Life At Home

          1 February 2014 – 5:45 am

I’m listening to music that speaks to my soul,

drinking hot coffee,

and reading a good book.

I have three bottles of wine in the pantry,

two bottles of beer in the fridge,

some sleeping pills in a vial in my office,

four plums in a bowl and one in my belly,

and a bit of money in my pocket.

No point lamenting the likely loss of love

or the unlikeliness of ever experiencing it again.

         Afternoon Dilemma

Every afternoon,

after tucking away my daily meal,

I settle down in my favourite chair

with a mystery novel on my lap

and a bottle of plonk on the table,

not far from my right elbow,

and confront the dilemma

of which takes precedence.

The bottle will inevitably make the book

irrelevant,

but I do enjoy reading what is for me

the literary equivalent of comfort food.

I know I should limit my interaction

with the bottle – and its successor –

to occasional wee sips,

but I never do.

The book will be there the next day.

I’m never all that certain that I will.

     Mundane Everyday Soul

Traversing the familiar tracks

from bed to toilet to computer and back,

which I do daily, and often

– and likely do nightly in my sleep

without remembering –

is something ingrained in my being.

It’ll mean nothing

and be nonexistent

once I’m incapacitated or dead.

                     With the Sound on Mute:

watching daytime TV during August 2014 included seeing:

young Swiss and Scandinavian women

with expensively even dentition

competing at snowboard half-pipes somewhere in the Alps,

every dimension of the half-pipe meticulously set –

a young widow in Nepal wiping away tears –

ads featuring self-satisfied, confident, upward-mobile types

gloating about the dream houses

that they’d paid the contractors who put them on the telly

to build for them –

houses exploding from drone strikes –

a re-run of a documentary

about a Hungarian-speaking town in Romania

whose citizens are mad

about ice hockey –

a doco of reptile-eyed Brazilian military torturers from the 1980s –

adorable soft-nosed cattle munching on hay

somewhere in Australia,

followed by a shot of an adorable little girl

helping her mum put a roast in the oven –

archaeologists and tourists examining Angkor Wat –

men from around the world wearing camouflage fatigues

strutting while they flaunt assault rifles –

the sheer joy of dark-skinned cricketers playing their game –

country Kiwis growing turkeys for slaughter –

a flag-waving American redneck mob

shouting and snarling at wretched migrants at the border –

self-righteous, sadistically psychopathic Daesh shitheads

rolling over brown landscapes

killing for fun as they go

and making claims about establishing a global caliphate,

their flag flying over the White House –

lying neo-fascist politicians smirking.

          Obvious Strategy

It was mid-afternoon in mid-Spring.

The weather outside was pleasant

and my front door was open.

The first fly of the season zipped in,

but my pyrethrum spray convinced it to depart.

I was less than halfway through

my first bottle of wine for the day

when my loneliness overtook me,

making me shudder and sweat.

The obvious strategy for addressing this

involved concentration upon

drinking, not thinking.

               Habitat

A really large arachnid

crawled up onto my arm

as I was settling into my reading chair

with a bottle of whisky

and a Nero Wolfe mystery.

I flicked it off onto the coffee table,

then went and got a paper towel,

picked it up,

squooshed it,

and put it and the balled-up paper towel

into the bin.

The poor thing had just entered

the wrong habitat,

as I’d done so many decades ago,

only I haven’t had

the easy escape

of a fast and unexpected death.

           Preferring the Rut

I was waiting for someone,

so I stepped out onto my balcony

shortly after noon

on a midsummer’s day –

something I rarely do.

The songs from what seemed like

dozens of species of birds

filled the air around me,

and blessed clouds easing by

blocked the discomfort

of exposure to

direct, ozone-free sunlight.

It struck me that I should do this more often,

but I haven’t.

  

                            Beyond Me

It’s a block of five townhouse units

away from the street

at the end of a longish right-of-way.

The row of five letter boxes

stands facing the driveway

just inside the footpath.

I’m in unit three.

A young couple who moved into four

had a newspaper subscription,

but never collected their papers,

which became soggy and spilled out onto the ground.

I couldn’t figure this out.

Maybe they found a vista

that included rubbish on the ground

to be attractive,

or spiritually or morally uplifting,

or a mark of class,

as they passed it every time they came or went.

Maybe they thought that removing it was their mothers’ job.

I’m not their mother,

but since the sight of their rubbish on the ground

in front of my home

did nothing to please my aesthetic sensibilities

or to lift my morale,

I picked it up from the ground

if I was walking by

and stuffed it into the back of their letterbox

until recycling day,

when I’d have to set it out.

I would rather have stuffed it somewhere else,

but squabbling with neighbours never pays off,

and they moved away

shortly after I called noise control on them one midnight.

                       Indoors-Outdoors

I’m fondest of the colder months,

when I can close myself inside my house,

away from the unpleasantries teeming outside,

dress warmly, and seal my body snugly away

from the elements.

My heating bill during the colder months is, however, a worry.

As the days lengthen and warm,

the temptation grows to open the front door

when I’m downstairs

in order to let in the balmy breezes,

the view of my potted flowers and herbs,

and the smell of the jasmine

growing over my front patio wall.

It also lets in the pollen,

and means operating the pyrethrum anti-fly spritzers,

but that’s way cheaper than heating.

By February the jasmine’s finished and it’s fly season;

the fly-repellent devices can do only so much,

and leaving the doors and windows open

and running the fans

against the heat

is sometimes only marginally effective.

Autumn is always welcome.

I like closing the front door with the earlier sunsets.

I’m basically an indoorsman, anyway.