Getting ready flash mob rallying the flash mob

Flash Mob

On 1^st December Mitchell Jack Love Morton and Harriet from UAEM Imperial organised a flash mob for World AIDS day at Trafalgar Square. They wanted to raise awareness regarding the unnecessary deaths of so many thousands of people in developing countries because of the astronomical price of the drugs they need. They want to put pressure on universities and pharmaceutical companies involved in the development and production of these drugs to allow developing countries to produce generic drugs at much lower price.

It was a freezing cold day. It took a huge amount of will-power to make the trek to Trafalgar Square. The original plan was that after Mitch delivered a speech outlining the problems and their suggestions to combat them, everyone would take off their outer garments , revealing bright red clothes underneath and then jump in the fountain (symbolising patents jumping into a patent pool where they belong.)

Very quickly the police and the Trafalgar Square security men dissuaded the students from jumping in the pool. Instead, holding their bright red banners, they formed the shape of the red symbolic ribbon at the top of the steps in front of the National Gallery (having been assured that the rest was private property and that they would all be “nicked”.)

Mitch gave a rousing, genuine, fact-filled speech and we were all moved by the sight of these young science students making such an effort (not for any self-seeking motive whatsoever but because they wanted to help people who were powerless to help themselves.)

As a message of hope for the future, it was very encouraging to see all these young people braving the extreme cold in order to make a stand ‘not for profit but for people’.

Joselyn Morton

Poetry

Truth

Truth is a long-armed spear

Missing, reaching,

piercing, probing

disappearing into the ether

reappearing years later

Joselyn Duffy Morton ©

Before

Before I loved

spiky thin stilettos

to dance the night away

now I couldn’t live without my

thick leather gloves

to pull the tree stumps out.

Before I wore

starched sticky-out petticoats

to puff my fifties skirts out.

now I adore a chain hoist

and a husband hot and moist

with sweat as he winches

the stubborn stumps out.

His grandfather did the same

on his Southland farm

as he and his horse yanked at the manuka roots

then he would have planted crops

or grazed his sheep

in snow and sleet.

We wrap the rope round the parent tree

so we can pull the self-sown offspring out.

Our method seems biblical, even barbaric.

Revenge and bad-taste retribution

but not ill-deserved.

I plan to plant flowers and sit and admire them

for hours and hours.

Joselyn Duffy Morton ©

Plum trees

Digging out plum tree roots,

what a shitty job

I must have been very wicked in a past life for

my karma to have come to this

A CIA operative in Chile in the 50s perhaps,

a prominent Catholic who let confession lapse.

Whatever.

Right now I wish I was an Irishman

(not just a quarter)

with a bag of dynamite and I’d blow these bastards out.

It’s taken me days to get the ivy and the brambles off.

Now there’s 26 stumps eyeballing me, glowering,

threatening to grow

into another frigging tree.

Joselyn Duffy Morton©