Revolutions

Streams of Conciousness

Clear blue sky; A flock of swans, harried by a rage of eagles – grace and beauty torn and desecrated by a brutal magnificence. Sympathies confused and divided as power and awful purpose obliterate purity and elegance.

So God's appetites are fed and bled. We and He, mirrors of an age; of ages. Our struggles like children, build and destroy – as much pleasure and satisfaction from the fall as from the rise.

And in our societies, the renegades and the anarchists, plotting and hoping, waiting for the fall. They will the end and push that last toppling block. And society does fall, and changes, with winners and glorious losers and all love all even as they burn and ravage the great works. The chaos quickly sickens those at its centres as the desire to build and settle reaffirms the base roots of what it is to be; to be part of this great beast that is humanity. Humanity in all its thousand forms and billion views, looking for a commonality and expressing its hurt and disappointment at the intransigence of establishment in yet another age of dissolution.

So here we sit – the signs of a teetering Way are all around: panic buyouts by governments as major Institutions verge on collapse; badges of delusional wealth lie in driveways, unused and unusable. Burgeoning shelves in supermalls become bloated with unafforded luxury while the bargain basement clears faster than it can be restocked.

And the beggar Nations supply our indolent desires even as they reap the long rewards; draining our dregs and last illusions of wealth into their holey pockets and rag-caps, they plough our squandered inheritance into their new dreams. Ever cheaper and ever poorer, we retrain our dull sensitivities to their beggar tune 'till we no longer discern between investment and durability, from bargain and cheap.

So the balance changes.

And we topple in an agonized disbelief, many still dreaming that they sit atop of a pile of rubies even as the blood drains from the shattered glass and soiled heaps of recycling waste that now support this evaporating existence. Red rimmed eyes in blank white faces, gawp at the spinning diktats of the men who sell direct into the insular hovels of shrinking private space.

But the real power never changes; it follows the money. From nation to nation and pension fund to investment fund; the faceless and the nameless spend our profits in distant resorts, always just removed from the turmoil that their rape and pillage spills across the nations, but close enough to take their black, bullet-proof carriages to their shareholders meetings and their bank auctions.

Yet peoples carry on; their haughty views much changed and for the better as they review the world from a lowly place. Their cultures endure through their artful works and prophetic poetry and their music, once proud and strident, now haunting nostalgia and full of the meanings of right.

So, where to look for the writing that will lead us? Our corrupted leaders, saddened by their newly elected pragmatism, can only dream their illuminating speeches as the grey background men rewrite their hopes and ambitions into the workings of the megalith. Yet out in the streets the rebels blazon their battle cries across every flyover and railway cutting in adrenalin-pumping gouts of red and black and silver and blue. The real beads of hope though lie buried in the back columns of the Big Issue as the poets silently rage in impotent fear and hopeful dream ...Keeping their heads down nevertheless.

CL Aug 08 - Rev. Nov 08