Love Stuff Continued

              Love and Me

Okay, I do realise that I learnt

when just a wee lad

that I’m undeserving of love,

and that now that I’m old and grumpy

and no longer exuding pheromones

that it’s out of the question,

but I still crave it nonetheless.

                   The Death of Love

After she snarled loudly and almost wordlessly at him

in front of the supermarket’s pastry fridge

as he turned, shaking his head,

without picking anything up

and headed for the eggs,

people nearby began to stare.

He stopped, turned,

put his hands up in the universal surrender signal,

and said, ‘Okay, I’m sorry.

I apologise, okay?

I was wrong.

I made a mistake.

The blame’s all mine.

I’ll try not to do it again, okay?

Why so much violence?’

She looked him through with blazing eyes,

then looked around at their audience,

and said nothing

until they were heading home in the car,

when she muttered,

‘Love is dead.’

         Reality & My Situation

Of course it wouldn’t last.

I’m gob-smacked that it happened at all,

and not at all surprised that it ended – just like that –

without any credible explanation.

It never seemed to me

to be exactly real, anyway,

other than when

our bodies were touching.

Despite having the experience and skills

for surviving as a lonely old man,

flatlining emotionally

in a loveless existence,

which seems more real and natural, somehow,

readapting to this

was difficult and painful,

and definitely remained a work in progress.

The longer I knew her

the more of a stranger to me

she became,

and the more divorced from reality

the whole situation

seemed to be in my mind.

             Romance & Passion

Now, I really didn’t absolutely need

a tsunami of gooey romantic emotionalism,

or hollered, groaning porn-style pseudo-passion,

but it just didn’t do it for me

when she started cracking jokes

while we were fucking.

              A One-Night Stand

A few days after I’d been to a party

at my friend Alfredo’s house

some time in late 1968,

I received a phone call from a woman

who I didn’t recall actually meeting there

asking me to accompany her

to a blues performance

by Albert King at the Troubadour.

She picked me up in a fairly big car

and drove the long way around

from Echo Park to West Hollywood

via the San Fernando Valley

and over the hills at Laurel Canyon,

smoking pot along the way.

I forget what we talked about –

the blues, I suppose.

Albert King was Albert King.

Then she drove me to her apartment

on the other side of the Hollywood Freeway

from Echo Park, if I remember correctly,

and I’m not sure that I do – after all, she was driving –

where we spent the rest of the night.

What I remember most was how soft and fragrant

her long, teased-out, 60s-Afro-do hair seemed to me.

When we awoke she drove me home

before picking up her son from some relative’s.

She didn’t give me her phone number when I asked for it,

and sadly I never saw her again.

I suppose that I made my psychosocial deficiencies

glaringly obvious to her.

That, or she’d just been in the mood

for a one-night stand

and Alfredo’s wife had suggested me.

                                          Grace

It was 1993.

I had a one-semester contract as a lecturer in International Business –

a second-year lecture course and a graduate seminar course –

at the then still-under-construction

Massey University Albany

in Auckland’s northern suburbs.

I commuted from home and family in Hamilton,

sleeping for two nights weekly at one or another North Shore B&B.

One of the 200 or so students in the undergraduate class

stood out from the rest from the first day.

She wore rimless glasses that seemed to be at least five mm thick,

long, glossy black hair that seemed to glow in the fluorescent lecture hall,

and a flirtatious attitude toward me.

I didn’t imagine this,

even though my marriage was by then

a stay-together-for-the-kids sham.

I mean, what do you call shouting,

‘I love the way you look in tight jeans’

at me from across the campus

during one of my non-teaching prep days

when I was more casually dressed than usual?

Still, despite my heated fantasies,

I was aware of my professional ethics

and the potential shitstorm of making any response at all.

Even when she came to my office after I’d posted the grades

and gave me the full benefits of her leaning-forward cleavage,

I kept my outer cool.

Being able to be with my daughters every day

without having to make legal arrangements

meant more to me than the ego-fluffing delights

of a fling with a rich Chinese woman with thick glasses half my age.

Damn!

            Unworthy of Love

He asked me, in the line of duty,

why my life situation was

so unsatisfactory

in regard to love,

and I told him

– first thought, without reflection –

that it’s because I’m unworthy of love.

Of course, he questioned this,

in an enquiring manner,

whether due to sensitivity or training

I don’t know and it doesn’t matter,

rather than a challenging one.

Ready for a challenge,

I had to make a quick shift in my ready response,

and, though explaining that

I was aware that this was outrageous

and open to withering rational challenge,

it really didn’t matter

how I or anybody else considered it,

I’d been conditioned from earliest childhood

to accept it as axiomatic,

deep down in the essence of who-I-am,

that I’m unworthy of love,

and nothing that I or anybody else says or thinks

can change that.

We also agreed that it’s a self-fulfilling point of view.

I hoped he could show me how I was wrong,

and that there was a way through this,

but of course he couldn’t.

              My Last Wife

She was brilliant,

good-looking,

artistic,

competent at many unusual skills,

and had an arse beyond compare,

but, as is the case

with many brilliant people,

she refused to use her mind

when doing so would have told her

what she didn’t want to acknowledge.

She therefore,

although over 40,

and a doctor who should’ve known better,

continued to chain-smoke

whilst trying to get pregnant

and had a miscarriage

a few weeks after she did.

After that

she had no use for me,

and held her arms up

in front of her torso,

elbows at her waist

and loose fists by her chin

whenever I just

tried to hug her.

When I Needed Her The Most

As her love evaporated

I desperately wanted to know

what I could do or stop doing

or say or stop saying

for her to bring it back to life,

but she wouldn’t tell me.

Meanwhile, the rest of my existence –

work, home, fair-weather friends –

were disappearing

as if by conjurers’ tricks

all over the place.

So I slouched in my chair

with one wine bottle after another,

one codeine tab after another,

staring at nothing

or reading long historical novels

that I don’t remember

while she made her plans

to leave me in that house,

that was nobody’s home,

to sulk without anybody there

to notice me doing it,

let alone care.

          The Joke’s On You-Know-Who

I used to joke that the reason I’m such a pussy

is that you are what you eat.

Since most women tend to find confidence

to be the most attractive feature a man can have,

my being such a pussy has meant

that I haven’t had the pleasure

of engaging in the activity about which I joked

as often in my life as I would have preferred,

and not at all for several years now.

All because I still am

what I used to eat.