Poetry 2

      Why Are You Reading This?

Sometimes the absurdity of it all

becomes absolutely clear to me,

and I wonder at the folly of writing it down.

                  Artistic Intercourse & Masturbation

I was whingeing to Martin

one day when we’d been rehearsing for a performance

about how many verses I had backed up on my hard drive

that I might never get the chance to perform,

especially since my editing work had declined drastically

since the managing director of the agency that sent me work

had fucked up its website due to his overwhelming

egotism and incompetence,

leaving me with time to compose a startling number of these

whilst sitting around and waiting for work.

Martin said something about, well,

the creative act is sort of worthwhile in itself,

but I responded that I’d rather have an audience,

as the difference between having my verses just sit there on the hard drive

and other people either reading or seeing me perform them

is like the difference between wanking and fucking.

The major problem, of course,

is that I’ve never had the confidence

to be adroit at the art of seduction,

let alone in the sense of

selling myself or my artistic efforts.

          Readings

It always astounds me

that people who are in attendance

when I perform my verses

without musicians

seem to enjoy hearing me do so.

I doubt if I would.

                           The Solstice Gig

It was just the way that things worked out.

We had this gig to perform

at a private party a block or so from my house

on the evening of the solstice,

which was the day that Martin finished shifting flats.

We never even got the chance

for me to read him the verses that I’d selected.

Since I hadn’t heard from him, for one reason or another,

by mid-afternoon,

I came to the conclusion that our performance would be cancelled,

and treated it like any other day.

What this meant, of course, was that I drank a bottle of cheap merlot

with my daily meal between three and three-thirty,

and then another one with my mystery novel

after walking the dog – between four-thirty and five,

and then drifted off to sleep.

Martin’s banging on my door awakened me.

The gig was on.

I don’t remember getting dressed, walking over there,

or setting up my music stand.

I remember seeing Vera, and that Ravi person,

but everybody else was a blur, like on the periphery of a dream.

I remember delivering the introduction I’d planned,

and wondering, as Martin plucked his bass with the first title,

how he was gonna fake it.

I don’t remember finishing the first verse,

or anything else about the performance,

except falling down twice.

I don’t remember walking home.

People told me later that, except for the falling-down part,

my performance had been a good one,

but the whole experience made me sad, anyway.

I’d liked that set when I’d put it together.

I would’ve enjoyed being there to share it.

          One Process

I write down notes to myself

about ideas for new verses

when I’m drunk,

and then complete or compose them

at the word processor

when I’m sober.

I’m not the one to say

if this process works.

                              What I Write

I unfriended some random dickhead from facebook

for engaging in some random, unprovoked, aggro verbal violence,

and in response he keyed something like,

‘Thank Christ! Now I won’t have to read his so-called poems!

They don’t even rhyme!’

I imagine he was drunk, but so what?

Now, putting aside the obvious observation

that nobody had ever forced him to read my posts in the first place,

this inconsequential piece of spleen-venting fluff

displayed a complete lack of comprehension

of what I write.

I don’t call these things poems.

Never have.

If other people do, well, they do.

I’m not going to argue the point.

I don’t like to argue, being highly conflict-averse

(unlike the abovementioned dickhead,

who seemed to seek out a good fight for its own sake).

Each one of these things is what it is:

an observation, a recollection, a description, a dream,

an introspection, a commentary, a fantasy, a rant,

or some combination of these things.

As a collective term for them I’ve used ‘bagatelles’ (look it up)

or ‘chingaderos’ (Spanish for ‘fuckers’).

I break em up into lines

to make them easier for me to perform,

since I don’t memorise them,

due to cranking out so many.

Poetry, like any art,

exists in the responses of those in its audience,

and not in what its creator tangibly produces and presents,

anyway.

           Pardon My French

If some asswipe shit-head

considers my fucking choice of words

to be ‘offensive’ or some similar bullshit,

all I have to fucking say to them

is that I’m easy as shit to avoid,

so fucking avoid me.

                  Flaunting Flaws

I read a poem,

more or less,

by Bukowski,

offering up some more or less universal advice.

It was on the internet.

I got the impression

from the number of versions available,

performed by various performers

and with a variety of arty visuals,

that it’s one of his more popular ones nowadays.

It’s only fair for me to admit

that I generally don’t enjoy

reading other people’s poetic efforts,

but Bukowski’s are usually

among the exceptions to this.

I also recall Hank giving me

all sorts of advice,

back when we drank together regularly in 1972.

Most, but not all, of it was crappy.

The poem in question,

called ‘Roll the Dice’,

is not one of the exceptions

to my poetic aversions,

and the advice it gives, by and large, sucks.

Hank sure as shit didn’t follow it.

That’s one of the things I love about Hank –

he was deeply flawed,

and flaunting his imperfections made him laugh.

Words Previously Spoken With Music

I look at photos

of past performances

and wonder, was that us?

was that me?

because the magic – for me –

of the moment is gone

from my soul

and I don’t know when anything similar

may take place

again.

More Political Stuff

                      Courage and Support

I feel so inferior

to Pussy Riot, Julian Assange, Jafar Panahi,

and all those who publicise and challenge

the Chinese cadres’ information control,

the callousness of India’s elite,

the Brazilian state’s crimes

against the environment and indigenous peoples,

and every other abuse by the mighty and arrogant.

Those who resist and defy

bullying by governments,

corporations, religious organisations,

and other authoritarians

who are firmly convinced

of their entitlement to privilege

deserve all the support

that anybody else

can give them,

however little good that may do.

  

                        Spooky

Shortly after the US’s evil president

started killing eight-year-old girls

and other people in Baghdad

for no legitimate reason,

I went to the US consulate

to start the process

of renouncing my American citizenship,

having also held Kiwi citizenship

for yonks.

Figuring that making a point

requires doing something to make it,

I informed the media,

and TV3 sent along a crew.

After they interviewed me on camera

outside the office building housing the consulate,

a man approached us and requested,

in the sort of bland American voice and accent

a spokesman for Monsanto would have,

that it would be best if the camera didn’t show the building

due to the threat of terrorism.

The TV3 reporter asked him who he was and

what gave him the right to order us around.

He purred softly that he just helped out at the consulate

with security and stuff like that.

The reporter told him that,

in this country at least,

we have freedom of speech and press,

and he turned and left.

He’d been wearing neutral-coloured trousers

and a bland business shirt with no tie,

and within seconds I would have been unable to describe him,

his face had been so ordinary and bland.

I’d been face-to-face with a real-life spook.

The camera operator panned up to show the building.

                         Horrors

And so another horror committed by humans

had flitted across our screens,

replacing or eclipsing the previous horror,

depending on the degree

to which we can identify with the victims’

location, culture, ethnicity, prosperity,

and so on.

People have inflicted more horrors

on other people since the last lead-story grabber,

albeit in less sexy places,

and rest assured that more notorious horrors

will supplant the most recent one

in our attention span

as they occur.

After all, we live in a time of horrors.

I rather suspect, however,

that all times have been times of horrors,

as far back as we care or dare to look.

I don’t think that the problem

is the times in which we live,

but that it’s people, particularly assholes,

who are living in these times,

as our species did in such times

before instant worldwide video

and six-hour news cycles,

as when English-speakers committed genocide

on the native North Americans and Australians,

or when the biblical Israelites

did so to the Canaanites and Amalekites

in obedience to the One God.

       The Right Honourable

One thing

that nearly all people

who have enjoyed

what our culture defines as success,

and those who aspire to emulate them,

seem to agree upon

is that honour is contemptible.

           Internet Petitions

People all over the place

lie all the time, of course,

and many delight in justifying,

at least to themselves,

the domination and cruelty and destruction

in which they wallow

with arrogantly disingenuous hogwash

as a matter of habit,

as a matter of policy

– it’s just a part of who they are,

like being football club supporters

or connoisseurs of cheese.

It’s a daunting task,

challenging

their bullshit prescriptions and machinations

in any meaningful way.

The really powerful ones

can afford high-priced deniers,

who finance media dissemblance 

and produce consequent surveys revealing

that most people don’t give a shit

about the meaningful survival 

of anybody or anything,

even – in the long term –

of themselves or their progeny.

Those of us who view this nastiness

from inside emotional bunkers

– resulting from our being

shell-shocked and conflict-averse –

can only wonder if internet petitions

really have any effect.

          Fils de Baron Samedi

After reading something

about the Haiti of the Tonton Macoutes,

I tried to imagine what it would have been like

to have lived though that

and I couldn’t

because my mind wouldn’t let me.

  

               Power Imbalances

Close to the last time I talked

with an arrogant-dickhead uni lecturer

who used to pretend

to be my friend,

he and his then-current sycophant

were going on about some bullshit theory

advocating world government

based on somehow

them getting everyone else

in every culture

to adopt their values.

I noted that in my experience and scholarship,

the only value I’d found to be the same in all cultures

is that nobody likes to be bullied,

and somehow it got around to the sycophant

telling me that when I resisted bullies,

such as by not buying from companies

that bully others,

that I was bullying them.

I grew up with two born bullies in the same house

who naturally saw me,

the littlest one there,

as a natural target,

so I have this thing about bullies and bullying.

It’s important, for instance,

always to stand up to them,

and when that’s impossible,

it’s better to escape than to back down.

That’s the main reason why,

when I had the chance and the ability,

I became involved in a small way

with helping refugees, the world’s most bullied people.

I wonder if the sycophant

would put his sophistry to the test

and argue that the refugees

were bullying their former torturers

by fleeing, and depriving them

of the joy of torturing.

Reverse power imbalances, indeed.

              Graft As A Fatal Addiction

Functionaries such as he is

have always done things this way,

so he does them this way, too,

even though it’s obvious

that everything is collapsing around him,

that his corruption

is hurrying that collapse along,

and that doing things this way can’t last;

he keeps selling out to the highest bidder,

and any other bidders willing to front up

with the cash –

cash that won’t buy him jack shit

when everything to buy is gone

and no place remains to which he can flee.

                      Terrible Terrorising

I noticed that one of the unconvicted Syrians

released after twelve years of illegal incarceration

and probably torture at Guantanamo

for being a terrorist

said upon his arrival in Montevideo

that his priorities were:

(a) reuniting with his family,

(b) opening a restaurant, and

(c) supporting the Uruguayan national football team.

I’m terrified.

      Personal Versus Principle

During the early part of this century

I was highly active in the Green Party,

serving in many capacities

at the provincial

and even national levels.

After the 2005 election,

the party’s national

power elite

treated me with grave disrespect

and I cut back to just

chipping in ten bucks a month

and letterboxing

as much as the local coordinator

wanted me to.

Then a local party poobah,

whom I’d never met,

went beyond disrespect

to disdain,

behaving toward me as if

I were less than shit.

I was inclined

to end my association,

but the Green Party

remains the most sane and humane

counterweight to

New Zealand’s

reckless, egocentric, and greedy

right-wing fuckwit power freaks.

Personal dignity or duty to others?

I cut back to five bucks a month

and letterboxing the minimum amount.

Noticing Stuff

                          Weeds

Weeds are species

that grow wild

and profusely

among other species,

depriving them of space and food,

taking over their habitat,

crowding them out.

They reproduce aggressively,

and can harbour and spread

pathogens or other toxins.

Some even create environmental conditions

in which they themselves cannot reproduce.

Weeds tend to proliferate in human-disturbed areas.

Some become dominant when they enter new environments

that free them from natural enemies.

Sounds like homo sapiens –

the most virulent weed species of all.

                   How It Is, In Part

Sitting in my reading-and-drinking armchair

with the front door propped open,

I watched in fascination

as a small flock of sparrows

fought pitched battles with each other,

wings flapping with furious aggression,

contesting my bird feeder’s two perches.

These weren’t dance-like play fights;

they were serious.

Now, human aggression usually disgusts me,

but I’m completely non-judgemental

about their behaviour.

They do what they do.

It’s just DNA

and pursuing survival

in a hard world.

                 I Like To Walk

I’ve always liked to walk.

Even when I was a preschooler,

I’d skive off from time to time

to escape my unhappy domestic environment,

and follow the creek

that ran a block or so from my house,

fantasising about running away from home.

Since then I’ve walked,

whether with a dog, by myself,

or – rarely – with other people,

in many different cities,

along many rural roads and tracks,

up gentle mountain slopes,

and along many beaches – I can’t stand lying in the sun.

For me the best city walks

have been in cities with alleys –

I call it alleying –

and each city’s alleys have been different,

sometimes differing from one part of a city to another.

The best thing about alleying

is how few people

and moving motor vehicles

I’ve encountered whilst doing so.

Walking enables me to experience the seasons

and the changing skies

better than I could from any vehicle,

even a bicycle,

and to notice

such microcosms

as individual leaves and pebbles and blades of grass,

and how the volume of rubbish on the ground

increases

as my dog and I

approach

the Five Crossroads McDonald’s.

  

            Boy Fights & Girl Fights

In the mid-eighties I spent a couple of years

running the school jail –

officially In-School Suspension –

at an intermediate school

in a heart-wrenchingly downmarket area.

As ISS supervisor,

I was also the staff’s

number-two heavy – after George,

the big, beefy DP –

so one of my duties

was to help keep an eye on things

before the school opened each morning.

Poor kids fight a lot,

so George and I broke up

plenty of early-morning fights.

Fights between boys

usually involved

impressive quantities of

circling about,

bobbing and weaving,

feinting jabs, wild swings hitting only air,

and shouts of,

“Hold me back or I’ll kill him!”

and when we did hold them back they let us.

Girl fights were deadly serious.

They really did seem to be

trying to kill each other,

and even with me bear-hugging one

twelve-year-old girl from behind

and George, at 115+ kilos, fairly sitting on the other

they’d still be scratching each other’s faces

and managing to pull out

handfuls of each other’s hair.

               Visceral

It struck me

as I farted whilst I was pissing

that the smell of the inside of my body

when it’s outside of it

may not be particularly pleasant,

but is absolutely real.

             Icelandic Genetics

Iceland, or so I’ve read,

has about the most

genetically homogeneous population in the world.

Of course, I’ve read a large amount of

shit

in the many years that I’ve been reading,

but as the camera panned

along the faces of Iceland’s football team

during the national anthem

prior to a match against Croatia

(which is definitely genetically heterogeneous),

it struck me that many of them

could have been brothers,

and that they all

looked like at least close cousins,

so maybe it is indeed so.

But then,

how does Björk fit into this?

                                   Butch

I can’t recall ever knowing anybody named Butch,

whether via his – or her – birth certificate

or due to some fond family nicknaming during infancy.

I imagine, though, that being called Butch

would be likely to have an effect

on a person’s character –

or even physical competencies.

For instance, would somebody named Butch

be likely to have better-than-average fine motor skills,

and be a wizard at needlepoint or lace-making?

How many people named Butch have long hair?

I mean, one of the definitions of the word itself

refers to a particular type of short, closely cropped haircut.

Do people named Butch tend to prefer

Antiques Road Show to boxing or mixed martial arts?

Do they prefer to take their exercise

by playing rugby

or by Morris Dancing?

I don’t know, as I can’t recall

ever knowing anybody named Butch.

I myself, incidentally, am basically a wuss and totally non-macho,

but in many superficial ways I’m decidedly butch,

for whatever that’s worth.

I did know somebody, though, whose family called him Bunkie.

He was a flaming asshole.

Ended up with a career in the Army,

or so I heard.

           Think I’ll Read A Book

I turned the TV on.

As it came up

a Kiwi woman,

talking to another Kiwi woman,

said that Justin Bieber’s favourite food

is spaghetti and meatballs.

I turned the TV off.

                        Higher Education

When I was a uni lecturer it struck me and disgusted me

that most second-year students considered my courses

to be a game, the point of which was

to see how little they could learn

and how few academic and cognitive skills

they could acquire and improve

and still pass.

Many didn’t.

I wondered why they were there in the first place,

running up huge student-loan debts

for bugger-all in return.

Was it arrogance? Overconfidence? Privilege?

Or just stupidity?

                    Talent

I learnt long ago,

although not early enough,

that just because someone

can play a guitar or a piano passably,

and perhaps sing well enough

for others to tolerate or even enjoy it,

having such talent

fails to make that person automatically

not a nauseating shit.