Dreams & Fantasies Continued

         Bouncey Bouncey Ball-ee

It’s a buoyant ball,

sorta like styrofoam, but not exactly,

covered all over with every kind of sensor

a buoyant ball could need, and then some.

It bounces crazily wherever external forces –

wind, gravity, surface angles, waves,

people’s ping-pong paddles –

send it, with no volition on its own part,

only its insignificant weight,

dodgy balance, and semi-elastic resilience

to the point of near-imperviousness,

as well as its buoyancy,

all the while taking in and processing

every stimulus its sensors detect,

and broadcasting these processed stimuli

weakly back into its ever-changing surroundings;

few if any receivers

capable of tuning in to them

are present in the places

to which it has been bounced and blown,

and fewer still actually do tune in,

choice being something exogenous.

The ball, battered and dented

by innumerable collisions and thwacks,

remains with all its sensors sharp

and its processing capabilities unimpaired

as each wave and gust of wind blows it

against some hard surface or another,

or maybe another wave,

or some sentient being who swats it away.

Bibbledy-bobbledy-oopsie-eay.

                Eggnog

The eggnog vendor’s wife,

she told me

that her marriage wasn’t sweet.

Why she did this I don’t know.

The would-be expert

coolly sold me

on a plan beside a street.

When its time came he struck low.

The captain, she

refused to hold me

because her goals were incomplete,

so my role became a cameo.

          Non-Party Animal

I had a dream

in which I was at a party.

Men I didn’t know

involved me in their concerns

and then disappeared,

I supposed into other rooms.

Women I didn’t know

flirted with me –

as if I weren’t the old

and demonstrably

physically unattractive

and increasingly feeble

man I’ve become –

some even

cuddled and kissed me,

before they disappeared,

I supposed into other rooms.

Going to parties has mostly become a part of my past,

and not a part I particularly lament.

For all kinds of reasons

I never developed sufficient social skills

to enable me to reap the rewards

of enjoying purely social gatherings,

and my propensity to perform,

rather than interact,

has created a dreamlike barrier

between me and any others present

that’s tended to prevent me from attaining

either social success or enjoyment.

   An Acid Memory

I was recovering

from some pathetic

attempt at love

and ate some lysergic

at some beach fleabag

at Port Aransas

on the Gulf Coast

with only my dog

for company.

When I looked out

at the stormy ocean

it seemed to me as if

the oil supertankers

were dancing with each other.

                  Illusory Cheese Party

I love cheese. Always have.

Bland, sharp, smoky, tangy, ripely aromatic,

soft, hard, crumbly, creamy, grated, melted,

cheap, and I-can’t-afford it.

I love cheese. Always have.

But then, as my metabolism aged,

in 2012 I noticed a definite correlation

between my cheese intake

and the growing tightness

of my trousers’ waistlines.

Not wanting to have to spend money on new clothes,

and remembering things I’d read

connecting cheese and corpulence,

I sadly removed cheese from my diet.

Nothing religious about it –

some grated parmesan

sometimes finds its way onto my pasta

and some of the day-old sandwiches

that I buy at the Goldstar Bakery

contain grated cheese,

but daily swiss cheese on toast

and noshing cheap plastic-wrapped processed cheese

straight from the fridge are out.

Shortly after my birthday in 2013

I found myself at a party,

something unusual for me now,

eating cheese –

squares of strong, hard cheese on toothpicks,

feta and gorgonzola on bruschetta,

cream cheese on crispbread –

and then I woke up.

Damn.

                Demons

I never know when

they’re going to invade,

and it’s always a horror when they do,

but I do know that

they’re much less likely to take over

when some distraction

engages me enough mentally

to disregard them.

  My Bladder Saved Me From A Demon

One of my primary demons

invaded when I was unprepared.

I heard noises inside the house

as if someone was using a sander,

and when I went inside myself

everything I touched left sticky-wet white paint

on my hands and arms.

When I went to the loo

the floor was covered

with about three centimetres of water,

and he was sanding the wall behind the toilet,

which he’d disconnected

and pulled into the centre of the room.

Fortunately, I really did have to pee,

so I awakened and went down the hall

to my own untouched-in-reality crapper.

       Good Ole Cloudy

Needing Cloudy,

Male or female, fat or skinny,

Fudging leaf-lines at the park

Soft and curved or hard and tinny

Shadows slipping through the dark,

Shining on and shining over

Clued-in and clueless

Soldiers and preachers

Gang boys and teachers

Identical to the naked eye

Fashion shouts and then it lies.

Chalk surrounds, but vision shoots through.

Cloudy assists.

Turning Cloudy

When I hear what

Sounds like cheap talk

Sounds like her talk

Sounds like empty words

Stinks like rotten turds

It’s a fever won’t let me rest

Her eyes are ever a test

hidden away in plain view

Just another introverted ham on cue,

Exploited and exploiting,

Our Cloudy.

There goes Cloudy,

Rubbing and thumbing

Edges where it itches

and weeps and burns and bewitches,

The old arms-pinned-down

Threatening enemas

Scrambling for a way

to unglue their shoes

Popping and pustulating

Tight ceiling coagulating,

Clogged up Cloudy.

                                Neo-Baroque Dream

If I ever win Lotto,

the thing I want to do most

is to commission a pair of musical compositions,

each by a different composer,

that together would comprise an evening of music.

The brief for the commissions would be

first of all that the music be in a style

that I call neo-baroque.

The ‘neo’ part means that the composers

should use whatever weird-shit approach or mixture of approaches –

dissonance, atonality, polytonality, twelve-tone, tone clusters, serialism,

polyrhythms, graphical notation, impressionism, minimalism, surrealism,

jazz-influenced postmodernism, spectralism,

or any other genres of the past century or so –

that would be strange-sounding to conventional ears.

The ‘baroque’ part means that the music should be basically polyphonic,

with two or more relatively independent melodic lines

interacting intricately.

The instrumentation would also be neo-baroque,

as the compositions would have to be for a quartet

composed of a harpsichord, tenor saxophone, viola, and xylophone –

or maybe a marimba.

I’d want the music to be as abstract, mathematical,

and purely musical as possible,

with no programmatic elements – whether self-expressive, emotional,

dramatic, heroic, majestic, triumphal, nationalistic, or sociopolitical.

I’d like it to transcend any single cultural tradition

and to avoid specific cultural references.

If the composers could work in

some spiritual, sensual, or visceral elements

without abandoning the rest of the brief

I think that’d be cool, too.

             Misspent Youth

When I was a youth, unfortunately:

     I did not dress in formal evening clothes

for dinners at my family’s ancestral estate

after a day of riding to the hounds,

and before dallying with a parlourmaid at night,

whilst home on holiday from Harrow.

     I did not work in my father’s silversmith stall

deep inside a timelessly crowded souk,

developing breath-taking skill and pride in dim light

while old women in black, redolent of baked bread,

arranged my appropriate marriage.

     I did not join a top-drawer fraternity

at an Ivy League university,

dress casually but expensively,

and escort interchangeable debutantes

to cotillions and polo matches

in my vintage Mercedes Benz

with real leather upholstery.

     I did not help navigate a hand-carved waka

across the endless ocean with salt wind on my face,

wearing a loincloth, gorgeous muscles working hard,

to a previously unknown island

that I helped to make into my people’s home.

     I did not frolic wearing nought but a flimsy toga

with diaphenously clad nymphs

in white-marble Grecian temples

beneath a Maxfield Parish sky.

     I did not run away from home

to a sooty and heartlessly competitive city

where I went from sleeping under bridges

to the life of a fur-coat-wearing pimp

with a purple penthouse and chauffeur-driven Cadillac.

Sometimes things just don’t work out that way.