these ‘representatives’ who when

Just scratched reveal they represent not ten

In any hundred thousand, yet who tower

And dominate as if they speak for all. 

We needs must ‘wipe them out by peaceful means’

With decent revolution which still cleans

As thoroughly as violence,  yet restores,

So we regain the courage of the fall

That sent us, willing, out through Eden’s doors. 

Facial Justice Warriors

We’ll fight.  We’ll shout for justice for the face.

We hate.  We’ll take the ugly by the hand

And we, unsightly members of our race,

Against sweet symmetry, we’ll take a stand. 

The gorgeous must be stopped and we demand

Society eliminates all trace

Of beauty.  “Long live plainness and the bland.”

We’ll fight.  We’ll shout for justice for the face.

“Brutalism trumps grace!”

The pretty and the classical, the grand,

The handsome, none are welcome in this place.

We hate.  We’ll take the ugly by the hand,

And lecture them and make them understand

They must despise all elegance, debase

The currency of beauty, in this land

And we, unsightly members of our race,

Must make the cute redundant and disgrace

Those who’d employ them, as they can’t command

Respect.  The reign of beauty we’ll replace,

Against sweet symmetry, we’ll take a stand.

The plain alone shall breed and thus expand

Equality - reduction to the lowest base.

We’ll get the children too, there’ll be no strand

Of difference left.  We’ll work at Herod’s pace.

We’ll fight for justice.