The Grog, Part 2

                    Why I Drink Red Wine

I have several possible roads to oblivion

available to me at the end of each workday –

or day of sitting around waiting for work,

composing bagatelles such as this one,

reading mysteries, and playing computer solitaire.

I have no access to sufficiently potent opium derivatives

to achieve the objective,

and I doubt if I could afford them if I did.

Sometimes I buy whisky, but relying on it

to achieve the objective

tends to produce annoying side-effects

the next day.

I often have beer in the fridge,

but just to go with certain kinds of food –

drinking more than two or three beers makes me feel bloated,

and the kinds of beer that I like cost too much.

Anyway, as one of the most accomplished drinkers

who ever wrote brilliantly

once told me, wine provides the most bang for the buck.

Since I occupy the price-sensitive segment of the market,

I buy whatever varietal is cheapest that week at the Pak’n Save,

and I discovered long ago that cheap red wine

tends to be more drinkable, to my taste, than cheap white.

                       My Churchkey

I’ve had it since I was in high school,

a plain steel can-and-bottle-opener of the old type:

one end angled down and sharply pointed

to open the archaic steel pre-pop-top beer cans

that were all we had back then,

and at the other end a flat hook

ideal for opening beer bottles.

The logos of some long-ago beer brands

decorate the 7-cm handle between these functional ends.

Beer occupied a large part of my consciousness

when I was in high school.

We called these things ‘churchkeys’

and I call my treasured relic the same.

Kiwis, of course, prefer to open beer bottles,

the ones without twist-off caps,

using a Bic lighter

or something similar.

My friend always declines my offer

of the use of my sacred churchkey,

because he likes his Bic lighter more.

I try not to let this hurt my feelings.

      Oh, Cheap Wine

Oh, cheap wine, caress me!

No one else wants to.

Oh, cheap wine, comfort me

when the waking nightmares

of my minority torture me.

No one else wants to.

Oh, cheap wine, make love to me!

Make my mind and body

relaxed enough for sleep.

No one else wants to.

  Sympathy, Reassurance, and Support

I ain’t too well-wrapped,

that’s no secret,

and sometimes when I encounter

the mental-disorder triggers

that profusely litter both my environment

and the endless crannies of my brain,

my mind careers out of control

taking me to terrifying ports of call

where sniggering tormentors thrash my being

with pain and emptiness and unbearable

self-loathing.

At these times I disgust myself

both for craving and for having no access to

sympathy, reassurance, and support

– comfort is beyond my comprehension –

as I know nobody to whom I could turn

for that sort of stuff.

The last time I tried,

before composing this,

I received in response

a snarling rebuke

and accusations of harassment.

Alcohol helps,

of course,

but it’s been requiring

increasingly large quantities

to take me to the point

at which the agony

relents.

                         Raw Suffering

After having had enough of work,

I’d finished some fusion-cuisine tacos –

using frozen chapattis

instead of those cardboard supermarket tortillas –

and a bottle of cheap plonk,

and taken the fox terrier for a walk using the longer route,

but when we returned it was still ninety minutes before time

to leave home and walk to a performance.

On my standard day it would’ve been time

to tuck into my second bottle of plonk,

pick up my novel du jour,

put the abstract music that I had

in the five-CD server on Shuffle,

and drift off into oblivion,

but no –

I had to be sober enough to perform

in two hours time

and somehow make it through that non-working,

non-preparing-or-eating-food,

non-walking interval

in moderately full possession of my faculties.

I switched on the music,

took a wee slug of the plonk,

and then spent the ninety minutes trying to read

over two mugs of café au lait.

It was ninety minutes of raw suffering.

            Published Guidelines

I have from time to time in my life

– well, more often than not, actually –

consumed far more alcohol

on both a daily and a weekly basis

than published guidelines consider

to be the threshold of safety

and therefore hazardous to my health and well-being.

And yet here I am,

an elderly person well past the retirement age

still drinking too fucking much,

and not dead yet.

      Stupidity When Blotto

I can’t stand the loneliness,

and since I managed

to understand

and acknowledge

the nature of its reality,

and gave up expecting

or, more to the point,

striving for anything else,

I’ve been drinking myself blotto

after work each day

until I can sleep.

One corollary of this

is that almost every evening

I stumble about the house

for I don’t know how long

in a dazed condition

doing things I don’t remember.

No surprise, then,

that I frequently fuck up

and do stupid shit

or clumsy shit

that renders me bemused

when I see its evidence

or consequences

in the morning.

          Vini Collóquiis

out of bed before midnight

unable to sleep –

gone downstairs

when midnight passed

and tucked into

a bottle of cheap merlot.

supporting my head in both hands,

elbows on the table –

my head

my human head

the head of a member of a species

too abominable to contemplate –

a species

so fucked up

that it makes me feel ashamed

to be human –

I’m in hell I’m in hell I’m in hell –

but the music

from my obsolete midi-system

is sublime –

How could our species create this?

    Sustained Effort

Self-destructiveness

is such a waste of my time

if I’m not

gonna stay at it.

I’ll drink to that!

More Love Stuff

        Watcha Got Cookin?

She rode in here on the sloping back

of an immigrant emu

wearing a hijab scarf and a string bikini,

scattering confetti

made from shredded documents

of vital importance

to somebody who didn’t matter.

I could smell her body,

the real aroma and the flowery bath products,

more clearly than my own

despite my determined

consumption of vin ordinaire.

Her purpose was obscure to me –

did she intend to crumble my barriers?

Then why the outlandish transport

and uncoordinated attire?

I put mushrooms in the pan with a hint of garlic

and cooked them down till it was time

to add soy milk and wholemeal flour

and take the pan off the heat

before stirring it all into sauce,

bowtie pasta gurgling on the back burner.

Dapper.

As she stood beside me whilst I did this,

I took the opportunity

to grope her globular ass.

She informed me matter-of-factly

that she’d been waiting all her life

for someone who didn’t put her on a pedestal

and would casually grope her ass

in the kitchen.

          Definitions and Perceptions of Love

The sexist quack

told me that men and women

have different definitions of Love.

‘All of them?’ I thought. ‘All over the world?

‘Billions and billions divided neatly

into A and B by genital conformation?’

But of course I said nothing.

After all, she was behind a desk,

had credentials on the wall behind her,

and was in a position of power

over the well-being of someone I love.

‘Women,’ she went on in a condescendingly pedantic manner,

‘consider love to be an emotion, what a person feels,

regardless of the nature of the interpersonal relationship,

whereas men define love in terms of behaviour, what a person does,

regardless of the emotional factor.’

I thought about mentioning all of the abusive men

who insist that they really loved their wives or partners

despite having bashed or murdered them,

but the quack was behind the desk,

I was in front of it,

the certificates were on the wall behind her,

and my loved one’s well-being

was in her incompetent hands,

with serious negative consequences.

            A Good Snog

I still really enjoy a good snog,

despite being an old-age pensioner

and knowing that it involves

sucking on a nine-metre-long tube

with shit at the other end.

  Wong’s Precise Sexual-Preference Aesthetic

His name was Wong and he came from California.

He had a round, chubby face and a confident smile

that expressed unquestioned self-assurance.

He told us straight off about his sexual preferences,

as if we were all dying of curiosity about them.

He liked skinny boys and fat girls.

“If a girl’s skinny,” he explained, pulling a face,

“I’d rather have a boy, thank you,

but if a boy is fat I’d much prefer a girl.”

I thought at the time that this was cool,

especially since I was far from skinny,

but I wonder now, many decades later,

how well this would sit

with the twenty-first century politics of body image

and objectification.

                  A Snappy Bon Mot

It was at a frat party in the mid-sixties.

I only heard about it from an eye witness

because I didn’t belong to a frat.

Anyway, this drunken dork

whipped out his dork,

plopped it onto a tray of snacks

and offered it to a young woman.

Picking up a cracker with a piece of cheese on it,

she smiled and said,

“Ooooh, that looks just like a penis –

only smaller.”

                His Ex And Her Ex

The very first thing she told her new man,

before anything else,

was that she hated to be controlled or manipulated:

‘Being a part of someone’s plan,’

she insisted, ‘would kill me.

Literally.’

She’d gone on to tell him about her Ex,

and about what a control freak he was,

down to his preferred place for every little item in the house,

and especially in the kitchen,

which he hadn’t let her use,

and how this had driven her to a nervous breakdown,

and how he still controlled the custody-sharing arrangements

for the kids, driving her nuts with powerlessness.

Her new man had told her not to worry,

that due to his own mental problems

he had a deep-seated aversion to exercising control,

whether directly or indirectly,

over anybody about anything,

and that his default setting

was to let people be themselves

and for him to make decisions

for himself and nobody else.

Over the succeeding months he proved to be

accurate in those self-descriptions,

at least in regard to his deference to her,

whilst she rigorously controlled

and subtly manipulated him

before giving him the old heave-ho,

at which time he came to the conclusion

that her Ex had probably been

something like a cross between a prince and a saint.

        My Former Lover

She was apparently eager

to get naked with me,

something I can’t imagine

anybody else would want to do,

and her face as she orgasmed

was about the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,

but I never really knew her

after almost a year,

and from time to time

she cut me off

from any contact

at all

with her or her life

for a few

weeks or months,

so I couldn’t let my myself

let my emotions become involved,

but, abjectly, cravenly,

I enjoyed her mind

and her body

every chance I got

until that became impossible.

She was many different people.

When it was definitively over

I missed some of them bitterly,

and some of them

I was glad to be without.

    Soulful Passion and Mental Health

The number of women

with whom I’ve been involved

over my long and rocky lifetime

is more of a testament

to my inadequacy as a person

than to my sexual attractiveness

or prowess as a lover.

It seems worth noting, however,

that the two who have lodged themselves most firmly

inside my soul,

and who still weigh the most heavily

on my mind

both suffered

from serious mental illnesses

when we were together.

Maybe it just hurts me

that I was inadequate for their needs.

                  Right For The Wrong Reason

I was twenty,

one of the youngest participants

at a writers’ workshop in an off-season ski resort.

She was a few years younger,

a runaway from a relatively nearby mining town.

She picked me up.

We got drunk.

We went to my room.

We climbed into bed.

We started kissing.

I started groping.

She said, ‘Richard, no’ somewhat softly.

Now, I was only twenty

and, although in full possession of all the requisite hormones,

embarrassingly inexperienced.

I’d heard those presenting themselves as worldly wise

expound, knowing smirks of their faces, on the phenomenon

of women saying ‘No’ when they really mean ‘Yes’.

This had always seemed to me to be a really fucked-up game,

devoid of honesty and integrity and truth,

values that even then meant heaps to me.

So, thinking, ‘Okay you phony bitch, if that’s how you want to play it,’

I said, ‘Okay. No it is,’ thinking that I was disappointing her.

I rolled over, and eventually fell asleep

next to that eminently desirable and half-dressed girl.

We slept chastely together,

as she had nowhere else to go that night.

Brotherhood I

Trigger warning: dirty laundry

     A Note To My Sibling

You’ve never conceived of me

on an interactive level

as anything other than

a thing

for you to have a jolly time

tormenting.

It doesn’t matter to me

that you can justify it to yourself

as just brotherly

kidding around,

because it wasn’t.

It doesn’t matter to me

that it’s the result

of conditioning

that you acquired

by following the cues

that our inhuman horror of a mother

gave you as a birthright.

Our radically different upbringings

in the same house mean

that I see the way we were

and are

in a manner

that your self-centred,

malicious mind

can’t imagine.

                      Throwing

As soon as I was big enough,

I guess when I was three,

my mother began to shunt me

outside to the back yard

to play with my brother Paul,

who’s two years older.

Being boys, what she instructed us to play

was ball.

Being little, my coordination

was incompletely developed,

and I threw the ball clumsily

in a shot-put sort of way.

Instead of mentoring me

and teaching me to throw properly,

he immediately started taunting me,

in that sing-song chant cruel children use,

“Riki throws like a girr-ul! Riki throws like a girr-ul!”

He did this every time she forced me to play catch with him,

for years and years and years.

Sometimes he did it in the house

when we weren’t playing ball at all.

I cringed every time, which made him smile.

Even when we became adults

he’d bring it up sometimes,

with a little smirk on his face,

as if it were some reminder of warm fraternal bonding.

Of course, I never did learn to throw properly.

It kept me from being adequate at sports that require it.

Even in my sixties I couldn’t help but feel inhibited

when throwing a tennis ball for my dog,

and preferred the cricket bowling action.

I flung sticks for her sidearm across my body.

Thanks, Paul.

Just one of the thousands of destructive impacts

that you’ve had on my life.

    Cold Water in the Shower

When we were in high school,

from time to time my older sibling

would sneak into the bathroom

when I was taking a shower

and pour a pitcher

of cold water on me

from over the shower curtain,

and then exit giggling.

When I reminded him of it

a half-century later

he seemed to think it was still funny

and told me I was “spewing”

when I called that response

sick and evil.

He then claimed that he wanted

reconciliation.

                          Shvoogies?

When I tried to explain to my sibling Paul

about my activities as a basketball coach,

He dismissed the sport of basketball as,

and I quote,

“a bunch of Shvoogies running around in their underwear.”

I supposed that by ‘Shvoogies’ he was referring to human beings

with ancestors who’d been victims

of the African slave trade.

I also supposed that he thought he was being funny,

especially since he giggled after he said it,

but I thought he was far from funny,

and certainly didn’t giggle with him.

                At the Start of Nightmare Week

The last time I had the misfortune

of having to endure my sibling’s physical presence,

was a nightmarish week in 1990.

Early on in the adventure,

whilst I was still jetlagged,

and after he’d warmed up by putting me down

and trying to wind me up

by frustrating my efforts

to have a meaningful conversation

with the stratagem of responding to my every sentence

with dickheadedly inaccurate non-sequitur put-downs of New Zealand,

he commented on New Zealand’s then-recent

decriminalisation of homosexuality

by aggressively asserting that

all homosexuals should be lined up against walls

and shot – illustrating this by miming

the firing of an automatic weapon with his fingers

and making the corresponding noise.

Then he indulged himself in the

aren’t-I-a-naughty-boy-not-really-I’m-so-pleased-with-myself

half-giggle and half-snort

that it has always disgusted me to have to hear.

Not wanting to get into a pissing contest with him,

under the circumstances,

I didn’t remind him of the time, thirty-two years earlier,

when he was fourteen and I was twelve,

that he tried to rape me,

but I’ll never forget the pressure of his hand on the back of my neck,

or the foul stench coming up from his genitals,

or his mocking laughter after I’d struggled free and was fleeing.

          Sick and Evil

Y’know, it struck me recently

that my elder sibling

probably still thinks

after more than a quarter-century

of estrangement

that just because

he had such a jolly good time

relentlessly bullying, vexing,

belittling, tormenting,

and otherwise abusing me

as we grew up,

and at every opportunity

thereafter,

that I’d enjoyed it, too.

I’ve read about

that twisted shit going on

in his ilk’s minds

whilst they’re doing it,

but clinging to that

contradictory, disingenuous

self-delusion

into old age

is sick and evil.

    One Problem, Though

All too frequently

I find myself

filled with fantasies

about directing vituperation

into the smug, smirking, sneering face

of the morally inferior subhuman

who is my parents’ older son.

But then I remind myself

that in order to do this

I’d need to confront him,

and the sight of that face

and the sound of his voice

have made me feel

physically sick

upon encountering them

for decades.

(Hair colour in cartoon is wrong)