Vuvuzelas ...18.06.2010.

Vuvuzela...the new buzz word (now the W.C's weighing upon us) is a plastic trumpet that is very loud. Everyone in S A.'s got one and they're gonna blow'em long and hard. Win or lose. The vuvuzela blowers are not saying anything. Just adding more plastic to the ocean that's probably much larger than the permanently welling BP oil ocean. Buffalo herds on the move would be making much more sense. Sainsbury's is selling them to make extra bucks.

Hornets fill nest-like
stadia.Their probosci
make noise not honey.

A case of dyslexia.

Last year a question mark
hung over my health.
Over the summer term,
I was subjected  to acute and grave accents.
It seemed that a bullet point
had passed through my index finger,
becoming lodged in my spinal column.
This was a case of Dyslexia.
I was given a script, classified,
then moved to the editorial ward.
My writing came to a full stop.
Fortunately, a rather bold-faced,
freelance surgeon managed to
insert a file into the margin of
my spine, bypassing the literal artery
and hacking away the bullet point.
Since he had decided that mine was a
lower case he left me on a billboard,
covered in a broadsheet
and hooked up to a strap-line.
I regained consciousness in
the glare of the headlines.
After hypertexting for a while,
I calmed down.
Eventually I slipped into a comma,
ending up with a semi-colon.
It had been reported
on the message board
that my tabloid gland
was hyped-up, that I had
narrowly missed a deadline
in the gutter press but that,
after a further operation
and two cuttings
to remove hard copy,
I was feeling just
CAPITAL.

The Wisdom of Apple. 14.06.2010.

Sales of theApple Ipad are chugging along nicely until the next big thing/fad/pad comes along. You've got to worry when David Hockney buys one, though in his slightly grudging, satirical Yorkshire disdain he opines that it will probably be supplanted soon by a wafer-thin one, light as paper.

Apple boasts that the Ipad 'contains more books than you can read in a lifetime' even though people who buy Ipads would largely scorn the idea of spending their precious time reading books as there are so many other apps. to choose from ( games, more games, movies, flight information and so on) and may never have seen the inside of a library, let alone a book!

My Mum read more books
a day than they'll want to read
in Ipad's lifetime.

BAE Killing Systems 08.06.2010.

BAE Systems, the engineering contractors who export things to kill people in other people's countries for lots of money (also known as manufacturing exports) is busy making deadlier bullets, after complaints that they're passing through the unarmoured bodies of often lean Taliban troops, only wounding (damn) and therefore perhaps not killing them. The new model bullet is longer-ranging so you can kill at a discreet distance and not get killed yourself, you see. The present bullets discharge lead particles which can (God forbid) poison the shooter.
Who says Britain has no manufacturing industries anymore? This one, and money-making and lending are doing very nicely, thankyou.

BAE makes the
bullets for you to fire much
more ethically.

A bullet is a
bullet is a bullet is
a killing device.

Killing fields will be
much more pleasant without all
those half-dead folk.

Letter to Majed

February, 2010.

　

Dear Majed,

I am sending you the poem I wrote several years after my
father died. Needless to say, I loved him and think of him every day, as I do
my dear Mum, who died last year. The poem is just as much for her, as for your friends and fellow countrymen, as much for the loss of anyone you love.

My parents were modest, intelligent and compassionate. Like you, they had
both been teachers.

For my father.

All effort, doubt, consideration
are banished to the greater silence,
availing us nothing,
availing you nothing.
Matters you would fix
stray away, undetermined.

The slant intent of your signature
is laid to waste-
though how could we ever think it would be?
The purpose of your thought in that last written instruction,
emphasized as you were failing
over and over again
is kept in the bureau, the mind.

Now has come the yawning, deafening silence,
the relentlessness of a world
going on from horror to horror,
the once-charmed carriage-clock
beating out the dead hour, demented;
a wound-up thing set aside
to carry on its dull duty;
the kitchen drawer roaring
where it used to draw warmly
and the fruitless imperative
of the chaffinch's song.

Everything you loved
we loved too.
Love breaks the heart
when we cannot share it,
crying in mute sufferance,
brimming over the full vessel,
or cracking it, remaining
though the living world
may banish us.

How do we throw love away?

Love  to your family and the pupils you teach,

Lou.