Lost in Plain Sight
All culture at the touch of a button;
All the world available;
Every idea accessible;
Swamped with trivia,
Hidden within the mundane
Disguised with untruths –
Lost in plain sight.
Opher – 7.12.2021
In this age of the internet we are swamped with knowledge. Every dream, thought and idea is available. The accumulated wisdom of humanity is there for us all.
Every culture, every book, every great life.
Yet it seems that all people need are cute kittens and porn.
It’s what I do
I reach down inside
To find what I believe
To put into the words
My lungs can breathe.
When I get it right
The emotions well inside
Give it everything
With nothing denied.
I don’t care if you get it
It’s not about you.
It’s about what I think
About what I do.
It might be pointless,
Useless, completely askew
As long as it’s me
It’s absolutely true.
Opher 3.12.2012
I was merely musing about the futility of writing poetry.
Toxic Times
By
Opher Goodwin
Foreword
It is March 2022 and I’m sitting in my study writing this. We are two years into the Covid Pandemic, over two years into Brexit and a couple of weeks into Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. We have a useless self-serving clown in charge of a crime syndicate that is presently running the country.
It appears that the Russians have orchestrated the Brexit referendum vote as well as the election of Trump and Johnson. They are financing the Tory Party.
Incompetence, corruption and sleaze are the hallmarks of this greedy bunch of nationalist extremists who masquerade as Tories but are nothing more that self-serving populists.
Brexit is an utter mess. (Just as predicted and labelled ‘Project Fear’) it is fuelling the break-up of the UK and costing us around £32 billion a year. Pretty catastrophic. Worse than that it has replaced cooperation with competition, replaced freedom with red-tape and removed a raft of rights and freedoms.
Wresting back control has put power in the hands of a bunch of arrogant Eton schoolboys! They are giving billions away to their chums while slashing public services and hammering the poor. They call it levelling up. The up refers to the direction the cash is flowing.
The inept way this bunch of idiots has handled covid is responsible for tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths coupled with a massive hit to the economy. Their friends have made billions out of this catastrophe.
On top of that we have double jobs, double standards, law-breaking, illegal lobbying, lies and cynical control of the media. The level of sleaze and corruption has reached unprecedented levels.
The BBC is under threat, the NHS privatised by stealth, all public services cut to the bone, the police and military run into the ground, education made into an exam factory and the public duped and lied to.
Opposition to this bunch of profiteers will soon be illegal.
Leadership is invisible. When not hiding in fridges it is dressing up in some silly cos-drama coupled with selected soundbites, or rare readings from autocues. All scrutiny is removed. All accountability avoided.
Everything is brushed under the carpet.
We have silly lying platitudes handed out – ‘Got Brexit done!’ and ‘Got Covid done!’ as if these were triumphs instead of disasters. It’s all very Orwellian – yet a segment of the population are gullible enough to fall for these lies.
Then we have the war!! NATO is threatening to move to the borders of Russia and Putin wants to rebuild the USSR. The horrendous invasion of Ukraine is a diabolical work of madness.
We are threatened with war throughout Europe. The spectre of nuclear holocaust is waved before our eyes. The Ukraine is to be sacrificed as the sacrificial lamb but weapons are being poured in to fuel a proxy war that will deplete the Russian economy and morale.
This cold war is heading for a culmination.
Hundreds of billions of pounds is wasted blowing cities into rubble and killing helpless citizens. New generations are traumatised as minds and bodies are blown apart.
Will Putin survive? Will Russia survive?
The world changed.
Global warming is causing floods, droughts, extreme weather and environmental disaster. It threatens mass migration, starvation and huge global changes – an existential threat that is beyond anything we have yet envisaged.
Then we have the fascism of Trump, conspiracy and QAnon, ignorance, populism, stupidity, threat of civil war, hatred, fear and political extremes.
Welcome to the 21st Century. This is the backdrop to this collection of ‘Poems’.
I hope you ‘enjoy’ them.
Opher – 5.3.2022
The Sun Don’t Mind
There’s a war in Ukraine
But the sun don’t mind.
Though millions starve
It will continue to shine.
One day I’ll die
But eternity won’t care.
My mind will cease,
My atoms everywhere.
While we’re fed conspiracy
The universe expands
Unaware of devastation
Oblivious to our plans.
Fleas on an elephant,
A tear in the ocean.
Voyagers on a rock
Living without a notion.
So big in our heads
So tiny in reality.
An invisible flash
In the uterus of infinity.
Opher – 25.6.2022
So important to bring things into perspective.
We take ourselves too seriously.
Yet our lives are important.
The wonder of life is quite unique.
We take so much for granted.
We are busy trashing paradise for a pocket full of baubles.
How can we give this life purpose?
Life Goes By
Life goes by
With us
Or without us
Despite us
All around us
But for how long?
Just once
On a bombarded rock
Dancing in the rain
Wearing just one sock
A profound dunce capered.
Opher – 25.6.2022
It always seems amazing to me that on this tiny barren rock, in the middle of a vast ocean of stars, life began.
So much we don’t understand.
So much awe and wonder.
So many coincidences.
Instead of appreciating the stupendous circumstances that surround us we have to make up rigid fables and tie ourselves down.
Instead of respecting the wonders we are surrounded with we have to carelessly ignore them, destroy them and try to rule over them.
I can’t help thinking that we’re destined for a big fall.
Nuclear
There’s a nuclear reaction
In the sky
That gives life to us all.
For all eternity
We’ve wondered why.
Now we teach it in school.
It’s either a scientific product
Of gravity
Or it’s a god.
Producing endless
Depravity
From scientific and religious odd-bods.
Opher – 26.6.2022
How our gods change through time. Once it was universally accepted that the sun was a god. It was appeased through prayer, ritual and worship. Now it is a scientific phenomenon whose secrets have provided us with colossal weapons.
The sun – life-giver.
The sun – the cause of much death and misery.
Human beings have a way of taking something good and twisting it into something evil.
Give It all You’ve Got.
All the laughs,
All the love,
The agony
And loss.
Will be forgotten,
Count for nothing,
With nobody
Counting the cost.
In the darkness of forever
It won’t matter
That we went for it
Hell for leather.
All we have is
A brief moment in time
In which
We love and shine.
Though it won’t matter a jot.
We’ll still give it all we’ve got!
Opher – 25.6.2022
I often feel that life is a gesture, nothing more.
It is testimony to man’s essential nature that, despite knowing that it is all meaningless and destined to end, we still strive to create.
Pointlessness does not matter.
In the moment we attempt to understand, to express and to raise our puny flags as if staking out eternity.
In this moment there is no death, no aging; no such thing as futility. In this moment all things are possible.
In this moment we can experience everything, fill ourselves with bliss, understanding and love; we can live. Only in this moment.
That is what makes life worthwhile.
Out of One Comes Many
Starting with one
Giving rise to many.
Coming from a place
Where there wasn’t any.
Impossible to understand
How it came to be.
Everything about it
An impossibility.
From the inanimate
To consciousness.
To see, hear and touch
The more with less.
We’ve created religions
To try to understand.
Now science steps in
To lend a hand.
But to understand
Is beyond humanity.
No phony explanations.
Appreciate the majesty!
Opher – 11.4.2021
We live in an amazing infinite universe.
We do not know how it came into being.
We have consciousness. We see, hear, think, touch, smell and taste.
We do not know how.
We live and we die.
We find death frightening so we invented an afterlife.
We found the mysteries of the beginning of the universe, life and consciousness too bewildering. So we invented gods, heavens and paradise.
For some of us these inventions explain everything.
They explain nothing.
They are inventions.
We live in an amazing infinite universe.
We have consciousness.
It is a wonder.
That is enough.
Landscape in my Head
There’s a landscape in my head
It comes from the national zeitgeist.
The combined will of everyone
How every last sentiment is priced.
I’d like it to be compassionate,
Outward looking, caring and true.
But Brexit unleashed the nastiness
The racism just grew and grew.
Now we’re isolated on our own
With the ‘Little Englander’ mentality.
Blaming all the foreigners
For the blunder that is our reality.
It empowered all the nationalists
Who crawled out from every crevice.
Snarling their xenophobic slogans
Like bulldogs full of menace.
It’s not just the wealth we’ve squandered,
Greedily snatched by profiteers;
It’s the friendships that we’ve shat on
Built up through many years.
The landscape that I now live in
Is made by ugly bullying pigs.
Created by arrogant Brexiteers
And a bunch of Tory prigs.
The England that I crave
Is tolerant, outward and true.
The one that welcomed the Huguenots,
And stood up for the Jew.
An England worth fighting for
Not narrow-minded arrogance.
I’ll strive for a better vision
Worthy of taking a stance!
Opher – 11.4.2021
For me it isn’t just the money that’s been wasted or the nasty little profiteers who saw an opportunity to make millions. It’s not even the monetary costs that will throw millions into poverty and cause decades of austerity. It’s not the loss of jobs or the firms going bust or fleeing into Europe. It’s not the masses of red tape and the curtailing of my liberties.
No.
For me it is the emotional impact – the change from an outward looking country full of tolerance, cooperation and friendship to an isolated nation viewing the ‘foreigner’ as the enemy. The rise of xenophobia and racism is just the expression of this unpleasant nationalistic fervour. It’s empowered the fascists, racists and scum.
I’m not suggesting that all Brexiteers are racist fascists. But by voting for such a damaging outcome they have unleashed and empowered the worst slimy breed.
It’s going to take decades to undo the harm.
England is so much the less.
