Urban Life Continuing

                 Days

The days slip by,

as they’ve always done,

some beclouded by hope

and others clarified with despair,

depending on occurrences

of positive or negative reinforcement

from a human environment

that has its own fish to fry,

and also maybe depending on

diet, exercise, drink, smoke, pills,

and how bad my back hurts;

winding them down

pointlessly and unrewardingly,

here in Hamilton,

a city that’s had to cobble together

some kind of wafer-thin history,

but does have a variety of bridges,

at least for those of us who walk.

For drivers they’re just stretches of street

with no right or left turns possible.

It’s a pleasant city,

with seasonal weather,

an unlikely target for terrorism,

where hundreds of its inhabitants

don’t ask me about my accent

or where I’m from.

Where I’m from.

Shit.

I guess everyone knows

where I’m going, though,

on one of these days

as it slips by.

   Springtime Dusk

I went into town

– the CBD –

after work one Friday,

and outside TimeZone

observed a gaggle

of teenage losers

wearing the current uniform,

dimwitted willing victims

with cigarettes dangling from their lips,

practising slow, clumsy, high

martial-arts-type kicks

that would be easy to

ankle-grab and upend.

They clearly considered themselves cool.

Maybe – but I doubt it.

          Watch On the Bridge

Walking over the bridge

in the flannel-soft early spring evening,

I glanced at my watch.

The kick-off was set for eight.

My watch said seven thirty-five.

The pub was about ten minutes away.

I wondered if I was too early or too late.

Too early and I’d have to hang around

waiting for my mates,

surrounded by drinking strangers –

something uncongenial to Jewish DNA.

Too late and I wouldn’t get a seat,

it being a big game.

I generally like to arrive

right-on-the-money on time,

which means that for social occasions

I’m always too early.

This time, though,

no specific on-time was in the brief,

and so I got there neither too early or too late.

    A Physio Failing At Psychotherapy

The physio told me that the reason why

I did only slightly more

of the exercises that he prescribed

and didn’t go off to exercise at the pool

some unspecified number

of times per week was because I

chose

not to do what I could for my painful back.

He ranted on for a while, using the phrase,

‘You made your choice’ several times.

He didn’t explain why I made these shameful choices,

leaving me to conclude

that my reasons were based

on some deep – or shallow – moral failing within me,

just basic inferiority.

It wasn’t only because

he was about half my age and had muscles on top of muscles

that I didn’t scream, ‘Bullshit!’ into his face

and go for his throat.

There was also the paperwork that would be involved

in a police complaint.

My actual reaction, however,

involving the words, ‘semantic sophistry,’

was enough for him to terminate

my course of physiotherapy prematurely.

When I lodged a formal complaint

with the Health and Disability Commission,

the hospital’s Head of physiotherapy

phoned me and spent a half an hour

with some laughably unconvincing ass-covering

before assigning another physio

to my case.

                       Cosmopolitan and Sophisticated

Hamilton is clearly becoming more cosmopolitan and sophisticated.

As I was striding along on my morning walk,

a practice I refused to abandon after my fox terrier’s demise,

I saw a short, middle-aged Chinese man

with imperfectly groomed longish hair

and wearing a rumpled but expensive-looking dark suit

stumbling drunkenly and occasionally shouting in short bursts of Chinese

on the Victoria Street footpath at six-forty-five post-summer-dawn.

He crossed Alma Street without looking

and then lurched similarly into Victoria Street

in front of an oncoming SUV,

somehow making it safely to the centre median.

I strode on without monitoring his further progress.

Nothing like this would’ve been possible thirty years earlier.

Hamilton is clearly becoming more cosmopolitan and sophisticated.

      The Oakley Street Litterbug

It’s a tree-shaded residential street,

but not all that quiet,

as it’s a connector

between River Road and Boundary Road,

since they don’t intersect,

Boundary Road flying over River Road

to become the Whitiora Bridge.

City buses use it.

It was on my walking route

to the Pak’n Save.

From time to time,

an enormous amount

of torn-up paper bits

surrounds one of the Oakley Street bus stops.

When the weather goes in that direction,

this mass of litter can spread

as far away as River Road.

It’s irritatingly ugly.

I remember reading about this

many years ago,

back when I read the paper

and before I lived in Claudelands,

I think.

The article said that the litter

was torn-up Lotto and scratchy slips.

The cops were on the case.

Well, it’s been seven or eight years now,

and they still haven’t stopped the litterbug.

Somebody cleans up his or her crap, though,

every time – within a few hours.

       Lottery Karma

I saw him on Victoria Street

sitting on the footpath

his back against a wall,

a bushy-bearded bloke

with sad eyes

and a sad message

bearing a hard-luck story

written on the torn-off side

of a brown cardboard box

on his lap.

I went to my favourite

downtown dairy

to buy my Lotto ticket,

where the friendly

middle-aged woman

at the register

always told me,

‘Good luck, eh?’

when she handed it over,

and I always answered,

‘Thank you.’

On my way back up Victoria Street

to the Claudelands Bridge and home

I put my last dollar-ten change

in his beanie,

lying there on the ground.

He said, ‘Thank you very much.’

I said, ‘Cheers.’

That Lotto ticket,

by the way,

turned out to be just another loser,

of course,

but that’s okay.

                         Sadness

An enormously obese woman on a park bench,

the sides of her torso bulging down almost to her knees

eating a large box of fried chicken and chips

at ten o’clock in the morning,

her hair dyed a garishly unnatural canary yellow –

almost greenish rather than blond –

with coppery-coloured streaks,

a small boy sitting beside her,

unaware that this giant of a woman

whom he clearly loved

was in the process of killing herself.

I didn’t stare, but just that glimpse

made me feel sadder

than my usual low-level ambient sadness,

which was hypocritical of someone like me,

drinking myself to death, as I am,

in a world that dishes out death

and sadness

in enormous quantities

as a matter of course.

  Intruding Into Personal Space In Public Places

A young dickhead

on the cusp between adolescence and young adulthood

swaggering Ward Street

just outside Centre Place

called out,

loudly and confidently,

‘I really like your ass, baby!’

to a pair of girls walking by

– he didn’t specify which one,

but he got his mate to snicker.

I wondered how he could do that.

Brought up differently to me, I suppose.

Two days later,

outside Sky City in Auckland,

I watched as a voluptuously fleshy young Chinese woman

wearing skin-tight,

super-short cut-offs

strutted her stuff

along the footpath,

prompting one of the deros

sitting on the wall

to call out,

‘Get some clothes on!’

I didn’t wonder how he could do that.

Grog removes the ability

to give a fuck.

                          Two Hamilton CBD Women

Crossing Claudelands Road at the light at Victoria Street,

she was still youngish – five years on either side of 30, I’d reckon,

in business drag with a sheath dress that emphasised a fit lower half,

although she gave the impression that her couture

and her fetching, determinedly ploughing-ahead silhouette

were not matters at the forefront of her consciousness;

she was carrying a stack of document boxes somewhat awkwardly,

her face tight with intensity, her lips pursed into a strained boxlike shape,

sending out the overall impression of coping

with everyday harassment and continuous moderate displeasure.

She strode purposefully through Centre Place Mall,

a tiny, child-height woman as thin as knotted rags.

Taken out of context she gave no clue to her size –

everything from her shoulder-length hair

to every visible item of her clothing was naturally proportional.

She seemed, not exactly unaware, but dismissive of her diminutive size,

as if it certainly didn’t matter,

and anybody who acted or even thought as if it did was a fucking fool,

but that didn’t matter one way or the other, least of all to her.

No victim, her; the casual, indifferent confidence in her posture and stride

marked her as a woman not to be fucked with, despite her size,

as a woman who would make you laughable if you even tried.

                   Secular Smiles

The stink of tobacco smoke

disgusts the hell out of me,

and I feel only contempt

for those who direct the activities

of the multinational tobacco corporations.

I’ve never been able to enjoy rap or hip hop,

maybe because I’m too old and white,

or that I prefer instrumental music

without any voices.

Still, as I walked by Union Park,

a pocket-sized patch on the quiet street where I live,

and saw the three young Kiwi Somali blokes,

all somewhere close to twenty years old,

hangin out

out of sight

from the flow of traffic to the mosque,

some four blocks or so away,

reciting rap lines to each other

in a good-enough mimicry

of African-American English

and smoking cigarettes

an hour or so before sundown

during Ramadan,

all of them laughing and smiling,

I smiled, too.