THE CYNICISM OF LABOUR POLITICIANS

The cynicism of our politicians

Strange to be hearing these labour politicians saying ‘we must respect the decision of the electorate’ and shuffling to present themselves as honourable, humble and full of the spirit of service. The reality is a cynical ploy to push the Liberal Democrats into the arms of the Tory Party in order that Labour can re-group in 12 months time free from the responsibilities of having taken part in the proposed cuts in public services and give the other parties a hammering in the next election.
It’s another example of how the party purporting to represent working men and women has sunk to a state in which principle is worth nothing and all is sacrificed to the machinations of power. It is evidence yet again of the terribly corrosive nature of our politics on the natures of those drawn to participate in its games. Strategy-games, mind-games, spinning games, money games and of course let us not forget their war-games. There is not a member of the Labour cabinet who I would consider buying a second hand bike from, with the possible exception of Hilary Benn.
Millennia ago the Greek philosopher Plato suggested in his manual of governance ‘The Republic,’ that the leaders or guardians (politicians) of the society should live lives of simple and ascetic discipline. They should own no property and live in communal communities. The simple reason for these safeguards, according to Plato, was the essential truth that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Our politicians seem living, walking embodiments of that truth. Though we must remember Garibaldi who held power twice and walked away from it twice.
However, better to light one candle than curse the darkness as Ghandi said. One such candle for me is the election of Caroline Lucas of the Green Party as MP for Brighton Pavilion. I’ve listened to Caroline speak on several issues over the years and she has always presented as someone who matches principle to pragmatism and speaks with a thoughtfulness and compassion astonishingly rare in our political discourse. Congratulations to her. She and the Green Party have the support of Heart of Balance Blog until such time as The Party for the Propagation of Poetry and Cycling comes into being. And well done Brighton-you’ve shown that you really are cool.
The other slightly guttering candle is the fact that all BNP candidates lost their deposit which is a great relief and one in the eye for those who proposed a new creeping wave of fascism was succeeding in fomenting hatred and division in our cities. Not this time Mr Griffin (a really creepy fellow.)
So what’s next? The low hanging fruit of coalescing politics? The intertwining gasses of Cleggy and Cameronian farty-bollocks? Not for me. I’m packing my panniers. I’m moving to Brighton.

PS:  It's a done deal with the tories-but Vince Cable as Business Secretary, with responsibility for overhauling the banks?  They've got to be shitting their pants!  Come on Vince!

BOTR Ring 1: OF DESPAIR 'STARLIT NIGHT'

 STARLIT NIGHT

One starlit night our love-song slipped

Out an open window [that

I had forgotten to make tight]

Slipped out to frolic beneath the moon

And danced all wild till dawn slipped jewels

Like wedding rings on fronds of grass

And back she came-a homing bird

A swallow cross a mighty sea

Back home safe and secret-safe

     Clothed in glittering memories

THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS POEM 1-'PERMANENTLY STRANGE'

PERMANENTLY STRANGE




Tales from a frozen foreign land

labyrinthine tourmaline-dreams

of black horses flowing out to sea



told in a strangely twisting tongue

that chords can barely bend to chant

the rime and rhythm in the line.



How fools found gold in streams that curled

and mazed round roots by boggy banks

What are you? Why are you here?



His-story hisses out of flatulent balloons.

and fools all fall about the place

while others look round for helpful signs.



It wasn’t that they didn’t.

It might be that they’ll never.

It might be that it’s permanently strange.

Dominic Gill-A hero for our time!

Adventure Cyclist and film maker Dominic Gill on his Hase Pino Tour Tandem with Ernie, a 75 year old man with Lymphocytic Leukaemia.  Dom and Ernie plan to cycle the Pino across America raising funds for Cancer Research.  The trip has always been a dream of Ernie's and with Dom on the rear it's one he will now achieve.

Dom's last adventure cycling from Alaska to Tierra Del Fuego on a tandem and offering random passengers a ride was a great documentary that you can check out at www.takeaseat.org.

Beautiful bike too, provided by Hase Bikes.  Good job guys!

THE BOOK OF THREE RINGS PROLEGOMENA: MOMENTS OF IMPENDING TRANSFORMATION

A thin whipcord clacks a screech. Nerve-shock and wibble-wobble. He is become a touretted marionette.  A low moan gut-birthing. Shake-handing.  Eyes tear-fill streaming blue as sapphires.   Shoulders up-jumping down-sledding.  A dense weight stone-black and heavy gut-deep and yet deeper. Steady breathing, try to focus, anything, but cannot.   Room-spin. Chair-toppling like a statue on a broken plinth.  How long there?  Moments, houries, yearies.  Incandoes of the Lesser Hell.  Purgatorio that stops all clocks.

Years later he goes to the bedroom where she feigns sleep and pulls on someone’s shorts and trainers and a tee shirt.  As is his way he responds to all vicissitudes by running running  running.

Everything that was familiar, that was home, is now alien-strange.  He is the strangered in a strangely.

He runs down the country lane, past the golf course shameless in its grassy nakedness.  Dead golfers eye him coldly from the hillow-humps.  Clubs resting against their legs descried against the horizon sculpt them into living gallows

Stiff-running.  Heaviness in his gut that seems to include his heart as if the organs have turned to granite or slate perhaps.  Past the graveyard, up a steep little track and into the wood.  The grim, grey dawn slowly jumps up and down on the death’s head nights head beating beating beating until its brains spill grayley onto the fields.  He runs under beech and oak; ash, and clumps of you.  A huge droplet of water drips off a broadleaf and lands with a dull phut on his head.  Up he slowly wends.  Outcrops of limestone yield to him.  

The weighty belly and another limb grown heavy as pitch.

He emerges like a beetle onto a small limestone plateau and the village is spread-eagled and spatch-cocked out below him with its little stone walls and pretty houses of the good folk.  The village is spread out below him but now is like the vilest lie; an insult and an affront.  Does he hate it and all that is in it?  Or, has he always hated it?  All it’s pies and flaunty marrows.  It with it’s giddy reeks and shallows.  It’s shoreline saltmarsh slashed with sinuous rills.  It’s pockmarked limestone sharp against the skin.  It’s limestone sheep hot with ticks and vacant eyed, except for the Leicester Blue prize-winning flock, immense in the morning mist, shrugged from a llama.

And the ubiquitous yew-death tree stooping to conquer, trollopped up with scarlet baubles in it’s greens.

Almost disbelieving his own Self he asks Good to help him.  He does not know if Good exists and even if It did whether It would be listening to him right now.  He guesses that Good, if It did exist, would be incredibly busy, with hardly any time even for Its own family, if It had any.  Good would be an absent parent!  Good probably didn’t exist but, you never know.

‘Please help me Good’ he breathes.  ‘Please.  Please help me.’

He briefly considers flinging himself upon some pointy limestone shard where he can lie impaled like one of the world’s great tragedies, but the height is minimal and that would be absurd.  Even now, he realises that death is not an option, even if he possessed  the gravelly to open such a door.  The existence of somethings will not allow.  

No, it is clear he must live, but how will he live with these two wolves fighting for possession of his juicy bones and grits?  He does not know.  He knows that now which he does not know.  But does he know what he knows?  And how will he know if he does not know?  But what he does know, even now, is…