Some Personal Stuff

           A Paradox

A major problem

with composing verses

about my personal shit

is that since I’ve been conditioned

to think that I myself don’t matter,

I can’t think of why anyone

would want to read or hear them.

         Fucking Up

I hate it when I fuck up,

and I fuck up plenty.

It’s not so bad

if it’s a minor fuckup

that affects only me

and not all that much,

although with even these

I tend to

– metaphorically –

kick myself in the ass.

I hate it when I fuck up, though,

and I fuck up plenty.

When it’s a major fuckup, though,

that affects other people

– especially people I love,

or people who are relying on me –

in a destructive,

or at least a negative, way,

especially with lasting,

or at least lingering,

and grave,

or at least potentially serious,

consequences,

my self-loathing and self-destructiveness

ratchet up to dangerous levels.

I hate it when I fuck up,

and I fuck up plenty.

       A Sense of Place

I thought it’d be cool

to spend my old age in a place

where people have lived

for many centuries,

with whitewashed-but-flaking

stone walls crowding narrow roads

winding along steep hillsides

overlooking the sea,

where siestas are the rule,

the old women wear black,

and the old men sit

in the shade playing dominoes

and drinking nasty local brandy.

But now I’m already in my old age,

and 150-year-old, far-from-the-sea

Hamilton’s my home.

Siesta is optional and ill-attended,

I have no public place

to drink and play dominoes,

and no life-long friends

with extended family connections

with whom to do so.

   An Honoured Campaign Pledge

It was 1964.

The uni had an authoritarian

in loco parentis attitude,

so the student ha-ha government

was completely impotent.

I decided to put myself forward

as a candidate for the student senate.

I put up one poster

on a board in the student centre.

It read,

“Expect Nothing?

Get It!

Your Student Government

Has Never Done Anything

I Promise To Uphold That Tradition”

I won a seat.

I went to one meeting,

where I sat at the back

doodling and saying nothing.

Then I transferred

to another university.

               Same Coin

One of the more cogent reasons

for my lack of leadership ability

is that I’m a terrible follower.

                     Asshole Soul

Lately, from time to time,

memories flood my mind

of times when I’ve been an asshole,

times when I’ve been the kind of person that I don’t like.

Not all of those times at once, of course,

because that would take too long,

but whilst walking to dog, or washing the dishes,

I remember at a trot

one or two occasions when, for instance,

I’ve made sexist or homophobic jokes or remarks,

or body-shaming comments,

or witty stereotypes of one group or another

or other vile streams of words left over

from my childhood cultural intake.

These flashbacks make me feel like shit, of course,

and make me feel like I am shit,

but I can think of nothing to do to make things right.

Apology would be pointless,

for it would be to a world-in-general

that just doesn’t care,

and would dismiss my sincerity if it did.

I can’t even guarantee that I won’t slip

and be an obnoxious asshole again later,

even today, or next week, or any old time,

solidifying my status as a hopeless case.

Of course I regret every one of these incidents,

and will continue to do so

until I die or slide into dementia,

just as I regret all those incidents

when I fluffed or backed off from opportunities

to have potentially deeply memorable

out-of-the-ordinary sexual adventures.

              Conditioning Tells

I was about to tell them

that if they’d help me with that little problem

it’d mean the world to me,

but I couldn’t

because from the dawn of my memory

my mother and my older brother

had conditioned me to accept unquestioningly

that nobody could possibly give a shit

about anything just because it matters to me.

The mother of my children

confirmed this relentlessly

over the course

of a decade and a half.

                 The Zen of Pee

Standing up to pee or sitting down to pee –

not something that most blokes think about.

Blokes stand up to pee

because sheilas squat when they pee and we’re not sheilas.

That’s one thing for sure.

But when I get up in the middle of the night

to have a bit of a slash

to relieve the pressure from the evening’s plonk,

well, I don’t want to hafta turn the light on

and I don’t wanna hafta aim in the dark,

so, well, y’know …

I’m still as butch as I ever was.

            My Hands Are Up

Hey-yup! You got me!

Fair and square.

It’s a fair cop, guv.

I have no self-justification, all right;

you caught me red-handed

in a contradiction

between two of my neuroses.

Guilty, your honour!

Of course, expecting them to be consistent

and not to contradict each other

probably isn’t too much to ask,

but there you go.

There it is.

I’m a seething mess of conflicting

disorders and anxieties

that really make no sense at all,

except for their interconnectedness,

which I concede is ultimately senseless.

So I’m both pathetically thin-skinned

and too timidly conflict-averse

to do anything about it

except sulk

unless I have to.

I may have little or no

self-esteem or self-confidence,

but I have plenty of self-respect.

I hate being nasty,

but I’m rather good at it,

when pushed far enough.

And so on.

                       My Wall

I have a wall.

It’s psychological, of course,

and I suppose a bit metaphorical.

Anyway, it’s not a solid wall,

like the ones around my patios.

A car couldn’t crash into it.

One reason for this

is that it fails to conform to the laws of physics.

It’s a one-way wall, y’see.

It keeps me in,

but it doesn’t keep anybody else out.

It might deter some people, though,

as it’s highly visible,

in a psychological, metaphorical way,

but anybody who wants to do so

can just go right through it

as if it weren’t there.

They just have to want to.

When toxic people join me inside it

I can’t escape,

other than by relocating

(isn’t that a gorgeously bureaucratic weasel-word?)

myself and my wall, together,

to some other set of coordinates

on space-time’s twanging grid

and hope that the fuckwits and dickheads

and their ilk

get the message

and leave my wall and me in peace.