Market Forces

        Simple and Straightforward

I remember seeing on TV,

back when Mugabe’s thugs

had been running particularly amok,

the widow of a white planter

whom they’d killed

sadly telling the cameras,

with a fox terrier intermittently licking her face,

that she couldn’t understand

why they’d do that –

her husband had been

a perfectly good man –

perfectly good,

kind and generous,

never hurt anyone.

His crop

had been tobacco,

which kills about as many people yearly

as all the thugs and terrorists and military order-followers

and other brutal specimens

in the world,

combined.

             Goo Happiness

For some reason

the free sport channel

provided a more than steady stream

of a stunning variety of commercials

for a brand of face goo.

All of the many testimonials they presented

from men and women,

girls and boys

of multitudinous skin tones

and ancestries,

about how wonderfully this goo works

made me wish that I had acne

so that I could send them money

to clear it up.

This is, of course, clearly fatuous,

as I have little money

and I’ve never had acne;

the one time that I did have a few zits,

when I was eighteen,

I got rid of them using just plain soap.

                   Market Forces My Arse

I bought the singlet I was wearing

under my long-sleeved shirt as I composed this

from the sheltered IHC workshop

in Otorohanga twenty-three years earlier.

I can’t say that free markets and trade

and the concomitant slick marketing

has ever done me better than that. 

      The $5,000 Question & Consumerism

The bloke sitting next to me

at the whisky tasting

put down his glass and asked,

‘If all of a sudden you had $5,000,

what would you buy?’ or words to that effect.

‘I like to ask people I meet this,’ he went on.

‘The important thing is that it’s not about winning Lotto;

it’s just five thousand dollars.’ or words to that effect.

I put down my empty whisky glass

and answered without hesitation

that I’d pay for a private operation

to remove my cataracts,

which just happens to cost

a bit less than five grand.

He clearly disliked this answer

and wanted to know what I’d buy.

I couldn’t think of anything else for the money

that would come even close

to improving my enjoyment of life.

Many months later,

whilst walking to the bus station

to get a ride to a performance,

I cut through the downtown mall

in order to reap the benefits

of air conditioning.

Glancing into the glittering display windows

along the way,

it struck me that none of them displayed anything

that I’d want to buy,

even if I’d had the money to buy it.

                  Language Evolving, Sort Of

In 2005 people called older mobile phones ‘bricks’

because they were so much larger and clunkier than the new ones.

In 2016 people call the phones from 2005 ‘bricks’,

I suppose because they’re so much smaller and less clunky

than the newer ones.

            The Ethics of Biscuit Buying

Even if I could afford it,

I doubt that I’d buy any of that

gee-whizz-that’s-really-amazing shit from Apple

with a brand name starting with a lower-case i,

after having read reliable accounts

of the conditions in its Chinese contractors’ sweatshops.

I have, however, developed a fondness for a brand of biscuit

called Breakfast Crackers.

It only costs a dollar thirty-nine per package,

but it’s made in Fiji.

I wonder how much of the dollar thirty-nine

that I spend on each package

goes to the military dictatorship.

             Let’s Keep It Upbeat, People!

Watching Australian Better Homes and Gardens

on TV with the sound off,

my overwhelming impression

was of all the presenters

grinning so maniacally as they talked

that it was hard to believe that they weren’t all on meds.

     The Politics of Interurban Ridicule

He told me with great merriment in his voice

that instead of the standard word, Glaswegian,

what blokes in Edinburg call a bloke from Glasgow

is “Yuh Weedgee cunt.”

This didn’t seem funny to me at all.

Expressing hostility-tinged-with-superiority 

toward someone just because they’re from another city

is just plain ugly and stupid.

This hostility is also certainly

a proletarian and underclass characteristic

not shared by bankers and other rich people,

and helps to keep the lower classes

divided and distracted and easier to exploit.

Har-de-har-har.

                             Popsicle Truck Bell

I drove a popsicle truck for the first half of the summer of 1966

before going to a far-off out-of-season ski resort

for the writers’ workshop where I lost my taste for the poetry racket.

As I drove slowly through the suburbs,

in between stopping to sell popsicles or chase kids off the truck’s rear bumper

I pushed a button that rang what sounded like a loud bicycle bell.

It could have been worse.

The fellow who drove the soft-ice-cream truck told me

that he heard his truck’s music-box version

of ‘Greensleeves’ in his dreams at night.

                   What We’re Worth

I remember reading sometime in the early nineties

that for legal reasons

due to some mandated cost-benefit analysis

or something

some jurisdiction or insurance company

or something

had to assign a value to people’s lives

in order to choose a site

for some environmentally insane,

potentially deadly infrastructure.

The economists they hired decided the value

as each person’s expected future lifetime earnings,

factoring in life expectancy, age of retirement,

and similar stuff.

This makes sense,

because rich people’s lives

really are worth more than poor people’s.

Aren’t they?

Maybe those economists

could have factored in some non-monetary indicators

of the value of human’s lives,

at least before calling themselves scientists.

If somebody paid them to do it,

I’m sure they could come up with a formula

to put a monetary value on love, too.

Maybe they’d need separate mathematical formulae

for romantic love, parental love, puppydog love,

and love of money.

Divorce courts have to do it all the time.