Boat People - Summer Special

Inflatable on Kos Beach 01

new series old episode

what's novel about reality

is how its never-ending reruns

get us hooked on the heebie-jeebies

meek as lambs braying in abattoirs

mechanised murder goes round the malls

church & school halls its ring o'hell's bells

broadcasting from built-in cameras tells

all from the bombers' Facebook pratfalls

to their teenage genocide boudoirs

just think what flat screens have done for war

what war has done for car sharing pools

how few real men are left now their souls

skit or scat with the heebie-jeebies

for oh what sitcoms are fan fiction's

take on fake this broke reality

Inflatable on Kos Beach 02

10,000 years of improvised seafaring

I

the turning point came late in the 70s

until then Boat People

were a neolithic eco-culture

archaeologists had conjectured

from log canoes preserved in the silts

of North European estuaries

museum pieces that dated them

to between the 4^th & 8^th millennia BCE

as the last great Ice Age receded

the Boat People were deer hunters

who adapting to the warmer climate

perfected the antler adze

constructed vessels from tree trunks

& navigated coastal waters as sea-fishers

II

then came the fall of Saigon

after which reporters applied

the term Boat People to refugees

fleeing in overcrowded craft

across the South China Sea

a narrative preserved in press cuttings

on film & through oral history archives

moreover actual memories live on

in flashes of those lost overboard

of others who failed ashore

& in longings for ancestral lands

which nowadays are exploited

by the succeeding eco-culture

whose folk tales also recall the departed

III

apparently escaping religious bigotry

politics & poverty today's Boat People

are POCs taking to the waves again

this time via PVC inflatables

which in typical cases they paddle

from Afro-Asian peninsulas to islands

under Western economic condominium

the quality of pity & revulsion

attendant on these intrepid voyagers

has already entered urban nomenclature

causing the term Boat Person to be vocalised

both as insult & compassionate expression

depending where a speaker's empathies

have taken root or are nurtured

IV

whether arising from act of god

or in human intervention the drive

to call folks Boat People is commonest

amongst politicians pundits

coast guards & reporters

in whose tracts the term survives

insistent as waves persistent

as the surge in ocean levels

we must wait to see if Boat People

undergoes further metamorphoses

as profounder geophysical shifts

& sharper swings in religious politics occur

or if the term acquires universal currency

when the tide of human settlement returns

Inflatable on Kos Beach 03

this human project

as someone press-ganged into the movement

& bound to admit most of its mistakes

were mine I must be pushing it to write

yet all along I felt when opening

the daily gazette Jesus wept who said

nothing could or should be done about it

folks are going down & the world is too

unconcerned about this human project

to save us as a species like so what

they come they go dragging others with them

or not soon it'll be some other lot

Discarded lifejackets on Kos beach 01 

Discarded lifejackets on Kos beach 02 

Discarded lifejackets on Kos beach 03

Inflatable on Kos Beach 04

Hey what's new, CND?

Squash anyone?

When I see a beat up pair of shoes, a jacket or any old piece of tat laid out on the roadside, my mind flips into Survivalist Mode. I become one of that handful of folk left after the world's been devastated by nuclear war. Because it's hard for us New Age Sewer Rats to get basic stuff like food and clothing, anything we find becomes valuable. Even that oversized pair of trainers - heels frayed, lace missing - could be life-savers. Struggling to shake myself free of this morbid, sentimental fantasy, my eyes are drawn into the pathetic vortex of tat.

Having spent much of my late twenties on campaigns against nuclear weapons, I suppose these Survivalist Tendencies comes from then. Not that it was politically OK at that time to think anyone would get through an atomic war and the nuclear winter that followed. In the Peace Movement, the party line was pretty much against such talk, but I was never one for conforming – even as a non-conformist peacenic, I preferred to think my own thoughts. In fact, I never really believed that humans would be so stupid as to actually destroy themselves anyway.

I held onto my private view whether I was talking with other anti-nuclear campaigners or in banter with the opposition. I believed it was because people like us were protesting that the descent into total madness would be stopped. And whenever someone on the right accused us of siding with the Warsaw Pact and - as they frequently did - asked us why the Russians were not free to protest as we were, I wouldn't be drawn. Too often, we relished the eastern European TV camera crews that followed us around and took more interest in us than the BBC or ITV. I felt the act of protesting was not to persuade anyone that we were right and the other side were wrong. I suppose it was an existentialist thing, a piece of theatre.

Nowadays, living as an exile, I have to be objective in other parts of my life - not able or willing to get too involved with local issues. And on a personal level, I take some responsibilities more seriously than they deserve, and others I just shirk; such as when I know it's time to lighten up, I might still turn moody or bloody minded. Conversely, I can also let things slide and just coast along while the coast is clear. As an exile, I can just say to myself, So what? - as if I don't give a damn (though, of course, I do care). This is a kind of objective corollary.

Scratch A-side

As a result, I believe in recycling ideas to no obvious, immediate end; read old books and review them as though they were just out (click on, "Tatty Old Reads" above). To compose long narrative verses in outdated forms that hip Poetry Magz will but rarely accept. The act of doing is all that counts. So, let's hear it for CND!

Press the Button!

Wacko!

by Philip Lee

news is history

photo from Rattle, credit sought

Never Fade!

8½ broken sonnets

© Philip Lee, 2015

$ock Puppet's On-Line Art Auction

Soft Fabric Puppet with Wooden Gavel

Old Packaging #1: Spray Paint on Boxwood

Bruegelesque #1: Soap Powder in Sea Water

Old Packaging #2:
Ink & Blood on Brown Paper

Bruegelesque #2:
Great Hoover in Sky with Angels 

Old Packaging #3: Holes in Wooden Barrel

Bruegelesque #3: Tatty Old Mag

Bruegelesque #4: Progressive Video Concept

Old Packaging #4:
Holes in Brass Plate

Bruegelesque #5: Stereotypes On & Off Stage

Sold Out!

pull the other/any unsightly noise

pull the other

surely it's not news that democracy

is alive & kicking in modern Greece

or that the UK PM's phone was hacked

by a posh coke fiend on a butt of sack

not that a brat of the Bollinger pack

would call for a rag when his nose was blocked

or that Greeks would vote for early release

from a long bygone public spending spree

that German bankers still want their own back

though the roads to their summer homes aren't cracked

nor that Tories have been taking the wee

ever since they re-took the right to fleece

this just in guess what if the same old crock

of dealers ain't pulled again it's smile please

Chair Fart?

Available at all no-good chemists

Elis, the younger of our boys, asked if I had included chair-fart in any of these blogs. Chair-farts, or indeed, their overgrown cousin the ignominious table fart, I replied, being odorless, colourless and tasteless, are neither here nor there. But if he insisted, I should take a stab at writing one or two of them up.

To the average sock puppet, then, the exigencies of metamorphosing anima have deep significance. Just as a smell of feet – whether good or bad – permeates the interview room and lends it a special authenticity; so the creaking chair or table fart that punctuates any kitchen convo between husband, wife or lover speaks of taste in furniture, choice of habitat or quality of floor polish that has sauced or soured their relationship. Though sonic booms, for the present, are a thing of past concords and echoes from the future, something will have to be done about them if they are to have any prospects at all. Therefore, ignore chair fart at your peril!

Now I'm not one to snigger mischievously above six or seventeen times a day, so for me to snort into scorn the common-or-garden fart of kitchen chair leg on parquet flooring is not an artifice devoid of meaning. However my fellow men, women & children do agree, I tend to laugh rather often when nothing appears to be funny, and to employ underlined verbs precisely.

A fart, any given fart, is in any case a form of malapropism. Rather like the infamous actor dismissed from his repertory company for uncontrolled bouts of sneezing during performances – though he and his outbursts were beloved of audiences - the bogus (ie the raspberry tainted) fart which accompanies an academic dispute over the ending of Mozart's Requiem or a knife fight breaking out during the vivisection of genetically engineered mice is both impertinent and ridiculous. But people tend to turn dumb, deaf & blind; and though their noses may twitch, there is often a perfectly innocent excuse for opening a window or turning on the Xpelair.

In certain parts of suburbia, we have noted, a subconscious reaching for the floral spray can follows the merest hint of under-the-table indiscretion. Fart cushions aside, what was the last purchase you made in your local joke shop, Mrs Bucket?

Never Apologise!