under his eye iv

so, pope bob the communist,
riddle me this
if all of life
is formed of carbon,
ejected from the factory chimney
which i understand it is
are the two poles
of the toothbrush moustache,
mirth and antimirth?
matter and antimatter
genocide and love
and why does the church
always make things worse?

so i think i like pope bob. obviously, he believes in all the bad catholic stuff like homophobia and sexism. but at least he is against war and generally against poverty and for love, of some sort. so yes, i like him fine as pope. but not enough to tempt me to transubstantionate with him.

under his eye ii

crying to my mother
in the phone booth
an undiagnosed autistic
immature youth
unable to verbalise,
understand, explain
the abhorrent situation
i was in…
i had no way to pray
for succour
no deus ex machina
from the kirk

i seem to think about the pope more than most catholics. i always found church confusing as a child. jesus was a hippy peacenik sort of character. church people seemed much more stern. fundamentally uncool. it’s hard to imagine jesus ordering the burning of witches, or driving a land rover, or paying his workers a subsistence wage, or speculating in capital. or coveting wealth generally. yet so many rich people claim to be christians. like, as if they think the lower orders are too thick to spot the contradiction.

chorus 4 (the fourth chorus of the love epochal part 3: giletdonism)

see the month out
with a crow loop,
swelter on the juliet
manifest strength
and stability
unemployed and full e it

get tucked in for the gilet years
keep it strong and stable
despite hopes and fears
a pudding waits
at the end of the repast
let’s hope we get there
at last

i had quit my job! i hadn’t yet started my new job! i was sunbathing on the juliet balcony. life was good. see you next month when, you’ll never guess, the poem continues.

if i wasn’t called n n benn i’d have gone for red blaes

a pontiff
post-pontificating
has a point if hope remains
but dust will
surely settle
on his line in the blaes
departure
led suggestion
ask always ‘what is right?’
rather than
the usual
‘what did we do last time?’

with the changing of the popes i was thinking a lot about religion i guess. the last pope was alright. definitely better than ratzinger. but i have a lot of hope for pope bob. not that i’m a catholic. but a pope is a powerful man. i wish the president was more like pope bob.

red blaes was a sort of surface that used to be common for football and hockey pitches. i skinned my knees on it many times. a sort of pink dusty cinder with little jaggy stones in it. there is still some of it about. anyway, you could draw a line on it, like sand.

and its good that the future isn’t like the past. let’s not give up yet on making the world a bit better for the next generations of earthlings, plants, animals and mushrooms alike.

and in a fog of lousy vibes await an operative positive.

calling back to yesterday’s quite literary post, i am suddenly reminded of a literary/confectionary connection of note. roald dahl was one of my favourite childhood authors. i am ashamed to say my inner reactionary preferred enid blyton generally. but long before i had started on adult books i had reaslised that dahl had the superior worldview.

anyway, while of course dahl famously wrote ‘charlie and the chocolate factory,’ you may be unaware he also wrote a non-fiction essay ‘the chocolate revolution’ which revealed him to be a keen lover and historian of confectionary, and a particular aficionado of the ‘golden age’ of chocolate, 1930-1937, a heady seven years of sin which saw the inventions of many of the great confections of our age of tooth decay: the mars bar, the crunchie, the curly wurly, the aero, and the ‘energy balls’ – which are now known as ‘maltesers’.

what is your favourite chocolate bar?