you see,
that’s the problem
with being the strong one
who always offers others
a hand
everyone thinks that you
don’t need a hand and
they think you have lots
of surplus energy and no
worries

*(s.m)

Disappearing from the garden
Unheard amongst the trees
Humble bees are vanishing
Their sound is now declining
Patterns are slowly fading
A very serious diminishing
Is going completely unnoticed
With consequential devastation
For the well-being of the planet

The creature doesn't feature
On the Richter scale of cuteness
So humble in its appearance
Its existence taken for granted
Not majestic like the whale
Or clever like a leaping dolphin
Nor angry like the wrathful tiger
But its survival is threatened
A species on the edge of extinction

Tread softly on the ground
Walk gently amidst the flowers
Listen carefully for the sound
Our humble friend is not around
That tailored coat is missing
From the symphony of existence
We are all left naked by silence
And the business of buzzing
Can no longer be taken for granted

That taste sweeter than wine
Is now in serious decline
Sight sound and taste is vanishing
Without a serious murmur
From the industry of conservation
Or the planet savers of the nation
Amidst the ecological devastation
Small creatures give us comfort
While big issues merely threaten.

The golden rule never gives change.
And gamblers only drink champagne
Losers can’t afford it
Don’t play poker with medicine men
Doc Holliday's a sore loser
It goes with his obsession
He's a dentist by learning
A gambler by profession
An' a renaissance assassin
A Medici Faustian bargain
Playing the green baize table
Where ten’s the changing sign
The alchemist’s calling card
The card of transformation
A card of changing of beds
And a change of friends
They could even be enemies
Fortune changes for the worse
An’ losing is a winning gamble
When hands like feet change direction
Losing yourself is the smart play
Sooner’s so much better than later
In time the world loves a loser
But gamblers hate a debtor
I.O U’s don’t spell for less than A an’ E
They’re just vowels without provenance
Gambling cashes in on culture
Money is the 'lingua franca'
Of a very deadly silent economy
No really one talks about it
An’ you can’t keep your eyes off it
But sure as hell everyone
Listens to the silence
Ten’s the calling card of consequence
A very suitable number
In Fire Earth Air and Water
They can be quite soulfully pedestrian
You never know what’s in the elements
A good card to keep up your sleeve
But lose your shirt you lose everything
An’ it goes without saying a lot
Not a good card to be found naked with
Be careful with a nine in any colour
It’s the most deserving in the highest
Nines, sleeves and gambling
Are a triple tray of troubles
Heads have been known to be served
On a tray of trays
Nines can be very Trinitarian
And quite John the Baptist
A good card to lose in haste
But eternal if a friend,
There’s none better
Eights go on forever
The Via Dolorosa of numbers
They are a sacred journey
Only the compassionately beautiful
Gamble with an eight in their hands
Eight is a sacred mystery
In any suit it is never cut
And always woven
From a seamless gambled-for cloth
Eight never gambles in suits
Only in garments
Never gamble with an eight
Unless you’re gambling with redemption
Hand life and soul have been
Eternally lost or found on an eight
Truly a gamblers card
And sometimes a calling card
As every gambler knows
A card of consequence and karma
When it calls keep your eyes on the dealer
Sure as hell a deal's been done
An’ all the blue eyes are on you
Sevens like fives are a journey
Good cards for travellers
Wanderers and shape shifters
Seven seas and five continents
Suits those wandering souls among us
Two solitary prime numbers
Indivisible onto themselves
They can be quite pedestrian
Fives can be over confident over land
But they shouldn't try to be seven
Walking on water's a mistake
Unless you’re an avatar
Treading wine is better and safer
Fives and sevens are a journey
Good cards to keep in your shoes
Sixes are sixes by themselves
An’ they don’t go with sevens
They're the card of reflection
A scriptural card if ever there was one
A card dressed in a triple mirror
Vanity and vexation in the curves
A card to turn and turn
And turn your eyes again
The number of this card
Another Trinitarian consequence
Is reflected in the mirror
An image of ourselves
The card has an identity problem
Don’t knock it, you might need it
It’s your friend in need of friend
An’ with friends like that
It's just as well that any three
From any four sixes
Is the sign of a winning hand
In a loser’s smile
And the best part of a full house
A card of Jezebels, angels
And mirrors, on reflection
Don’t you just love sixes
Five is five and let’s not talk about it
It’s an assassin’s calling card
It goes with its own territory
A card that doesn’t take prisoners
Fours are strangers at the door
Every one with a Matthew birth mark
In the image of John
Like four seasons they arrive
Like pilgrims then are gone
To change themselves to be
The same again, another season
Another fall of leaving calls
A card for all weathers
And shelter in a storm
You are kind of pleased to see it
But you don’t know why
Also cards of mystery and obviousness
And only fools an’ fours
Can tell the difference
It’s the ‘maybe’ card
You never really know with fours
The proverbial knocking at your doors
But sure as hell
They’ll never ring a bell
A tidy card to send to acrobats
And other kinds of well-balanced people
That’s what fours are for
Commitments tailored to your needs
And the occasional highly wired friend
Don’t go out without them
You never know if you might need them
Threes are trinities and divinities
Fathers Sons an’ Holy Ghosts
And more usually the cause
Of a quick divorce
The world moves in threes
Sattwas Rajas and Tamas
The triune dance of the universe
Light, Action and Inertia
It even grows on trees
Every one’s a traveller
Some are even gypsies
A good card to keep in your shoes
They can be an invitation
Or a visitor from a distant place
They're the taxi cards of the pack
Call them when you wanna go
Somewhere, they'll arrive
They're the calling cards of falling friends
You'll never be lonely on journey
Of five and sevens with a three
They’re the crucifixion card
Unless it suits you otherwise
To be so amused
Deuces are twos, the mirror card
Duality’s their basic business
They really are a wolf card
Always travelling in packs
Not sufficient to be dangerous
An’ just enough to not be lonely
They really appreciate your company
It suits their reflective existence
To travel in togetherness
The faces are places searching for aces
Jacks in a pack never look back
If they can possibly look sideways
Concealing their knavish tendencies
They’re quite the well-tailored card
Fine raiment maketh a fool attractive
In very unfashionable circumstances
Treachery an’ deceit on each turning face
Sure as Clementine’s your long lost darling
An Ophelia never got her hand in time
A gambling Hamlet is a sight to see
Jealousy rage and a ferocious anger
Writ upon a countenance looking back
Beyond the cardboard eyes of the beholder
Dumb broads are never dumb
And seldom abroad
Sometimes they can be
A very home loving card
Two jokers live in every pack
One out front the other looks back
They’re the magpies in the deck
Less in sorrow than in joy
They cover every missing face
The hooded birds deserve their place
Their reputation precedes them
In black and white they are the night
In colours they’re magnificent sevens
And they’ve really got your number
In spades it suits their harlequin fashion
To be a veritable grave digging charmer
In jewels they ***** the precious deck
Two diamonds and they’re everybody’s
The vagrant royalty rules the roaming pack
Their world is another creature’s finery
Gamblers are such snazzy jazzy dressers
If you have to lose a shirt do it in style
Second hand clothes and second hand hands
Aren’t so much a misfortune more an affliction
Desperately seeking a lost occasion
Well-heeled fools engrave it on their heart
Better be dead in your gracious threads
Than kicking in rags of common comfort  
They’re the card that always looks back
The face in every hand smiling at you
Looking at them with cardboard eyes
Then there’s the precisely tailored box
The transient funeral parlour
In a good-looking box like that
You can die an’ dine anywhere
In reasonable style
If you’re tailed a toss head first
Into a losing situation
Cards never call they beckon
And if they speak it’s a good idea to listen.

In the times before the current ontology being right was easy; a gift from a dextrous God. On the other hand, the world was beautifully sinister. The ‘metaphysics of the sinister condition’ propelled Immanuel Kant to conclude, that: ‘Looking at your right hand in the mirror you see a left hand, identical to right, but unable to replace the other, which, like God is right.’ Wittgenstein, a patient soul, was rightly amused and replied 200 years later, (that’s the kind of guy he was: prepared to wait a couple of centuries in order to deliver a dexterously sinister reply), ‘A right hand glove could be put on the left hand if it could be turned around in four dimensional space’. (Neil Armstrong, Captain Kirk and Doctor Who have ordered two paisley patterned pairs each).            
Machiavelli absconded from this digital count, citing an ‘a priori’ engagement with the Inquisition as a not unreasonable excuse for his point of departure. Aristotle replied: ‘Might is Right’ was true Philosophy
and fitted the world like an un-left handed glove, but he didn’t want to hang around to debate it, because his brilliantly sinister protégé, Alexander, played a very destructive ragtime with his band and was quite decidedly a great southpaw, who got dextrously cross being labelled ‘sinister’ and imagined himself to be rather charming, in that mirrored image kind of way.

Julius Caesar like Jimi Hendrix before the fall
Playing a right handed empire upside down
Until only decadent ruination was left
Second handed down to instant history
Carved in stone upon an ancient broken glory
The experience never left his soul alone
Unlike it left the beautiful Saint Joan
True righteous in all her blossoming
Left to solitary incineration at the end
Leonardo always painted in the mirror
Reflecting images from right to left
And made the distant appear quite near
A smile gazing in the closer distance
But there’s miles of mystery in the eyes
Everything else is just as he rightly left it
Beautifully left vertical on the right horizontal
Restoring your faith in renaissance artistry
Bounarroti worked the Sistine ceiling
With God outstretched in dextrous touch
Toward Adam’s innocently sinister reach
In that other Eden; Adam was left handed
Not dissimilar to the artist and the vision
Set high above the holy sepulchred floor
With its tabernacle likened door
Left so far and distant down below
The hell of all those dazzling heavens right above
Inspired Napoleon to abandon his rags
For a brightly coloured bespoke coat
And a gorgeously tailored left-ways hat
The woven garb to free a continent
And safeguard the very precious joys
Of Liberté, Justice and Egalité
The food, wine and song of democracy
In a very left handed kind of way
That was so right-on you loved him for it forever
And Moscow never looked the same without him
It’s much more Left Bank now in its Russian ways
Catherine thinks it’s Great, and in that style she left it
Then left was right an’ wrongs were righted leftly
Until everything left was rightly wronged in cruelty
And left a scar that rightly shamed a century
Nothing lasts as all things pass to dust and history
Yet the phoenix flies in the face of burning misery
While the ever salient Homer left us his republic
And his equally luminous sinister revelation
That Jack the Ripper and the Boston Strangler
But worst of all, Ned Flanders were all lefties
As it is in the end, so it was in the beginning
The ever brilliant Elvis has left the building

The gravity of angels doth presage a fall
Dissent is the ascendant written on the scrawl
Scripture's now grafitti's permanent fixture
Anyone care for a psalm missile or two
God has a couple, his friends have got a few
Nothings old every things really quite new
Every bargain's even got a testament or two
Destructions guaranteed, creation's over rated
Another Eden's a blue print for a parking lot
Rise and fall's kids’ stuff, god does them all
Damnation just that button on a play station
Satnav's got two, that's one for each direction
Heaven's great ' but hell can be a serious option
It really is an avenue, you gotta keep it open
When faith abandons you, the other joints reliable
In the meantime just enjoy the uncertain chaos
Sin must have some virtue, there's enough about
Even the clergy occasionally let it all hang out
If its good enough for frock coats, who knows
It might be better for all of us dressed as we are
Ready for anything that sin can throw at us
And everything we can toss back in a glass
Darkly with the shades on in a cheap hotel
We might as well if heaven's hell on earth
And the wagers of each sin is just a gamble
With eternity dead heading with our salvation
It could take a while before the result comes in.

A scarecrow dwells on the horizon
Such a lonely image of crucifixion
No ragged thieves surrounding
Sublimely frightening and beautiful
Observing this world’s unfolding
From the inside solitude of loneliness
Externally gazing at the moving distance
Tethered and shackled to lifelessness
Exposed to nature’s scorning passage
A victim of insignificant circumstance
This symbol of something miraculous
Sowing each souls fertile imagination
Harvesting it in the rags of the future
Fixed and pinioned to the present
The lonely ballerina on the landscape
Unmoved the world moves around it
Like a dancing figure on a music box.