More Imaginary People

                        Hose-Down

Perry had found a niche in Hollywood

as the preferred choreographer of hose-down scenes

in low-budget women’s-prison movies.

When changes in the public’s taste

and his own advancing years

made opportunities to practice his specialty increasingly rare,

he more or less retired, and,

along with his long-time gentleman friend,

a successful investor named Mel,

took off on a series of luxury cruises around the world.

Nothing like unrelenting togetherness

within a confined shipboard environment

to see what true love is made of.

At a port call in Penang

they met some charming young men on the beach,

and spent an adventurous, flower-and-spice scented

it-seemed-like-forever playing with them.

Perry awoke from a deep sleep against an outside wall

because a local policeman was prodding him.

The cop found a small envelope of weed in his hip pocket.

His money was gone, so he couldn’t bribe his way clear,

and all of his everything was on the ship, which was gone,

Mel, he learnt later, having bought passage

for a young Austrian hottie named Rudi.

At least they hadn’t taken his passport,

and the US consul told him that arranging

deportation rather than prison was a sure bet,

considering his status and 73 years of age,

but it would take some time.

In the interim he was confined to the local jail,

which, like most tropical lock-ups, was unbearably hot,

wishing he could have a hose-down.

              The Reward

She’s too old

to drive a car anymore.

Her husband’s long gone.

Her children live far away

and are terribly busy

with their own shit, anyway.

Nobody she knows

has any time

to help her with anything.

It takes all the energy she has

just to walk up to her local

overpriced grocery

and drag her wheeled suitcase full of cans home,

as if she were walking

a heavy and recalcitrant dog,

through every kind of weather

no matter how fragile she feels

so she can feed herself

and her cats.

Cats

who take all the everything

she lavishes upon them

as a matter of right,

without even a thought

of giving anything back to her

in return.

                            Lucy & Lars

Lucy adjusted her flowered tube top

and stirred the canful

of all-day breakfast

on the back element of her range,

the front elements being burnt out.

She was thinking of Lars.

She usually thought of Lars.

Lars, who could be so kind and considerate,

like that time, just after her disaster,

when he’d flown her to Phuket,

and brought her drugs and even a doctor for her pain,

and given her comfort and cuddles for her desolation

and had slept in the other bed.

Lars, who could be so cruel and insensitive,

and who’d kept a baby elephant in a fortified paddock

on a country estate that he rented in Cambodia,

going out at night to listen to her cry for her mother

for hours

before getting on her back

for a ride around his hired domain,

admiring the flowering tropical foliage

and his own unchallenged power.

Lucy turned the heat off

from under the gloop in her pan.

She’d heard a car pull up and stop

on the loose pebbles outside her front door.

Lars.

                     The Morality of Evil

He accumulated an obscene amount of money

and luxurious possessions and decorative people

and the power to influence and control nations

by inheriting, cheating, bullying, tricking, plundering,

betraying trust, exploiting people and scarce resources,

avoiding and evading every responsibility he could

causing widespread damage to neighbourhoods and infrastructure,

causing widespread damage to global and local environments,

causing widespread damage to people’s lives,

engineering suffering and hopelessness for millions of children,

and he justified it all in public with bullshit ideology and glib lies

that fooled only the most gullible.

His only rational rebuttal to charges

of extreme immorality and evil,

which he offered only to himself,

was that in a thousand or so years

he and all his victims and progeny would be dead, anyway,

and, if not totally forgotten, faded beyond memory into myth.

                 Big Boy

He became obsessed

with all the jumbo-sized

premium greaseburgers

that BK and Macca’s could come up with,

devouring several daily,

savouring the textures

of the multiple patties

combined variously with melted cheese

and semi-cooked fatty bacon

and other gustatory treats,

becoming jumbo-sized himself.

Then, after seeing on the internet

how monks in the middle ages

refused to bathe

as a means of avoiding vanity,

he stopped taking showers altogether.

He decided it was more natural,

like the brand of vitamins he gobbled.

His skin-deep gaminess

meant that he was almost continuously scratching,

but he told himself that all that scratching

had to burn up plenty of calories.

                              Logos & Scents

She stood with aggressive pride in front of her cosmetics display,

proud to have a job in Beauty

where she’d experience appreciations of her beauty

and knowledge thereof

instead of the body-shaming that had tortured

her forever days in intermediate and high school;

with flawless make-up and hair,

she also enjoyed the heavy scent

wafting across the aisle from the Dior and Chanel stands.

She cherished her friendships

with the Shiseido and Estée Lauder girls.

With her fragile pride justified by success,

she schemed nonetheless with entrepreneurial speculations,

intent of finding an as-yet undiscovered niche market of her own,

her mind rummaging through her basket of knowledge

of other people’s thwarted aspirations and cravings;

the idea of providing luxury cosmetic products and services

for bald heads began to work its way forward in her mind,

polishing for pates, as she envisaged it –

décor for chrome domes, scented shades for smooth surfaces.

As she looked out from her station into the mall,

her heart sank each time she spied someone wearing

a fashionable hat, and she wondered if her chosen niche

would make it anywhere but inside her imagination,

even with the stunning logo her mind’s eye had designed.

She wondered about little else,

except what her friend at the Shiseido stand’s brother,

an IT geek who seemed attracted to her and her size

meant when he ranted on about stuff like

capitalist exploitation and environmental suicide.

Still, he was almost cute in a way.

                       The Blob

He knew he was a blob,

but he didn’t believe he was a blob.

He either was or wasn’t a blob,

everything – all of existence –

being, after all, uncertain.

He supposed that he had friends,

but he didn’t feel as if he did.

Having or not having friends,

after all, depends on semantics

and perceptions,

and all the relevant scientists agree

that we’re fools if we trust our perceptions.

People do make crappy witnesses,

after all.

       Probably No Warp In Space-Time Here

Drinking almost half a litre bottle of scotch hadn’t helped.

The woman, thoroughly inebriated,

looked through the photographs one more time,

arose unsteadily, turned to her left, and then turned to her right

before walking carefully around the furniture and up the stairs.

She wondered, being a science-fiction fan,

whether the whole history of her species would have been different

if she’d started to her right and had then turned around to her left,

even though she was alone.

She decided that it probably wouldn’t.

          Gourmet Sausage

It had taken him years,

but he’d made it to the West,

and the smoke from the barbecue

wafted fragrantly across the lawn

to where he stood

with his delightfully haram craft beer

by his host’s well-dressed friends,

and everything dissolved

into the smell of burning flesh

and the sound of terrified screaming

after the drone had struck his school,

turning the sky ugly red

when he was nine,

and the fear and fury from that time

knotting his abdomen

filled his Western existence.

Shaking, he shifted to the shade

of a jasmine-covered wooden fence

at the far end of the garden,

away from the smoke,

and everything dissolved

into his father’s face

looking strangely different

to how it ever had before,

his hairy hands shaking

as they scooped him up

from the gravel strip

where he’d been playing

beside the jasmine wall he’d loved,

and the fear and fury from that time

knotting his abdomen

filled his Western existence.

His host’s bogan neighbours’ speakers’

boosted bass throbbed through the fence,

and everything dissolved

into the booming and thundering

of explosions and collapsing buildings,

the sound track to his life

since before his memory had begun,

and the fear and fury from that time

knotting his abdomen

filled his existence.

A woman with long hair,

who was wearing a long dress

with bare shoulders

and many necklaces

crossed to where he stood alone

and handed him a slice of bread

wrapped around a gourmet sausage

and some gourmet sauce,

and everything dissolved

into the force of the people smuggler

shoving that horrid dick

into his eleven-year-old face,

and the fear and fury from that time

knotting his abdomen

filled his Western existence.

He bit into the sausage,

felt his teeth burst through its skin,

and everything dissolved

into his sisters’ screams

and the smell of dust and terror

as the fighters from God

were raping them, laughing,

underneath the blood-red sky,

and the fear and fury from that time

knotting his abdomen

filled his Western existence.

He swallowed the bite of sausage,

and felt himself taking into his body

all of the suffering and terror

that the hog from which it had come

had endured on its factory farm

and whilst queuing for its death,

the sadness from that shared horror

knotting his abdomen

and filling his Western existence.

The long-haired woman finally noticed

that he was indeed elsewhere,

and called him back to the here and now,

explaining with a self-satisfied smile

that we determine our own destinies

with the choices that we make,

and that if he was suffering

it was because he chose to do so,

that being a victim was a matter of choice,

and that he could choose to be happy

if that’s what he really wanted,

and everything dissolved

into his mother’s angry voice

when he reached to her for comfort,

snarling blame at him for the rocket

that had destroyed their old Dodge

with his father in it,

her eyes like candles

and her lips like tightropes.

With the fear and fury from that time

knotting his abdomen

and filling his Western existence,

he threw his gourmet sausage

with its gourmet sauce

and what was left of his craft beer

into the front of the woman’s long dress

and ran.