VANITY

Being at sea aboard huge luxury vessels is very glamorous. As a skipper-come-captain, it is easy to be wined and dined each evening by billionaires with the finest foods and drinks. The only drawback is that you steadily become an old soak. I worked alongside many captains who became just that. Thinking back to a collision at night with JJ, the skipper, and a refugee boat – he had gotten drunk with a stewardess and gone to bed, leaving the vessel on autopilot. The similarities to the Titanic are on a much smaller scale but just as deadly. Doing double dog watch shifts doesn't help. Instead of 4 hours, you do 8, covering for someone or even the milk shift when you start at midnight and sometimes finish six hours later. Dozing off is so easy if the autopilot's on. Many of our crew used to come on the milk shift smelling of booze – sea watches disorientate you. I've seen quite a few old sailors having a beer for breakfast as they come off the first watch at 4 am.

A living monument of mystery Robin Hoods oak is by far the most famous tree in all of ancient history , a thousand years of silent still sophistry , with all its empty holes and hollow the winter winds howl through her creating a mournful sound of sadness and sorrow.

Is vanity a sin or just the selfish substance we need in order to win ?.

A short poem about how AI artificial intelligence is now learning from other Ai algorithms using the deep learning techniques then competing against each other in the AGi' tournament what with all the different i's ranging from sci-fi ,WiFi ,hi-fi , to the secret service abbreviations of SI FBI CIA MI5 MI6 let's hope the deep learning machines know the difference between so many different i's an don't the biblical vindictive lexicon of taking "An eye for an (i) The poem is written in' haiku 5 7 5 syllable continuous which is probably more to an Ai's algorithmic programmed personality.

A preacher man told me that all of us come pre-packaged with the seven shades of sin, which are basically our primitive seven instincts of survival that we needed while hunter-gathering on the savage African Savannah. Through evolution and ecclesiastical endeavors, we have been trying to adapt our mammalian species to a more sacred, sentient state of being ever since.

A musing for a wonderful women we called Ann Summers due to her working there, she asked for a birthday poem and caused me a writer's block which when I tried to explain she cursed me a look of pure disdain so I wrote it as if she was serving me at the Ann summers shop.

The sloth is portrayed as the epitome of laziness but this little arboreal adaption turns out to be a perfect green dream a hairy little leaf eating machine that has a zero carbon footprint and could save the world all on its own we would do well to put a little of the sinful slow sloth back in our own fast food life styles in order to try and save our poor planet .

The third slave uprising in Rome was brutally crushed; a hundred thousand men lay dead on the battlefield, and another six thousand were crucified along the Appian Way, left to rot as carrion crow fodder, serving as a lesson for anyone else inclined to rebel against the might of Rome.

We lived our lives like nocturnal belfry bats fuelled by drink our cranial crashes and darkness of depression were common place the only way to fight against them was with serotonin smarties and a daily dose of humour .

A short minute musing about infecting your friends computer's with a virus and how they treat it as though you've infected them with a sexually transmitted STD .