changed mores

people in the past believed
all sorts of mad stuff
gods and idols
and witches and curses
and in a natural
rank of persons
elite gold souls
and humble serfs
and the people
of the future will
think us ghastly
and selfish
to be clear
i think they will hate us

we should need a supermajority to ban anything. a simple majority is not enough. we need to have a presumption in favour of allowing. don’t let one person veto a construction project or the 51% most boring citizens ban weed for the rest. no tyranny of the busybodies. that is all.

wales ii

we pick brambles by nebo
up the lane from nazareth
hold a toddler up a boulder
you know slow is not
intrinsically good or bad
park the motor
don’t feed the metre
get a parking fine
waitrose cafe
avocado experiment
waitress seems
amazed it didn’t kill me
free tuna baguette
because they made one extra
if only they had a supermarket
in which to merchandise it

i just realised that if we just increase taxes on everyone that increases the share of money going to the government which decreases the amount of money available for other things. so increasing taxes is a better way of dealing with inflation than raising interest rates. it’s much fairer. and instead of people defaulting on their mortgages, the government will have money to spend on cycle lanes and mental health care and other great stuff!

events, dear boy, events

a thought i have a lot
is that the present is just
the way it is because of things
that already happened
and how different the world could be
if different things had happened
i wouldn’t be alive
if it wasn’t for the second world war
how should i feel about hitler?
how should i feel as a child of genocide?
on a planet still full of fascists
and sympathisers

is it better to live among fascists or not live at all? it is certainly a depressing way to live. how can a person choose to be evil? why are we hard wired for cruelty? it’s a moot point i guess. for now the main struggle is just getting them out of power.

forced to say ta-dah at hot yoga, humiliating, and chorus

come on, bon bon;
she literally dumped me
yoga ta-da,
run home wet,
get a pineapple at the tesco
turn it up turn it up turn it up,
this is techno

this is the trilogy of four to the floor
the thump sets the beat
and the dog whistle the tone
kick drum kick
in your headphones in your home
the technofuture is ours alone

walking home from the pub one night listening to the rest is politics podcast i had an idea for a new political party. the party will be called the new conservatives we will describe ourselves as a socially liberal version of conservatives: a centre-right economic position, a belief that government social morality should be progressive but also always lag a tad behind broader society, et cetera.

but actually the politics will all be really left-wing – we will nationalise public services and raise taxes on the rich and stuff like that. when challenged we will simply refer to the post-war consensus that existed until 1979. and we will accuse our opponents of being communists regardless of the form of challenge. thank you for your attention to this matter.

all billionaires are paedos we just haven’t proved it yet

mishear flushing pedos,
think will someone leak
the epstein files
*sniffs* smell that lass?
that’s football.
and it’s comin’ home
and it actually does
but i still have a wee tear for the losers
that’s a feeling i understand

then lo and behold they did release the epstein files, at least, some of them, not the video recording. and weird, nobody has been lifted. this is the worst cover up in history and yet nobody is arrested. maxwell moved to a swanky luxury prison. offers to testify in exchange for favours. trump, named more than almost anyone, remains in situ.

then england’s women won the euros and that was a bit cheerier but, due to the nature of this poem, it became attached at a section about a billionaire pedo cabal. sorry, lionesses. i did cheer for you.

something of the morning ii

it’s really quite alarming
see there’s something of the morning…
don’t they know
paracetamol
will directly cause neurodivergence… ?

i’m getting quite dysregulated
you know, it’s something of the morning…
these people
bring me out in sweats
i need another transfusion…

well now i’ve really had enough
of these zombies of the morning….
talk of the
kennedy curse
it’s the living that i fear for…

the way he croaks his words, the bizarre anecdotes re roadkill, the thing that lived on his brain. he is just so unusual. i simply reject that the world can be this insane. it must be me who is insane. [jumps from window]

something of the morning i

it’s really quite disturbing
but there’s something of the morning…
their eyes alert but torpid
gross bubbles of brain
protruding from their watching heads…

it’s really quite unsettling
see there’s something of the morning…
the smell of toothpaste
on their breath
masking their digestion…

it’s really quite upsetting
that there’s something of the morning…
what’s in the trunk
paper and a laptop
little if any roadkill… ?

it’s really quite perverse
you see there’s something of the morning…
they barely touch
the raw milk
and smell of carbohydrates…

make america healthy says robert f kennedy junior, sounding pretty rough himself. raw milk, i am pretty sure, is a meme of white supremacy. what a horrible bunch of arseholes seem to rule the world these days.

the trilogy of four

we now commence a trilogy
of four to the floor
techno-complacency is the vision
in the fore-
ground. action continues
in palestine
i’m powerless and frustrated
in this time-line;
seek whimsy, a step in the ascent
of pasta
bolognese, circuses, evil
and disaster
it’s time to normalize
the aphorism:
under the thumb of
“actually existing capitalism”

hello and welcome to part four of the love epochal: technodeterminism. this is the first part of a techno trilogy that i have been working on that will take up the next eighteen months.

i would like to use this sentence to affirm my belief that yvette cooper was wrong to proscribe the group palestine action as their actions do not amount to terrorism. it is absurd that with courts struggling with backlogs and the prison estate overcrowded that the police have been arresting hundreds of octogenarians for supporting peaceful protest.

and it is all a pointless distraction from the real issue: which is that israel is committing genocide against the palestinians. and if they are using weapons produced in this country, then everyone, including the government, including yvette cooper, has a moral duty to prevent that from happening.

the poetry/bills conundrum

would it make me
a syndicalist to say
the way that you treat people
is the way they behave
and then it struck me.
i’m not anxious,
i’m scared.
so much of the time
scared to be at home alone
i just don’t naturally
enjoy the repetition
and uncertainty of life
i’ve spent all my time
trying to find meaning and comfort
and all that really works is
a constant diet of art,
drugs and sex and exercise
but sadly i have to earn cash
to sustain it

the human condition. productivity. gdp. we work so much and so many of us work at things that… could simply not be done. there are enough clothes on earth to last several future generations. we could feed everyone well with less land if we could just eat less meat.

we could simplify life so dramatically, and benefit from much more leisure time. we could exercise every day. see friends every day. write poetry. paint murals. do the things that make us happy.

anyway. best put your phone away and get back to work.

we don’t need fasces, just a bundle of souls

it seems to me
there must be
a shadow gang of hoodlums
in every nation
ready to put on uniforms
to torture and abuse
waiting for a bully government
to empower them
and this is such
a lonely, alienating thought.
i’m not sure you,
fascist sympathiser,
will read this poem
but it is not strong
to stand up for the powerful
strength is to accept
we are weak
alone we are at
the mercy
of forces
we can not control
we can just hope that by sheer benevolent numbers
we can crowd the villains out
each of us forever vulnerable
as a bundle, indestructible

trump is the embodiment of a generation who, facing down the barrel of their mortality, have decided to turn the gun on everyone around them, cohorts and descendents alike.

he is a stuck up entitled snob who has made the critical error of conflating his wealth with his personal ability. he is a caricature of a generation who had the luck to grow up in a time of economic growth. they benefited from the social democratic, egalitarian societies that the generations before them had created after living through the wall street crash, the depression and the second world war.

they came of age in a time of full employment, strong trade unions, high wages, generous employer funded pensions and low housing costs – in britain due to massive postwar social housing programs.

and then as they reached their thirties, if they were lucky not to have worked in one of the many industries that were closed down, they benefited from the privatisation of social housing, and then of all the other things the government used to monopolise and provide as a service (gas, electricity, water, trains, buses), all of which generated one-off receipts for the government, made a lot of capitalists rich, but created a long term problem for future generations by incentivising profit at the cost of quality.

so anyway, now they own all the stuff, and they are rich, because when they were young you could have a job working in a factory and retire with a decent pension and have maybe even made half a million quid or so just by moving home a few times during a time of unprecedented asset price appreciation.

and they think they are really smart because the system has worked fine for them. and that we should appreciate their wisdom as they foist fascists upon us.