Letter to some editors

Dear Editor,

Nigel Farage's call for greater direct democracy is welcome.

However government today is as much about spending as legislation and traditional ideas of democracy did not face this problem.

Public spending has grown forty fold since the beginning of last century.

(http://www.bankofengland.co.uk/publications/Documents/quarterlybulletin/threecenturiesofdata.xls)

A novel form of direct democracy in a digital age would be to give citizens input into public spending decisions.

The elected government should publish its spending plans immediately after the general election. Then allowed a period for citizens to adjust each budget line by some precentage.

This would make our democracy more inclusive, less a la carte, political promises more binding and politicians more focused on persuading the electorate to back policies, rather than making empty promises to secure office.

Further, mandating policies might allow the retention of budgets within the civil service and end the incentive to profiligacy that comes from having to spend or return budgets within a year.

The next general election falls on the eight hundreth anniversary of the Magna Carta, which created parliament for the purpose of overseeing the Sovereign's tax and spending.

Representation may have been the best option 800 years ago, but the web now allows us to publish and collect feedback at little cost.

British innovation in governance was a competitive advantage for centuries. We should again focus Britain's “unique moral genius” on the issue of governance, harness the wisdom of crowds and use National Participatory Budgeting to build a more inclusive, more efficient and more direct democracy.

Murder on Ferry Lane

This and that
This and that's been said
They say this and that
They say this and that about him
Like it's justification
But that facts be
Execution by police of a man in a taxi
Execution by police of a man in a taxi
Execution by police of a man
This is repetition
No apologies.

No medicine
This bitter pill
Killed by the law
Verdict
Lawfully killed.

No medicine
These questions
These questions of character
The actors
The character of the actors
The act of shooting
A radio
The script of the actors
As answers
For questions
Unanswered questions
Of running guns and guns running
Questions at the gates of Downing Street
Questions, questions
Because they shoot first
And ask questions later.

Return love

Var life
Var love
Var happiness
Var I

If (life != happiness) {
    find (love);
    love = array []
    For each I in love []{
    I = 0, I++, I < love
    return love[]}

Else If (life = happiness) {
    love = array [];
    for each in love []
    echo love}

Else If (empty(life)) {
    find (love);
    love = array
    For each (love []){
    I = 0, I++, I < love
    echo love
    life = love
    return life}

Else If (love = 0) {
    life.live()
    life.work()
    life.make_merry()

    Find (love)
  
    life.live(love)
    life.work(love)
    life.make_merry(love)
  
    If (love > 0){
    return love};
    }

Else If (love == 1){
    life = happiness
    return love};

They come 'ere taking our jobs

A contribution to the debate on immigration

They come 'ere taking our jobs
With their funny food
And their bad attitude
And their gangs of drunken yobs.

They come ere
With the their strange ways, strange schools
Closed communities, their own rules.
Some say they're cool
And we should leave them alone
I say London's full
Country whitey go home.

They come 'ere taking our jobs
Talking odd
Clogging up our hospitals
And clogging up our roads
Breaching peace in parks
In self-important tones
Pushing up the house prices
But one thing I've never known
Why they don't stick to their devices
In the counties they call home.

Don't get me wrong
Heaven's be foresaken
This misplaced tribal ignorance
Ain't based on pigmentation
We've always had the Irish
The Germans and the Jews
And French and Dutch and Spanish
More than one or two
And Euston takes the Scotsmen
But Paddington should close
Cos London's full of country feet
Better walking country roads.

Don't get me wrong
Heaven's be foresaken
This ain't straight xenophobia
We still need immigration
A cornucopia metropolis
Of each and every nation
Rich as ancient Thebes
New York or Los Angeles
Or the prime of Rome
They ain't coming to your village
If it bothers you go home.

Why make space for bumpkins
When we can tap the global talent pool
Why clog up our economy
With web-foot, hair-lip fools.
We could take one or two
On a quota if they're of use
And house a case or two
Of institutional abuse.
We know what they're like afterall.

Now if they come 'ere and was humble
And stuck to cleaning floors
And worked only in the small hours
So that they could be ignored
I wouldn't grumble or begrudge
Just that odd one or two
But on the farms the fruit needs picking
So they should stay and work their due.

So spare us all you stiff-necked toffs
With prattling myopic aires
Our hands are better washed
We can tend our own affairs
So take the Queen and go tend the sheep
And take the parliament to Birmingham
Westminster we'll keep.

So all of you who don't know
Who where the weavers of the wool
Who built the railway and roads
And staff the hospitals
All of you who don't know
What makes a modern Rome
There's no place for you 'ere
You might as well go home
And leave the jobs to Londoners
And the best the world can send
There are green and pleasant lands
That you should stay and tend.

Sights across the city prove
What makes a modern Rome
And if you can't see how tide moves
Like Canute you'll lie in foam
So go back to the hills
So the chickens aren't alone
There's no place for you 'ere
Country boy go home.

F-Words

Certain f-words have suffered abuse
I have witnessed and heard
Some scurrilous use.

The four letter word
On so many lips
Has been turned to turd
The way ad-land use it.

Free. Everything free
Say linguistic parasites
And we'll buy if it's free
As the price seems right.

And then there is fresh
Which means unprocessed
But when it left the land
Is anyone's guess.

In plastic wrapped boxes
For one penny less
You can buy all you want
And its free and its fresh.

Windows on summer

This is a season of Cabbage Whites
In chaotic courtship
Who knows what hurricanes they cause
What they feel in their stomach.
Dancing in zephyrs like clumsy
Trapeze artists in honey
Over and under and past and over
And on
Like doppler rhythms from open cars
Calling satisfaction
That this democratic dream
Sunshine
Is all mine
And the Cabbage Whites'.

They're having a gas

Does Obama
Miss Osama
Is that why he sends Syrians
Heavy Armour?

There's Carlos the Jackal
But Bin Laden I'd rather
He was the best looking rebel
Since James Dean and Guevara.

The US has a concern
In regionalisation of the conflict.
They're having a gas.

From Pakistan to Somalia
Mali to Georgia
A war where we are unsure
Which targets we hit.

We're in want of a monster
Where is our monster
So we bomb and arm
Bomb and arm, bomb and arm
The whole of the Umma

What could be dumber
Than giving every angry young man a gun?
Auctioned futures
To give each rocket launchers.

The US has a concern
We will see violence escalate.
They're having a gas.

Lest we forget
Rambo 3 and our TV screens
Promoting Muja-hadeen
Staunch, with shoulder launchers
To take it to the Soviets.

To be forthright
It would seem poor foresight
To pour arms into a fight
Quite like what in hindsight
Spawned the air traffic
For those four flights.

I asked Humpty Dumpty
He said "sure right,
They're having a gas"

Blood, money and derivatives
To the victor the oils
So to backers with so much to give
It must be win
Win.

Aiming to install through proxy
Servers, processes and algorithms
For the new model of democracy
As seen in the Iraqi
Kleptocratic batshit strategy
Export standard is Beta
And may contain known conflicts.

We are all familiar with a different Utopia
With wheelchairs and legless beggars in our streets
Familiar with fatherless martyrs of the Middle East
They won't all, in the drama, don Semtex and rest
Some, like Osama, will take the rocks and look West.

Poem for the NSA

We met for a game of Bridge

Human to human

Drew out borders and grid

Drank port with ice

And served roast pork

The atmosphere was much enriched

As we talked long and loud

And as the pipes began to burn

There was not so much plume as cloud.

His facility with cards

Was well known

I did not heed the warning

Thinking I was smart,

I crested in six clubs

But was to crash and bust

Plot collapse before closure

A hostage to my hubris.

I never saw the diamonds glint

The toxic cargo smuggled by

Before the storm,

The threat seemed distant

There had been poor communication

Not so much as a flicker of understanding

A black out I'm afraid

All my partner could do was watch

They could not help nor aid

I started in a flood of trumps

You know the drill,

The attack looked all excercise.

But then delays started

The atmosphere crackled electric

I strained but could not recall

Which numbers had gone

And then a breach

The errant rough hit like a bomb

And an avalanche ensued

Lightening fast the looting of Kings

Running riot like pirates in Hispaniola

I had no power against the outbreak.

And in terror I was overcome

Relief was swift

The incident left me sick

Like a parrot with H5N1.

Vocab inspired by the NSA's key word list
http://redditgifts.com/exchanges/now-sharing-absurdity/

Excerpt from batshit

....
So I went to the shed
And in some cluttered corner
Under things I was saving
To do something with someday
I found, mangy and resentful
My career, emaciated.
It upset my friend the most.
I used to bring it to the office
When we worked together
Bright eyed, it would
Entertain him, fetch things
And do tricks
He had been away
And hurt to see it sick.
He had some scraps
The usual fluorescent lit terminal
Window on a light well
In some piece of listed dilapidation
Listing and sorry like an old ho
Seeking solace in a bottle
I feed it keystrokes and it might
Live through summer.
........

I used to love dawn
From any angle
The delinquent birds
Are my friends
Singing to street lights

I still love dawn
But seldom when too long up alone
The garden looks so fine
I have made a home
And grow rocket from the walls
And yet this home will fall.

I have become choosy
About my dawns
High summer Tai Chi
On still days only
When I am well rested.

The intoxicated dawns
Of ecstasy, when all
Night has been generous and warm
And these dawns
The drunks whisper so soft in the street
I hear my pen scratch.

I have so many
They can't be listed here
All dawns to choose from.

I must be muddled

I unchartered Chartist
In uncharted power struggle
I must be muddled
Sitting and thinking
And sitting and thinking
Sitting
A new beginning in Dao
I-universe, beyond ego
A new big innings
They'll laugh at you
I must be muddled
I should go down to the water
The sick and slow canal
To separate some of the muddle
The things that are there
And here
I must go down to the muddle
A sick and slow caned fool
To play my part in the struggle
Like I learnt at school.

Rain

Am I to blame
If I make myself the target
When Eros' arrows rain
Martyred like the a varaed bull
In the last lists of pain
As painted on my face
By Eros arrow's rain.

Some hope

Would you be my lover.
Forever.
So that they name stars after us
And wedding cars carry our figurine.
Is this an innocent or idle dream?

The beach

Last night tar skies were harbinger
Wind awash with ides
Galloped the stretched beach
Grain routed over grain
Fled the tide in vain.

Like Hannibal from West
Rolled billious stratus
Bloated with scorn
A pall, moonless and deaf
Told of pain by morn.

Sail open below the awful ranks
With little room leeward she ran
And was broken
Vessel threshed 'gainst cliffs
Wood rent and canvas tore
As land and air and water
Vied in blackness, each unsure.

Unblessed her crew were lost
Their cries like candles in a furnace tossed
Dashed and drawn down restless deeps
For Davey Jones their souls to keep.

Now sun is splayed like deck planks
Upon the beach
Sick mast rifted through deck
Decorates the break.
Figurehead cast upon a crest
Lies a lonely mourner on the wreck.
The rest has become flotsam
On the path in this morning fresh
And some young wife
Dons spinster's dress
Such crushing loss,
In passing interest.

A note of clarification

My love is not the first blush of summer wine

I thought it was a well known fact.
Beside Richmond's wide narrative
Tide tickling shoes and tyres
Doe fretted from barb to captor
And back
From what I thought
A well known fact.

I didn't note the polysemics
The grand Victoriana
Colonnaded against context
Grass bank and straw boaters
Placed me in another time
I thought you knew
It wasn't wrote between the lines.

I should've known
Should've had more sympathy
For your semantics, so unladdered
I said it
Just in observation
Meant it
Not as declaration
Thought it
No great revelation
But echoes of other utterances
Spluttered and frustrated
The dreams they trick Carp with
Must have caught your word
And made it grow
As misused beauty does
So unlike you
Misunderstanding
Its just
I meant it different.

You of all should know
Should not be suprised
It's not like I never told
Or gave it much disguise.

But I should probably know
You must have heard some lies
And looked upon a wintered rose
That promised much but died.

But since misunderstanding
Has budded, lest it flare
Let me hasten to the clifftops
And with pride to all declare

My love is not the first blush
Of summer wine
But like Brandy, the reserve
Rested, more refined

No quick crush
Of some rushed harvest
That bubbles heady light
A stronger liquor
The vapors lost
In alchemy of decade nights

No spritzer, diluted
Or coloured with Gin
Downed with a song
When the evening begins

A burnt love
Distilled drip by drip
From the alembic
To be sipped

Not the driving ocean wave
That claws the sand
Or raves at cliffs demanding
Or mirror vain and valueless
Till beauty gives its gaze

A love lain cellared
Vanillaed in oak
As seasons have ripened
And frozen
And blown to colour again
And children grown from swadling
To broad and sturdy men.

Beyond the flame of wax and wick
That startles timid at each breathe
A beacon blaze in optics set
To rest, in storms, the mind of ships
And proclaim above the cliffs
Occasionally
You are ever part of happy
And out to sea
At least for me
You know
I guess I always felt
You would save me from myself
I trust your judgement still
You always held my heart so well
Even at a distance.

Valentine for S

Love,
Where do you travel?
It seems you have settled
For years, at least
Physically, where do you travel
Now. My heart has moved
Many millions of miles
Around the mass of a word
A singular definition of a word
Amongst the trillions
Across the darkened sky.

Some have tried
To change my compass
Show me maps
Thrust ill formed modern usage
Crass into my lap
A luckless crop
I till
Still like a rock
In a vacuum without manumission
I travel the orbit of one definition.

Raindrops

Raindrops in spring
Still smell the same
Although among the scents of things
I have come to know some names
Of flowers and soils.
The emergence,
Curious in youth
Of Crocus, Hyacinth, and Sarcococa
Unknown comforts
Of Spring's breath
Is now a known wonder
In winter quite forgot
Liberated by raindrops
Telling my nose
That I must tend the roses.

She was classical

She was classical
The type to travel
To palaces in Crete
And finding string
Would ravel up the far end
Winding further in
Willingly where others dread
Lifeline spooled upon a bobbin
In a maze that monsters tread.
She would make a fate to speak of
With Theseus, the Bull
Or both
Live at least one more moment to the full
A flower in her youth.

Egg

Perfectly inert, outwardly
Hard I am
For how thin this armour is.
Eggshell vulnerable
One day myself
Will peck through.

Love is a long word

Call me to the campfire
When all sleep
And the great log in embers
Is a mirror of our love.
Know, as Buddhists do
Each flame
Never born nor dies the same
In dawn
We shall gather fuel.

Lion I would go with you
As we have through so many doorways
So many stairways and clouds
Tented heart a circus hidden
Just for us amid the crowds.

Those grounds we played
And shaped our thoughts
Those hallowed eaves
Where hopes were wrought
With talk uncorked
By hop and grape
Have been erased
Signs sallowed
And been replaced
All covered by the pace of change
But nothing is completely strange
When seen beside your eyes again.
Though the City's race makes brick but chalk
We share an archaeology
In the places and the streets we walk.

Walk with me
Unto the sea
Stand with me on sand once more
And let the waves lap at our toes
Then in a vessel let us go
Out beyond these balmy shores
Row together past the bay
To explore endless today.

So give us today
Words laughed over
After we have authored shopping lists
And unenunciated epics
Tailored favours worn implicit
And abandoned asking why
Our separate souls grow to arches
That hold a church roof high.

Give us then this promise
Vows for mouths of innocents
So that we too might smile
At the constants
Cast starlight
Into ink dark future
Sow our own conspiracy in sonar
Echo-locate in laughter
Values
And the outlines of tomorrow's you.

The bed weighs balanced
My other wing
Self-fulfilling Oracle
I trust this love
Like hot taps and light switches
My normal miracle.

Old friend

I met a saxophonist
Teeth like the old brass
She once blew
Dull, battered, dirty and lost.
Bewildered in well made rags
At the bus station
She begged

With time to spare
To listen and talk of nowhere
And where the roads lead
To walk local streets
And remind her of the tomorrows
She still has.

However long December runs
Some August dawns are yet to come
Of tomorrows planned when we were young
There will be some,
The simple ones.

I met a saxophonist
I gave her what change I had
She bought me a coffee.