Birds + Music Stuff

                                            Birds

        Non-Battery

I picked up a beautiful,

cerulean-blue bird’s egg

from the ground

in some bush by the river.

I considered eating it,

but someone warned me

that it had probably been fertilised.

Sure enough,

when some cheese slid into it

in the fridge door

and broke it

it was mostly blood.

Poor sad mama bird.

         Stale Bread

Toward the end of spring

I took to leaving

little pieces

of stale bread

out on the fencetop

for the neighbourhood birds.

Watching them

carefully approach

the bread

and peck at it,

I marvelled

at their acute consciousness

of everything

around them

and wondered about

their supposedly short lives,

although I’ve seen

remarkably few

bird carcasses

lying about.

There Had To Be A Catch Somewhere

A bird – some kind of finch, I think,

but I could be wrong –

alighted on my patio wall

above the bird feeder.

She stood there, alert,

moving her head into various poses,

checking things out,

then flew to the stalk

of an agapanthus flower

right in front of the feeder

and cased the situation again.

She repeated her reconnaissance

on the board behind the feeder

and on one of the feeder’s perches

before poking her face

into the feeder itself.

Then, without eating any

of the cornucopia of birdseed before her,

she flew away.

I can only conclude

that she decided that the whole set-up

was indeed a set-up

and far too good to be true.

       Wasteful Avian Pickiness

When they ate at my bird feeder

the members of the local winged set

spilt about as much onto the ground

as they got into their bellies.

Sloppy, sloppy, sloppy.

I thought.

It amazed me that

even when the feeder was about empty

or they were fighting over access to it

I’d never seen any of them flying groundward

to retrieve what must have been a considerable feast,

so I gathered up a couple of kilos of it,

put it in a plastic bag,

and when the time came

filled the feeder with it.

They wouldn’t touch it.

It hadn’t been sloppiness at all.

Picky, picky, picky.

                                      Җ                Җ                Җ

                                              Music Stuff

                      Swing

Although I listen to music

almost constantly during my waking hours,

and consider much of it

to be pure artistic communion

with the world of the spirit

(as I composed this I had a CD

of Francesco Geminiani’s concerti grossi on the box –

Oh, yeah!),

I’m sad to report

that I’m unable to stand the sound

of such musical genres

as opera, heavy metal –

both of which seem about the same to me –

rap-hiphop, romantic-era symphonies,

mainstream pop, marches,

and swing-era big-band dance music.

In regard to the last of these, of course,

my aversion is connected with

my maternal unit’s fondness for it,

as I have an aversion to anything

that my mind associates with her,

but I also once had a job as a waiter

in a theme restaurant

that played a tape loop

of Glenn Miller swing favourites

non-stop throughout the dinner shift.

Over and over.

Gaaah!

            Music Absorption

Tramadol, the super-duper analgesic

that I was taking for the pain

complementing my broken ribs,

had the side effect

of being a perfect enabler

for music absorption,

or absorbing myself into the music,

rather than the other way around,

which is what I had been more accustomed to doing.

This made listening to music

that I’d already heard often

a strangely new experience.

Within a few days

my system adjusted to the drug,

and that strange new experience

had become a thing of the past.

               King Curtis

I was listening to a King Curtis CD,

which was magic in itself,

and couldn’t keep my mind from wandering

to his death at the knife of a junkie

who’d chosen his front steps

as a likely place to shoot up.

This is the world in which we live.

                          Lemmy

Judging by the huge and extended outpouring

of lamentations and elegies

from my friends and contacts

upon his demise,

I learnt that the bloke was the benchmark

against whom it is appropriate

to measure all others’ ways of life

in the rock-and-roll-and-heavy-metal universe:

a cultural icon;

the apotheosis of black t-shirtedness.

I’d never heard of him at all when he was alive.

Oh, my.

Where have I been?

         Hip-Hop With The Sound Off

I was watching Maori TV with the sound off,

and between the basketball and the league

they filled in some time

with what appeared to be a music video.

So I watched –

with the sound off –

a group of hip-hop performers

going through formulaic motions –

hand gestures, facial expressions, body language –

identical to each other,

and identical to what I’d seen

from such performers

for about a quarter of a century,

conforming to the protocols,

whilst pretending to be rebels,

as if imitators led rebellions;

pretending to be artists,

as if imitators create art.

                                 Homeboy

I grew up on the outskirts of George Thorogood’s home town,

but the first time I saw him perform was about 2750 km away

in San Antonio, Texas

in a venue usually dedicated to the art of professional wrestling

that smelled like it.

As I walked there along dark residential working-class streets,

the closer I came to the place

I encountered with increasing frequency

voices from the shadows chanting the mantra,

“Speed? Acid? Lids?”

The opening act, Omar and the Howlers, never showed up,

but George and the Destroyers

came on early to placate the restless crowd

with straightforward, no-nonsense, blues bar-band rock

and did a damn fine job of it;

I thought that it was cool when George

invited a female journalist in the front row

to meet him after the show

for him to give her something to write about.

A quarter-century or so later,

I went to see George and the Destroyers

at the Mount Smart Super Top in Auckland,

and they rocked as well as ever.

I was especially moved at the time,

having neither a haircut or a real job.

This time, though, they were the opening act,

and in the post-concert jam

I’m afraid to say that George got blown off the stage,

guitar-improvisation-wise,

by the headline act, Carlos Santana,

whose home town had been Tijuana.