29/05/2010

POEMS

Why Shouldn’t Your Every Waking Moment Be Filled With Entertainment?
--

Cometh the hour, cometh the pad
Six hundred quid, they must be mad
but queues of geeks snake down the street to buy their slice of techno chic.
They take their VISAs to the limit
to fill the unforgiving minute.
A brave new world imagined there:
you take your telly everywhere.

-----------------------------


The Perils of Obedience
--

In 1961 a man
called Stanley Milgram hatched a plan
to show the world what he surmised
the average chap had locked inside.
He wagered our ability
to fight for what we felt to be
the proper, better decent thing
fell victim to our master’s whims.

He got a range of average males
to come and take the test at Yale.
But Milgram’s set-up was a rouse
each chap was paired up with a stooge
(an actor on a little earner)
who always took the role of “leaner”
while particpants were cajoled
in taking on the teacher’s role.

In short the teacher had to shock
the learner every time he got
the answer to a question wrong.
You’d think that it would not take long
for teachers dolling out the volts
to call the process to a halt
to say the whole damn thing was bent
to pull out of the experiment.

But though the teachers weren’t aware
the volts were faked they were prepared
to carry on and in the end
near Sixty-five percent of them
gave out the biggest shock they could
which sadly proved Stan’s theory good
that human backsides like the fence
the perils of obedience.

And now we have a theory to
explain the awful things we do -
the memory of Stanley’s volts
remind us how we pass the fault.