The Uranium Tipped Pen

A Penny For Their Thoughts

‘Tis a heavy burden,
A working human brain,
For when the world’s an idiot,
The clever man’s insane,

It weighs in at three pounds,
If you have the full amount,
Though it seems most folks I know,
Got theirs at a discount,

If you dare to stand aloft,
And say the ship is sinking,
They will throw you overboard,
For the crime of of thinking,

The world it is an idiot,
Its thoughts come off the shelf,
And Wise Man is a lunatic,
For talking to himself

For your amusement and pleasure…

Some verse I scribbled to amuse the good folks at StagePlays.com forum.

——

There are two types of folk
Out here in the world

And thus we must admit

That while half sit and write this crap
the others sit and read it

Whilst some bloggers have been claiming the demise of Albert Hofmann, discoverer of LSD.

We know much better.

In fact, the real Albert Hofmann, is 36 feet tall, and invulnerable to all forms of weapon and illness.

He still patrols the oceans, protecting the seas from Dolphin Unfriendly tuna trawlers.

The claims of his death are doubtlessly a Discordian ruse, implemented by the insidious Cain and his followers

After my usual weekly swim through the London Underground, I surfaced for air in Sloan Square, as I am wont to do.

My neurosis about being on time ensuring that I was a fair 20 minutes early for the Young Writer’s Program as usual.

So I decided to indulge in a hobby I have developed since enrolling at the Royal Court, namely walking up the street and trying to find a single shop that doesn’t sell expensive labelled clothing.

One day I walked for 40 minutes in a straight line without finding anything. They even have a designer underwear shop for men. Wonders never cease.

All of this goes (I think) a long way towards explaining Shaun. 

Shaun is the homeless guy on Sloan Square, homeless and starving I suspect, not out of choice, but because there is nothing but clothing shops in all directions. Sloan Square is a desert of clothing shops. Look closer, and you’ll see that all of the inhabitants have a starved look in their eyes, like they haven’t seen civilisation, food or water, for months.

I think perhaps Shaun is like me, he just started walking one day, only he wandered too far and now he can’t get back. He is forced to crawl through the barren and inhospitable wasteland, sometimes running, gibbering towards what looks like a cafe, only to realise that it is a cruel mirage, created by the sun burning on the nylon of CK boxer shorts.

I like Shaun, because like me, he cuts an odd figure out here in the fashionable Chelsea district. And like me he receives the same frosty glares from well-dressed passer-bys. The one which says: “You don’t belong here”.

It all goes to reinforce my theory that Londoners actually have more in common with camels, than human beings.

They stock up on normal human contact, compassion, quirkiness, probably in some hidden Oasis, and then out they go into the Sloan Desert, storing it all away in a hidden hump somewhere while they trudge the faceless crowds.

But I digress,

It turns out that Shaun is not starving, in fact his situation is quite the opposite. Shaun cannot possibly eat another sandwich.

He explains that it has become the “in-thing” amoung a certain kind of people, to give homeless folk sandwiches instead of money, the theory being that you can’t easily exchange a cheese ploughmans for class A illicit substances.

Of course, as he explains, there are only so many sandwiches you can actually eat in a day. But this doesn’t stop people, so determined are they to give him sarnies, that one bunch of Christians refused to leave till he had eaten one, causing him to later be sick.

He was literally sandwich-raped.

He didn’t specify what the filling was

He had asked me to stop and talk so that he could present his case, and so that I could confirm to him, that he was neither insane nor ungrateful.

So for the sake of Shaun, I have written this post.

Asking you to please not feed the homeless in Sloan Square, just give them some frigging change.

Yes, they might spend it badly, it might not help them become pope or Prime Minister, or whatever career it was you had in mind for them.

But that isn’t the point. Everyone makes bad choices, I don’t actively try to improve the way you make yours, by refusing to lend you a bus fare, because you won’t spend it “going anywhere useful”.

That’s not what compassion or empathy are. It’s about human-contact, about acknowledging another human, their plight, alongside yours. Not stumbling blindly through the dust bowl of empty labels and shiny accessories.

You can’t fix these people, or anyone else. So instead, just shrug, drop some change, and share a moment with them.

Or don’t.

But for Christ’s sake. No more sandwiches.

They say the pen is mightier than the sword… but is the pen mightier than the atomic bomb?

It has to be said that even the most stalwart intellectual would probably balk at the concept of going up against a five-hundred megaton radioactive incendiary device.

Of course, in times gone past this same question was asked of pens and guns, and the literary establishment responded by inventing the paintball gun, the ultimate combination of gas-propelled projectiles and writing implements. Which begs the question: is it time to start creating more powerful, mightier perhaps even, dare I say it, atomic writing implements? Capable of delivering a single paragraph over a two hundred kilometer radius; A pen that would write words that could not be washed off a surface for the next fifty years, and would cause children conceived in the target area to be born with those words already tatood on their foreheads?

In an age where government power over the populace grows ever mightier, this writer thinks that yes, that time has come. But what form will this writing implement take? Sadly, I have been prohibited from irradiating biros so I have chosen another, more devious method of spreading letters over huge geographic areas…

The blog.

Yes… it’s back. And now it is even MORE hairy.