Not to be outdone by Oxford, Cambridge has been offered money to fund a Himmler scholarship by a 5th cousin of the Nazi to find out why Himmler had been so evil unlike
the rest of his family.
Maybe it will produce new ideas to teach us important facts about human behaviour.Or is it too late ?
Is there any hope ?
The end of values, kindness, earned respect
The loss of wisdom,history and truth
The pillars of democracy are cracked.
The centre of the heart,who can protect?
Conspiracy and madness unseat proof
An end of values, kindness, earned respect
Violence is admired though lives are wrecked
The lasting triumph of the folk uncouth
The pillars of the Western Mind have cracked
Their minds unfurnished seem bereft of tact
They tread on others words like horses’ hooves
The end of values, kindness, earned respect
How can such opponents make a pact?
The calculating crucify our youth
The pillars of the Western Mind have cracked
Yet Western Empire builders had no ruth
They tortured those they conquered group by group
On such ground just madmen earn respect
The altars of the Western Mind have cracked
Bring your own God with you, you can’t help it anyway
I have heard you singing, don’t tell me you can’t pray
We’re strung like beads along a chain, we’re linked with none left out
Every time that someone dies, there opens a new mouth
Mouth brings voice, the people’s choice, there is no faking Truth
Eat and live, speak and grieve, give and so receive
Eyes to see and ears to hear,grace may be about
Still the Sirens wail and moan, leave them, they can’t count
If you came back you would not understand
The death of virtue ,truth and beauty too
And to advertise it,tell lies on demand
In my childhood, that bewitching land
Respect brought out good character to view
If you came you could not understand
Writing with a stick upon the sands
Up the tide will rush and wash out truth
So ,to advertise it,tell lies on demand
Evil,slick , obedient Eichmann stands
No human is as mighty as the noose
Coming back you would not understand
We can split an atom, yet be bland
Drop another bomb on human youth
To hide our sin we tell lies on demand
Once we worshipped Pan with horns and hoof
Now we worship Satan,God’s own proof
f you came back you would not understand
Media will tell lies and make demands
I
Before the referendum
Before I rang 999
When I didn’t know how near the end you were
Before Nigel Farage
Jo Cox
The lies of Michael Gove
Before Boris Johnson’s genes left Turkey
Before Leonard Cohen sang,save the last waltz for me
Before I heard Suzanne
Before you haemmoraged the bathroom into wine
Before you consecrated the bread
Before you were dead
Before by a journalist we were led
Before children said,fuck everything
Before Cohen died
Dylan got the Nobel Prize
Before aspirations were merely for another shag and a new denim hat
Before marriage was for licking each others’ groins
What poems fell dead
And the snow fled
Before the hatred of slow reading came and glued itself to our minds
Then we had the hottest September
In December
And the ice cap floated down the globe
Observed by toads
When you were still alive
And the lawn was unmowed
The sacrifice of humans, slain by will
The death instinct, no accident, the kill
Now it’s done more subtly than with fire
We need the help of cunning and of liars
Propaganda,adverts, image, word
Overwhelm our minds till life’s absurd
Inhabited by ghosts of adverts seen
Saturated minds, for soul no room
Who is in and who is out today?
Mainly white and Western on display
I was born without a screen to hand
The radio was old and had a stand
Little drawers where Mother kept her songs
Sonatas,Mozart,Schumann, was it wrong?
We read each other’s faces and our books
Heard Mother playing as we fell asleep
Time and space and peace, a slowed down age
Now we’re full of data and of rage
Father lost so long ago,we weep
Civil discourse takes a lengthy sleep
of overwhelming people with adverts ad cheap credit in Western Socie
I nearly died of laughter when he went out for a drive
Simply,purely, only to test his bleary eyes
He put his toddler in the back, just to be quite sure
He would not be orphaned if his father crashed the car
To make it even safer he took his good wife too
Even though she felt quite weak after having flu
They went to Barnard Castle, not just round the block
The river Tees is very fine, the Castle on a rock
It was all or nothing;was it murder,suicide
Taking all your loved ones on a really dodgey ride?
The Unconscious has impulses of which we do not know
Like sending cripples out to buy their own food in the snow
What can we deduce from this, is he Head of State
Ascending up to heaven, does he want to emigrate?
The kindness of our neighbours helps us cope
With life, with death,with many shades between
When we despair and can’t imagine hope
When the sailor takes us in his boat
When he rows us on a night-blank sea
The kindness of our neighbours helps us cope
The world seems made to hurt, and then frustrate
The mind confuses dreams , reality
When we despair and dare not even hope
Love is built as we restrain our hate
Sailing well a new country we see
The kindness of our friends helps us to cope
Persistence in the virtues gives us scope
Start again, the angel said to me
When I despaired and lost my threads of hope
In our mind love’s buried and unseen
Yet we can raise the dead with energy
The kindness of our frriends helps us cope
When we are lost and mapless is our hope.
If you are ill the nurses have no gowns
The doctors neither, nor a dressing gown
Don’t let them borrow yours ,all’s upside down
We can’t have naked people in the town
The government will rue this nudity
When Boris Johnson flies into a tree
We’ll see his valorous organ on TV
Whatever can the matter really be?
Why can’t the textile trade make us nighties
On the NHS most stuff is free
The towel laid across your aching knee
My BT Hub is dying can’t they see?
Oh, I feel shame I live in Sodom here
Gomarrah can’t be far behind,don’t leer
The sadness of the television world
Where actors have no character to share
Where all is flat and perfect but unreal
Where God’s in Hell, and yet it is concealed
The sadness of a toddler with a phone
Eyes near focussed like he is alone
Where he can see a Zoo in Montreal
Or hear hyenas as they make their calls
The sadness as we toss out ancient books
And never teach our children how to cook
The imaged food is perfect in young eyes
But when we live on that I think we die
The sadness when our neighbours have blind eyes
The sadness as our culture slowly dies
I’d like to melt into the slanting rain
Be mist or fog so I may feel less pain
The raindrops on the window tun like tears
Who is weeping, has some death occured?
The strange eugenicist just hired has gone
According to his thinking he’s not won
We’ve heard of racial purity before
This opens up a deathlike dangerous door
When I’m rain I’ll have no need to think
Into the earth with all the past I sink
No more to hear the News of Government
The newspapers each rotting with dissent
Words in print are given special powers
We think we’d like the truth but we are cowards
The sacred heart fragmented does not awe
Broken,lost, and trampled, global wars.
We worship our own selves, by camera formed
There are no depths, no Saviour to be born
The horizontal Flatland where we crawl
Does not encourage us to stand up tall
There are no experts, no-one understands
The dignity of art, the learning scorned
The heart has cracked, the jigsaw can’t be done
We all lose a game that no-one’s won.
Here comes a vacuum cleaner which will suck
The heart of God mixed with our human muck.
Can we think there is no vertical
The lost imagination, the strained will
Do you remember when we bombed Iraq?
No doubt the war was for the good of man
Yeah, some would die, and others feel their lack
By and large, what does it mean to sack?
Real democracy was said to be the plan
Do you remember when we bombed Iraq?
In Downing St will Blair have a blue plaque?
His conviction, where did it begin?
Yeah, some would die, and others feel their lack
Now the Leader wanders in the gaps
But we no longer call such deeds a sin
Do you remember when we bombed Iraq?
At night when we can’t sleep, we see attacks
Where to start, well Trump suggests Iran
Yeah, some will die, but there is heaven for wrecks
Since we write, we read our scripts again
Civilised, we use our manners well
Do you remember when we bombed Iraq?
Yeah, we chose to follow Evil’s tracks
Our sado-masochistic people jump for joy
Taken in by ads and lies and rage
Soon enough we’ll find we are mere toys
Johnson knows the tricks in his employ
While from each other, subjects are estranged
Our sado-masochistic people jump for joy
We think we want the best but are destroyed
By our own ignoring we’re deranged
Soon enough we’ll find we are just toys
Too late now for a message to convey
We chose helplessness and angst to have their reign
Oh, sado-masochistic people jump for joy
We will be numbered like the European Jews .
Our rulers kept them out, oh moral stain
Soon enough we’ll find we ‘re numbered toys
Once we had our heads to hold our brains
Now our minds are trapped like that of Cain
Sado-masochistic people jump for joy
Yet by ignorant suffering we’re destroyed
My image of my own garden
Since my husband died I have been afflicted with recurrent UTI’s.
This year has been the worst I have only one entire month when I was well.
Unfortunately they affect the brain and hence the mind.I have had scans but it seems my immune system is not strong.I wondered if it was the steroid injections as steroids do affect things like white blood cells etc
Anyway, today I have something humorous to tell you.~
I have had antibiotics then they doctor asked me to take a sample to send to the pathology lab
I took it yesterday.When I gave it to the receptionist she said in a rather unkind tone
Why have you brought this?
I wonder why?
I might have said, it’s your morning coffee replacement
Your plants need watering.
It seemed a good idea at the time
It’s so pale I wonder if I have anaemia.
I was bored and wanted to see you.
Mind your own business
However I just said the doctor told me to
Are they trying to economise even on lab tests?
The government has told doctors to delay the referring for cataract surgery
As my mother used to say:You have to laugh or else you’d cry
EXTRACT
Walt Whitman is two hundred years old in 2019—and the bicentennial of democracy’s bard falls in the shadow of a demagogic presidency.
John Marsh, in his book In Walt We Trust: How a Queer Socialist Poet Can Save America from Itself, has this to say about the poet and democracy:
For Whitman, democracy is a way of being; in particular, it is a way of being with others … it has much more to do with how you approach your fellow men and women. Do you respect them? Do you acknowledge their dignity? Do you identify your interests with theirs? In short, do you love them?
Whitman expressed his vision of democracy as “a way of being with others” in #24 of “Song of Myself”:
Walt Whitman, a kosmos, of Manhattan the son,Turbulent, fleshy, sensual, eating, drinking and breeding,No sentimentalist, no stander above men and women or apart fromthem,No more modest than immodest.Unscrew the locks from the doors!Unscrew the doors themselves from their jambs!Whoever degrades another degrades me,And whatever is done or said returns at last to me.
How my heart sings 