society – MichaelAitken

The blind country boy

A blind country boy in the city of love
Touches no one and no one touches him.
The world passes by, so much blinder than he,
Weighed down by worry but not doing anything.

When Gods word came forward and divided the sky
To make the moon rise as he stood by the way
Standing on a corner singing his song
Not knowing the light from the day.

The earth spun around like an acrobat’s ball
Beneath his feet spinning on the overhang
And the blind country boy in the city of love
Imagined the world as he sang and he sang.

He touches no one and noon touches him
The world passes by, not doing anything.
He’s the blind country boy in the city of lies
He’s singing his song – until he dies.

The train was angry

The train was angry because of the stress
Gone is the humour, the quaintness
In came the rules, the strict regimes
The paranoia of modern times.

The train felt angry, it was horse whipped
Spurred on by the driver like the old horse
Starving and tired under a cruel master
With never any freedom never any leisure.

The nights were shortening the pressure grew
For high speed journeys from Glasgow to Crewe
But just before entering the junction at Stoke
The train lost its temper and off the tracks broke

Why did it happen? A reason we need
Why did the train crash at such a high speed?
Perhaps like the carthorse pushed to the edge
It reflects how society plays games on the ledge.

Nov 10th

I’D LIKE TO JOIN A RAILWAY LINE

I’d like to join a railway line and never have to stop
Or languish in a siding or sold off as scrap

With fuel to keep me going, water to slake my thirst
Through the night with fires alight I would travel around your lap

I’d like to join a railway line a classic model one
A line so beautiful in design that circles round the sun

To never ever tire, to ignore the tick of time
To dispense with any schedule,
Oh yes, I’d like to join a railway line

Steaming to the buffer on a private track
With carriages of sumptuousness, upholstery of black
To spend my time on the railway line
With no need of turning back
Oh yes I’d like to join a railway line

The summer would be timeless without the need of work
Just to travel round and round the railway line

The nights would be endless as we’d listen to the sound
Of stars alive forever until the end of time
Oh yes, I’d like to join a railway line

27 Nov 1995

Love burns in the kitchen light in the twilight the cold silver moon, love burns in the night forests catching fire. The white rabbit in a white collar swinging from the gallows grinning a deadly grin. The white rabbit on counter clockwise fairground rides where candle flames quiver in the night air. Love burns the white fur, the eyes stare like exploding ovens. In the kitchen light the white rabbit skydives through clouds of burning oxygen, the ghosts of ancient flowers dancing in the slamming door light. Burning corpses of sensual love dreams roll down the edge of the sea of tranquillity, the white rabbit hops across moon glassy universes.

The white rabbit blues

The bluest food of white rabbits falls in love with charging moons in fields of thistles where bulls are sliced to bits by scythes of flashing morning sun. Love burns holes through hoops of love where white rabbits bleed to death like melting mini cars in cemeteries. White rabbits bring flowers of moth-silk petals fluttering in the wind like turpentine fire bombs. In the shoes of white rabbits, legless ducks on stilts walk through world war blitzkriegs seeking golden eggs, crashing meteorites of stag fights in motorway collision courses.

The white rabbit blues

Enamel onions with tongues of hydrogen-fires cry with jelly babies in pond water tombs. White rabbit love affairs of planets crashing through meteorite storms with thunderous waiting wolves in King Arthur battlegrounds. Love burns in worms of neon lights rolled around balls of wool in blood filled skies of autumn snowdrifts. White rabbit sings of sleepless loneliness everlasting on islands of gloom pierced with cannibal’s spears, cries of eagles in featherless bodies.

White rabbit blues.

Crystal chandeliers in melting kettles filled with love bites attract plagues of flies that die in holes punched into old love letters. White rabbit toys litter play-school dreams like armies of marching peppermints into the overgrown gardens night. Love burns hot iron brands in outer body hallucinations of operating tables amongst waiting armies of angels, where white rabbits grow like snowflakes from volcanic ice explosions in the undercurrents of Antarctica.

White rabbit blues

White rabbits within white rabbits with flaming tails of white whales where lovers on death beds kiss the necks and shoulders of deep sea monsters. White rabbits like flakes of flaming skin stampeding against full moon darkened nights of rocketing evergreen trees. True love white rabbits with human feet roasting on spits of shooting stars where half-awake Romeo’s hang like sofas from coconut trees in wheelchair scrapyards. White rabbits like enamel cannonballs mutiplicate in exam rooms like calculator production lines in dairy farms, flowing like glaciers in raging forest fires where tigers with bloody jaws are lit like street lights.

Invasions of white rabbits whose bodies fill living rooms in royal palaces like cotton bales in high speed carriages of old steam trains on iced over lakes in mountain ranges. Love sold on sticks like lollipops in white rabbit eyes of dripping boiler room walls that crash down bottomless crevasses of vacuum filled ancestries. White flourish, hanging by their ears from trees in foxy eyed jungles where human armies lie like decomposing fleas in seas of blood. White rabbits like fields of Australian sheep melt into honeymoon couples in gothic Parliaments where aborigines wrestle with writhing crocodiles that swallow the heads of mating chickens. The white rabbit blues sung in telephones in bottles ringing with shrieks of rooks that swallowed old women in graveyards vigils. White rabbits rolled out like turf around castles of tumbling cards.

1994

A Stranger at the Dinner Table

Several people re sat around a dinner table. I do not know who they are; they seem nice, friendly, unassuming. I do not see their preoccupations with each other.
They pass the salt, they pour the coffee, I like that the sun is shining, at how relaxed I feel with them, at how well the meal was so well organised; a family meal that has been happening every day for years.
Their clothes are clean and well fitted. The table cloth is clean. Items on the table include a pen and paper, a radio, a bracelet.
At one point in the meal they were all passing something to each other, their arms were folding at the elbow, swinging from the shoulder a motion that surrounded the table like a paper chain. Then they put their arms down and began to chat.
The wife spoke and as she spoke the salt cellar exploded like a small volcano and everyone was surprised, she though, not seeing the miracle or the response to her table talk just laughed.
The husband a few minutes later said something. The olive jar cracked open and the olives rolled over the table’s edge. The birds from a nearby tree flew down, do birds eat olives, and ate them.
The dinner resumed. The two twin girls started arguing over the chocolate mousse which stated to bubble and in the bubbles could be seen dark wicked eyes appearing. The mother told them to stop squabbling and be quiet.
The guest began to tell a story of his recent travels abroad. I was in Valencia recently he said and the gravy boat capsized like a ship and spilled over into the lap of their son’s new girlfriend.
This all hinted at the secret life of the family. I asked for captions to appear above their heads to show what they were really thinking.
The husband liked the son’s new girlfriend.
The wife was having an affair with the guest.
The twins were both in love with their tennis coach.
The group dispersed to various rooms in the building and the husband to his garage. The attractive maid came out to clear up the table. Suddenly on a distant hill a house caught fire. A fire engine passed by and all the firemen were singing

Your song of love and insincerity

Your song of love

The manifesto began to burn as you sang. When you had finished you had saved a whole nation from conquest.
The commander who had stopped to listen stripped off his clothes and walked across Libya. His skin became as white as snow.
At the prisoner of war camp your song hovered above the compound like a virgin light. The rules of war themselves bled to death and all the prisoners were released.
Suddenly on the calm of the ocean thousands of U-boats came to the surface attracted by their radar to your song. As you reached the high notes the code books ran into the sea and mermaids came and ate them; a Convoy of merchant ships passed by in peace.
In the equatorial jungle a man ran to freedom. Creatures in red coats with dinosaur claws and overgrown hair took hacksaws from their purses and listened. It was your song again for the 5th time it seemed to come from the mountains far away. The man reached the sea and safety.
Do you know that moment when all around you there is war yet it all comes to a standstill just to listen to your song of love?

Insincerity

Like a child who detects the insincerity in a mother’s voice you’ve known insincerity all day long. You give them their wages in the form of a treacherous smile and move on.
You were sitting on a rooftop when floodwater filled the contours of the land. Just like insincerity you said to yourself.
You know that at certain times of day the phone will ring. This must be insincerity for how can the fish catch the fisherman?
Your wife is self-wrapped in cling film yet she still manages her appointments. Little mice run about her feet as if sensing her insincerity.
A news report the size of a billiard ball crashes out of the TV and sips your tea while words roll about like marbles. Did they really think you would not see through their insincerity?
You know insincerity all day long, you watch it grow, you see its serpents heads popping out of its flowers and spitting blood and fire as the butterflies hover overhead.
You go to sleep and you have a nightmare that you have become insincerity incarnate.

The Porn Industry

Having got myself into a bit of a mess because of a pornography addiction I have been asking myself how did it happen. How did I get hooked. I believe I got caught up in the explosion of pornography in recent times. It began with digital technology at the turn of the century and has been attracting a whole lot of bad stuff since. You may sit at home watching it in what you think is isolation. But do a little research and try and comprehend that the actual scale of it has got beyond comprehension, it is a 21st century epidemic. It is something that you can break away from, you just have to learn – to hate it.

I have copied this from Fight the New Drug Website.

Consumer stats from NCOSE that are hard to believe:
1. 64% of young people, ages 13–24, actively seek out pornography weekly or more often. [1]
2. Teenage girls are significantly more likely to actively seek out porn than women 25 years old and above. [2]
3. A study of 14- to 19-year-olds found that females who consumed pornographic videos were at a significantly greater likelihood of being victims of sexual harassment or sexual assault. [3]
4. A Swedish study of 18-year-old males found that frequent consumers of pornography were significantly more likely to have sold and bought sex than other boys of the same age. [4]
5. A 2015 meta-analysis of 22 studies from seven countries found that internationally the consumption of pornography was significantly associated with increases in verbal and physical aggression, among males and females alike. [5]
6. A recent UK survey found that 44% of males aged 11–16 who consumed pornography reported that online pornography gave them ideas about the type of sex they wanted to try. [6]
7. Porn sites receive more regular traffic than Netflix, Amazon, & Twitter combined each month. (HuffPost)
8. 35% of all internet downloads are porn-related. (WebRoot)
9. 34% of internet users have been exposed to unwanted porn via ads, pop-ups, etc. (WebRoot)
10. The “teen” porn category has topped porn site searches for the last six years (Pornhub Analytics).
11. At least 30% of all data transferred across the internet is porn-related. (HuffPost)
12. The most common female role stated in porn titles is that of women in their 20’s portraying teenagers. (Jon Millward.) (In 2013, Millward conducted the largest personal research study on the Porn Industry in the U.S. He interviewed 10,000 porn performers about various aspects of the business.)
13. Recorded child sexual exploitation (known as “child porn”) is one of the fastest-growing online businesses. (IWF)
14. 624,000+ child porn traders have been discovered online in the U.S. [7]
15. Between 2005 and 2009, child porn was hosted on servers located in all 50 states. (Association of Sites Advocating Child Protection)
16. Porn is a global, estimated $97 billion industry, with about $12 billion of that coming from the U.S. (NBC News)
17. In 2018 alone, more than 5,517,000,000 hours of porn were consumed on the world’s largest porn site. (Ponhub Analytics)
18. Eleven pornography sites are among the world’s top 300 most popular Internet sites. The most popular such site, at number 18, outranks the likes of eBay, MSN, and Netflix. (SimilarWeb)
19. “Lesbian” was the most-searched-for porn term on the world’s largest free porn site in 2018. (Pornhub Analytics)
20. The world’s largest free porn site also received over 33,500,000,000 site visits during 2018 alone. (Pornhub Analytics) Seven digits make a million

Society is impacted by this, it is a staggering world wide empire of pornography. Who knows where this seemingly uncontrollable industry will lead. What developed in the towns of Sodom and Gomorrah in the bible don’t seem to be as impossible after all .

The contestants are gathered in the town.

The contestants are gathered in the town square somewhere on the Midwest plains. The master of ceremonies arrives.

Years before the game began the beginnings of long strips of coloured plastic tape were laid down into the square that stretched for miles out across the land and into the Rocky Mountains. Each tape chose its contestant by a secretive whisper that only they could hear. Sometimes more than one contestant was chosen and sometimes a contestant chose more than one tape. Each tape represented a pathway of life for them o follow, an ideal, a philosophy or a plain command that would appeal to their senses, their needs for something to follow in life. Year after year new tapes representing new ideas were laid down from the town square and off into the wide distance until the thinkers had exhausted every avenue of possibility. And no on this spring morning the game would begin.

The stating whistle blew. Out of necessity quite often, the solo contestants joined together to form teams to follow the tape. in other situations but one individual would choose but one tape. In other instances some tapes got no takers and one tape led the hapless contestant in a loop back to where he began.

What philosophy, belief or practice would win? Perhaps no one would win, perhaps in the end the tape ended on the top of a mountain with nowhere else to go; or into a whirlpool of rapids where it shook nervously in the abyss. Some contestants having reached the end of the tape carried on across the Rocky Mountains into California. Some contestants returned to the town to find an unused tape.

From the sky a traveller would see a huge rainbow coloured trail stretching for miles across the land like a modern Nazca line. At the end of the year the tapes were blown by the wind and wrapped themselves around the mountains.

The master of ceremonies gathered his fees and left town but before he disappeared he gave a speech in the public square which began, “I have something to say to America”, and ended with “farewell”.

Forgive us our debts

FORGIVE US OUR DEBTS copy

The teddy boy, the rocker, the skinhead and the Punk

For many years
I believed the status quo
Until I saw
Their marble pedestals

The teddy boy
The rocker
The skin head and the punk

Where do they fit in?

Fear cooked alive
When caught
Is easily divided up
Like a jellied eel

The Teddy boy
The Rocker
The Skinhead and the Punk
Where do they fit in?

It’s not like living in America
America is like babel
When it had one language
And no borders

I always wanted to draw
On graph paper
I believed it would make my drawings
More accurate

But instead
It imprisoned me
And took my pencil away

The Teddy boy
The Rocker
The Skinhead and the Punk
Where do they fit in?

Commercials
Have erupted like measles
Like an orthodox religion
From a fitted kitchen

Sunlight is string
Moonlight is gilt edge
Starlight is wrapping paper
The heart shines like a solar panel

And the antibodies
Of society
Are busy with a camera crew
Creating facsimiles

Of the Teddy boy
The Rocker
The Skin Head and the Punk

The fish tank
Cannot get bigger
But the fish
Can fight to the death

Love
Has been manufactured
Like tin foil
So that people forget

The Teddy boy
The Rocker
The skin head and the punk

And where do I belong
Nowhere
I stay at my post
Like one of the ghosts

Of the Teddy boy
The rocker
The kin Head and the Punk

Another day in the darkness of mankind

Another day in the darkness of mankind
Whose love is the scraps of torn paper sheets
On which I cling like an unwanted survivor
Straddling the oblivion between groups of people

And picking dirt out of an unbandaged wound
Is like picking love out of the darkness of mankind
Every day the demon wind sows seeds of malcontent
Pulling the blanket of the sun from under our feet

Only a child can glimpse what love can be
Whose summer holidays are the bond of sun and water
And every day is a dream come true
Fed and clothed and sleeping under the stars

Not knowing pain or tears or old age
Until the careless world breaks them away

Tag Archives: society

The blind country boy

The train was angry

THE WHITE RABBIT BLUES

A Stranger at the Dinner Table

Your song of love and insincerity

The Porn Industry

The contestants are gathered in the town.

Forgive us our debts

The teddy boy, the rocker, the skinhead and the Punk

Another day in the darkness of mankind

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