MIETTES PART ONE
*State of the World
‘The irritating incompatibility between the amazing things modern humanity can do and its apparent inability to live in and understand the sense of the world it has brought about. There is a desperate need for a new political principle to protect humanity from the destructive forces its own ingenuity and foolishness have unleased’.
Hannah Arendt (1950s)
*Michael Collins 2022
A pity he had to be killed to make him an indispensable myth.
*Irish Welfare
75% of child care and 85% elderly care are private. Where does the multinational tax go?
*Brokers
Israel offers to mediate between Russia and America over the Ukraine invasion. They’d bring to the table decades of suppressing by force the independence of Palestine.
*Comedy Clubs
Humor is a political sellout. Collective laughter drowns out thought.
*Tea-shock Martin
‘Climate restriction won’t mean you’ll have
to sell your second car’. His wife provides a recipe
for cooking fish on coal.
*Irish Meritocracy
The bigger the ego the higher the salary.
*Diplomacy
The best way of changing people's minds is making them feel they are changing yours.
*Blushing Green
For years I have been ranting against people wearing tee-shirts with commercial logos. Paying to promote a big business, often associated with bad politic. The prevalence of Emirate Airlines for instance. I froth at the mouth. The tee-shirts for the local rugby team, USAP are blood and gold with the signatures of famous players on the back. I wear them proudly, and red stands out in traffic when I’m riding my bike. As they were discontinued (the team was relegated) I bought a plain red tee-shirt and was pleased to wear it without the logo. Today I noticed it had a neck-tag. It was hard to read after a few washes. I deciphered it ‘Petrol Industries Company, mining and manufacturing’. I got a razor blade to cut it off.
Ukraine Propaganda (Guardian)
‘Nurse who lost both her legs in the war has her first dance
*Wild Boars
On the highway caused 5000 car accidents in Catalan country. Animals driven from their natural habitation taking revenge on prime fossil fuel consumers?
*Lethics:
The new morality¨ the right to do what you want, no matter.
*The End 0f Community
If democracy is reduced to personal choice, then it's everyone for him/herself.
*Neo-Ethics
‘Taking your opportunity’ is the new phrase to cover what was once called ‘arson ‘.
*Secularisation:
Once 'good' was a moral category, now it is a matter of feeling.
*The Freedom Fallacy
Free as a kite with no strings attached.
*Convention and me
Some people adapt themselves to the world. I’m not capable of that. But adapting the world to me has been a disappointment.
*Not Everybody
‘We reason deeply when we forcefully feel’, Mary Wollstonecraft
*Career Choice
Medicine is a dead end. You end up with a corpse on your hands. Writing poems at least there is a remote chance of something immortal
*Immunity
‘Poets are strange fellows. They are made that way, and one must let them follow their bent. One cannot judge them by the standards that apply to ordinary or even extraordinary people’. Karl Marx
*Social Mediocrity
People are so confident in their opinions
no wonder the world is ruled by inflated minions.
*Capitalism
We live in a world of profit and loss. I am a loss.
*Socialism
We live in a world of breaking even. Even everybody.
*Greed 1
The thing about the rich is they don’t need anything,
except more money.
*Tolerance
Adapting to circumstances is putting up with anything.
*Bureaucracy in France
The dotted line is infinite.
MIETTES PART TWO
*Salvation
Sport has been my shrink and music my confessor:
I exert my body to put my mind at rest,
and then I sing to myself.
*Crisis Management
You will need psychiatric counselling
Are you mad?
Well, you need to talk about your mother.
Keep my mother out of this.
*Memoirs
‘Genuine memory yields an image of the person
who remembers rather than simply catalogues events.’
Walter Benjamin
*Existential Impasse
Hubble is still a 100,000 million years off the putative Big Bang. Strange
I will die before I know why I exist.
*Philo Stoic
Your sweat today will be tomorrows’ smile.
*Blocked
Written off, but not off writing
*Modest End
J.J. Rousseau commenting on an aimable neighbour who had brief success with a boulevard comedy. ‘He was not greatly regretted’. I wouldn’t mind that as my epitaph.
*Objective Closure
'It's nice to dream of being remembered, but it is sufficient for an honest man to have completed his work', Emile Zola
*Stormy weather
The tree fell but the flowers stood their ground
*Walter de la Mare
“Poetry does not need to be great or even serious to be good”, WH. Auden
*Clarity arity
Is the politesse of writers
*Transference
I’m tired of everybody being tired.
*Adieux Covid
The 7th wave will be au cinema
*After Covid
Masques will be banded in banks and at the tills of shops and cafes
* Montaigne On Vanity
Doctor Philotimus, diagnosed an ulcer of the lungs in the breathing of a patient worried about his hands and broke the news, ‘‘my friend, this is not the moment to concern yourself with your fingernails’’.’
*Happy old Poetry
Joyeux Noel, Lord Byron
*Louis XVI’s Women
He came, they went
*The Sex War
The men went to war for years and the women stayed at home. Thus, encouraging inversion.
*RIP
Returning from hospital I was greeted by
a surprise get-well party and dropped dead.
*Deplore
The street is littered with masks.
I ask where are the people?
A voice from the sewer rasps
They’re the ones I had to kill.
*Martyr to Corona:
'Me, take the vax? I'd rather die' (Perpignan demo, 25/7/21)
*Apology for Cutting Someone Dead (2021)
Sorry I didn’t recognise you without your mask.
*Neo-reality
Let’s face it has become let’s mask it.
*Corona clown
Gerald, the minister of health, announces the Oxford vaccine is not for the under 50s, unless the alternative is throwing them away.
*Corona Road Map
Every boxer has a plan until he's punched in the face
*Punctual
I’m always on time. My own time.
*Sullivan’s Travels (Sturges movie)
‘Dead? What do you mean?’
*My mother
‘Your lies are so obvious they are almost true’.
*Macron, The Intellectual
To understand others’ ideas does not mean you’re a thinker.
*Mourne
The summer after m died, the chic colour for the fashionable was black.
I could hear her say ‘I don’t think that’s necessary’
*Child grown up
She claps her hands and says I remember you.
I try to look unchanged.
*Moderation
is my vice. It comes with the temptation
that one can live for ever
*Smart Phones
are an apparatus to make inadequate people feel adequate.
*Descartes
would only accept an omelette made with eggs hatched eight or ten days.
Earlier or later and it’s thrown out.
*Swatting Gnats
I’ve a good eye but a bad aim
*Existential Diagnosis
Life is a symptom. Death is the condition.
*Who said 1?
The blue-blue sea caresses the red earth too sensually
to be sincere.
*Who said 2?
Butterflies are flowers that fly?
*Who said 3?
The Seagulls in the port cry, ‘No, no, no’
*Confession on the Who
Me after reading too much Rilke.