Decadence

The topic is decadence
The meaning interpreted, I'm sure
So I opened the Pocket Oxford
Left languishing on the floor-

Deterioration, it said, decline of a nation,
Or of an art or literature after culmination.

When has a nation climaxed
After Shakespeare, Mozart, or a Great War?
Or are we governed by cyles
Like a constant, revolving door?

We hit a peak and then decline
Before we can hit a peak again.
The circle of life goes on
We cannot and do not remain.

And Byron wrote, "I love not man the less but Nature more,
From these our interviews, in which I steal
From allI may be, or have been before,
To mingle with the universe, and feel
What I can ne'er express - yet cannot all conceal."

For Man and Nature are inextricably entwined.
When we take too much, so we decline -
As Nature is bountiful, so it is lean
The boom and bust cycle and all that, that means.

Around the next corner
The moral reality
Of the nature of decadence
And its slide to the sea,

Which taketh and giveth
With pleasure and pain
Byron sought both
As his writings inflame.

Ian Matthews, October 2008.

Protestor Pants (Decadence)

These pants are a badge of honour
Opposed to the world of greed
They represent an alternate view
To meet a real need.

The patches serve great purpose -
Reused, recycled, repaired;
Not your throwaway item here
Whose messages are earnestly shared.

The boom and bust of money markets
Shine no light on one
Who wears these threads with proud abandon
Against the powers she shuns.

The purposeful placement of textural designs
Is all that decadence is not
Neither caring nor compassionate,
Indulgent - society's rot.

Kym Matthews, October 2008.

Childhood Lost

CHILDHOOD LOST


High on the chilly windblown crag, childhood is tarnished:

powerlessness and fear hang in the air like shades of dark.

This trusting spirit child, so full of generous ease,

no longer views her Lilliputian world through hazy,

carefree hues of innocence; but travels now, with hesitance

on tippy-toes, while ....flight, shouts and screams shreak -

discordant notes from every fibre of her being.



A threatening ‘otherness’presses;

menace hovers in the fractured shadows,

nooks and crannies where she plays her

childish games of make-belief and mayhem.



She shifts from innocence and childish play....

too late she minds her mother’s call

"take care my dear, be home by dark.

She bolts like lightning down the scree,

emerging from the crags on to the road.



The terrace, shines wet and lowering;

chimneys plume ; glowing windows beckon -

like familiar beacons on a hill.

Arms wide stretched wait to draw

this child of love and nurture in.


Her identity fractures yet

into shades of grey, while

fear become a token currency

and trust is forever lost.


Isabel Telford

April 2008

The Sea

The sea is scary, the sea is sad
always going and coming back to -
the secret place where she takes
our dead and scours them clean.

The Selkie, sings the sweetest song as
she fills the sails with her breath of storm.
Her sweet song thralls, the seabirds swoop,
Her lovers, she beckons like fish for food.


The song sings on where the sea’s plates
crack, and groan and shift,
deep and dark in the current's drift.
While the sea is scary, the sea is sad,
it's always taking, yet gifting back.

The waiting Room

The Waiting Room


A crowded room;

except for those -

who seem familiar

or warily unknown.

Ten pairs of eyes,

assess me casually

impatience, carefully concealed.

Odd - no clock;

No definition of time measured

to rearrange the anxious tick -

tock of my thoughts

of –

diagnosis -

treatment -

surgery -

or

painful death.


OOps! I’m called;

I’m in -

my worries fade

in sharing them -

Until………

Jasmine's day at the Sea

Jasmine's day at the sea

Snuffs and yelps of
unadulterated joy.
Alluring abandoned wriggles -
and her, so inelegant and
sideways wriggles through -
the sucking surging sand,
amuse, entrance;
as through, the errant foam
and spray she totters;
fearful yet ecstatic.

Tired damp and dripping,
she smilingly,
reluctantly resists;
retreat from her encounter.
with the elixer, the salty;
intoxicating sea of life

Digiworld

In a country far away on a digi-pixel plain
lies a hulk of digi-garbage near the sea.
And the digidrons , they scavage; in the heat,
they slave and hammer, for a few rupees,
they risk their lives in digi-hell on earth.

They separate and desecrate, the sacred cows of digi-land,
no longer sleek desktops, peripherals stripped bare.
Families fossick feverishly, they strip the stuff of dreams to bits,
alongside toxic elements laid bare.T hey work, from dawn to dusk,
to eat; to see the sun rise on another day.

Lead tin, copper, antimony; cadmium and mercury,
a toxic chemi-cocktail poising all who get too close.
They breathe, absorb the PCB’s,compounds-Hexivalent chromium;
chromium VI biphenyls, additives which maim the body mind:
all to meet our insatiable digifix demands.

We care little for the digi-trade, in India, and places where
Slave traders far and near abuse the poor.In our hunger
for the latest, we don’t care the cost in human live, we want
it now, no matter what or where it’s done.

It’s not our fault the DNA of digi-slaves will damage foetal cells.
All those who struggle to survive from hour to hour; while their
death sits listening anxiously, the door begins to close,
as their tortured lungs expel the welcome fumes of death.


So let’s think about the planet and how we live our lives,
as we let our lives be driven by our wants. Can we make
a change, we have no choice, we need to think of children
who are slaves around the globe. Let us work to modify our
needs, live simply from today, turn the lights out, turn the TV
and read!

Change

Change

With careful aim,
the smooth, flat stone
skips; -
and, skimming across the surface,
falters,-
timeless suspension,
in the moment.

Saturn-like concentric rings,
ripple, like graceful tutus;
while soundlessly yet rhythmically,
the eddys roll and levitate;
unstoppable, while at the vortex –
we watch, and wait……….

This is how change is meant to be!
An invasive, subversive assault of
the deep and murky centre of the whole:
striking,
cracking,
breaking open,
laying bare:
releasing the clangourous minutae of
dangerous, closely held and
tightly clutched humours,
predudices and values,
which turn us into-
withered , loveless souls.

Bloody death and Betrayal

The blood sings,
while in a distant place
a drum calls forth it’s dead.
Out on the hillside - all is still.

“Upwind man, always up” the Ghillie cries.
The eagles soar to dizzy heights above us,
on the updraught, waiting for the drop.
eager for the kill.

Look! Pitted antlers, etching
throat exposed,caution like a mantle;
we crouch, guns primed, like fallen.
eagles, exultant in ‘the chase’.

The canvas of the moor turns red;
the brutal decadence of violent death
rears like bile spilled. Forces dark,
malevolent, sing out to greet his passing.

This glen has seen it all before as
kith and kin raised high the claymore;
swung it wide in brutal swings
to murder.....and for what?

The drum beats true and clear
while others spill the quafe
of blood’s betrayal in this place.
I ‘keen’ my loss for beauty rich and free;
for decadence and death are all I smell.

Songs of life and liberty float downward
to the lifeless eyes of the dead beneath.
Those who'd dreamed of honour
and glory in this cursed glen, Glencoe.

Dante's Glade

The dappled landscape dips - like a graceful teapot,
pouring logs down devastated hills;
sticks of licorice bound for hell.

This is no silent dignity of death!
Tortured limbs split, bruise,
and crack on surface rocks
while shrieking splinters
scatter like stormy bees.

Death glazed eyes of creatures here,
reflect a mindless, wantan desecration.
Habitat torn, where forest giants sway like
ladder -bridges to the sky while,
on the gorest floor,the night sky weeps

Bridge across Time

Through the moonlit wall he came -

a lumininous decadent dew

suspended through his hair;

caressing his shadowed face.

Impaled upon his back,

a fairy sweet and fragile.

Love taken; love lost forever

in fairy dells beyond....

far beyond the tumbled

broken walls of knowledge,

safety,

and sanity.

Decadence

madeinchina.com


Is this a word for decadence

where babies die a lingering death

fed poison in the food of nourishment?

Is this a word of decadence

where the vanity of bulldozer

eliminates the home of a lifetime

to show the dazzling glitter of a

culture in frenzied freefall

to unbrindled capitalism?



In the birdcage of captivity,
in the cube of Tienaman;
fresh from the sewers
like lemmings, they appear.
shuffling hopeless penguins.

A block away,the diamonds sparkle

in the Beijing Shopping Mall;

country peasants labourers scramble

on the bamboo scaffolding,

like the detrius - expendible

for life tomorrow starts afresh:

morality is absent:

long live Mao who feeds us.

us to economic remodelling

In the birdcage of captivity,
in the cube of Tienaman;
fresh from the sewers
like lemmings, they appear.
shuffling hopeless penguins.

Decadence

Before the florid portico
I watched the gamblers come and go,
While by me on a bench there sat
A female in a faded hat;
A shabby, shrinking, crumpled creature,
Of waxy casino-ward with eyes
Of lost soul seeking paradise.

Then from the Café de la Paix
There shambled forth a waiter fellow,
Clad dingily, down-stooped and grey,
With hollow face, careworn and yellow.
With furtive feet before our seat
He came to a respectful stand,
And bowed, my sorry crone to greet,
Saying: "Princess, I kiss your hand."

She gave him such a gracious smile,
And bade him linger by her side;
So there they talked a little while
Of kingly pomp and country pride;
Of Marquis This and Prince von That,
Of Old Vienna, glamour gay. . . .
Then sad he rose and raised his hat:
Saying: "My tables I must lay."

"Yea, you must go, dear Count," she said,
"For luncheon tables must be laid."
He sighed: from his alpaca jacket
He pressed into her hand a packet,
"Sorry, to-day it's all I'm rich in -
A chicken sandwich from the kitchen."
Then bowed and left her after she
Had thanked him with sweet dignity.

She pushed the package out of sight,
Within her bag and closed it tight;
But by and bye I saw her go
To where thick laurel bushes grow,
And there behind that leafy screen,
Thinking herself by all unseen,
That sandwich! How I saw her grab it,
And gulp it like a starving rabbit!

Thinks I: Is all that talk a bluff -
Their dukes and kings and courtly stuff:
The way she ate, why one would say
She hadn't broken fast all day.

by Robert W. Service - thanks to www.poemhunter.com

The Muddy Puddle

I am sitting
In the middle
Of a rather Muddy
Puddle,
With my bottom
Full of bubbles
And my rubbers
Full of Mud,

While my jacket
And my sweater
Go on slowly
Getting wetter
As I very
Slowly settle
to the Bottom
Of the Mud.

And I find that
What a person
With a puddle
Round his middle
Thinks of mostly
In the muddle
Is the Muddi-
Ness of Mud.

by Dennis Lee

Obama

NOW AMERICA’S 4/11
(Barack Obama, first black US President, elected 4.11.08)


The slaves are now the kings:
A shaft of light pierced
Three hundred years of dark despair
And in one momentous day
Power passed to the dispossessed.

Words like ‘justice’ and ‘freedom’,
Long corrupted by rough usage,
Suddenly took on a newly minted edge
And people dared to believe again
They spelled out plausible ideals.

How remarkable that a democratic brew
With such dubious ingredients
As hate and ignorance and fear
Should have distilled a liquid
Infused with great humanity and hope.

How remarkable that the agent
Of this transformation,
Like another man before him,
First had to cauterize and cleanse
The stigmata of a coloured skin.

So, like Mandela, Obama sets a noble pace
For humans of every creed and race.