Tired
Solitude born of reclusiveness
born of terror born of abuse
is exhausting in many ways –
mentally, physically,
emotionally, and
for want of a better word,
spiritually.
It leaves me without the inner
strength
to take care of myself
or of some of the things I use,
and nobody else has any reason
or motivation
to take care of me or my stuff,
anyhow,
so things just don’t get done,
and it doesn’t matter.
I survive without.
This condition inhibits me from
accomplishing
things that have always brought
me pleasure.
The answers to the nagging
voice in my head
that repeatedly asks, why bother?
are obvious, and yet I can’t
use them.
Sometimes coffee helps, though.
Not A
Contradiction
People who know me,
don’t.
That’s not me.
I’m the one
who’s by himself.
One Problem
The
number of
failed
relationships
and
the amount
of
consequent solitude
that
has characterised
my
adult life
has
been,
I
suppose,
inevitable
because
I’m not
what
–
let’s
stress that that’s what,
not
whom –
what
women,
or
at least all those I’ve known,
want.
A Scene At Arthur’s Creek 1956
I
was ten the first time I went to overnight camp,
where
I was miserable, of course.
Okay,
I would’ve been miserable anywhere.
It
was about a half a year after my daddy had died,
and
although I was glad to be away
from
my mother and my brother,
I
couldn’t help but carry them inside my mind
as
an ominous omnipresent non-specific sense of threat.
The
other kids at the camp all seemed like threats to me, too.
I wasn’t making any
lifelong friends.
So
I feigned illness,
and
was chuffed to discover that I did have a slight fever,
so
they sent me to the infirmary at the camp next door.
I
walked there by myself,
and stopped by a
little brooklet beside the path.
I
sat on a rock and stared
at
the glittering, smooth-flowing water,
the
rocks of various sizes and shapes,
the
gravel with its uneven pebbles,
the
tree saplings along the edge of the woods
framing
my scene.
I
stared and stared.
I
stared at it fixedly for about ten or fifteen minutes.
My
ten-year-old self telling my ten-year-old brain
that
I was fixing that exact scene in my memory
exactly,
and
would always remember it
exactly,
and
more than sixty years later,
I
do.
Exactly.
Not Suited For It
I read mostly crime fiction,
I suppose because
the arrogant, egocentric,
psychopathic, sociopathic,
overconfident mentality
of the characters of the serious criminals
and some of the detectives
that such books portray
is so fascinatingly strange, exotic, and alien
to my timid, deferential, low-personal-risk mind.
Security
The
trillions and trillions of dollars
that
people, businesses, and governments
spend
every year on security
is
truly boggling,
since security
is, ultimately, an illusion.
It’s always
seemed that way to me, anyway.
When
I was 18 I shifted from my local uni to another
about
350 kays from where my family lived
in
a jurisdiction where
the
legal age for buying beer was 18.
I
drank heaps, but only after finishing studying,
so I got good
grades whilst my drinking buddies flunked out.
Once,
when visiting me,
my
mother asked me why I was drinking so much.
I
replied reflexively,
involuntarily
regressing into a small child’s voice,
that
it was because I was insecure.
She
came back at me sneering,
her
voice dripping with sarcasm and contempt,
“What
do you have to be insecure about?”
I
recovered and, putting on my young-scholar character,
said
that the world is a particularly insecure place,
numbly
unaware at the time
that
her question answered itself.
Progressive
Acquaintanceship
The better I get to know a
person,
the stranger that person
usually seems to become to me,
as the categories wash and fade
away
in the rising tide of always
inadequate
and usually contradictory
particulars.
My
Locus of Control
I fuck up often, y’know.
This is, I realise, a
subjective evaluation,
but since I have what
psychologists call
a strong internal locus of
control,
that’s an evaluation I frequently make.
Maybe things just happen,
and that’s just the way things
are.
Maybe some people take the time
and trouble
to fuck me over just for the
hell of it,
and cleverly cover their
tracks.
Maybe I’m a repeatedly pathetic
victim
of systems beyond my control.
Maybe I actually do things
better than I think,
or at least as well as a
reasonable person would expect,
and I’m just too fucking hard on myself.
But I don’t believe that’s so.
I fuck up often, y’know,
and I’m hard on myself when I
do.
The Hot Line
Maybe the main thing
that prevents me
from being overtly suicidal
is that I really don’t give a shit
whether I live or die.
Insomnia
I don’t wanna talk
about why I had insomnia, or how,
because that’s several different long stories,
and I like to keep these verses short.
Dealing with it, however,
has been a different story,
and a problem that grew steadily
until my GP
scripted me Zopiclone.
Sometimes I was able
to concentrate on my breathing,
as my old yoga-meditation guru,
a German named Erhard, or Hardie,
taught me,
but not all that often
and never for long
before the
demons took over.
The demons are what
shrink-talk calls ideations
involving the relentless personal abuse I received
from family members for most of my life.
These demons usually express themselves
into impotently reliving episodes of physical abuse
by my older male sibling,
the word ‘brother’ having connotations that don’t apply.
Zopiclone
somehow prevents this.
The other kind of demon
consists of earworms
involving passages of pop songs
that I could never stand
repeating themselves for hours
inside my head,
despite all efforts to focus my mind elsewhere.
Zopiclone doesn’t protect me
from that particular torture.
What A Day
I’m
tired of daydreaming.
It
makes me feel such a pathetic git
that
daydreams are about all
that
make my reality seem bearable,
but
that’s the way it is.
I’m
tired of daydreaming,
all
right,
but
I fear what it’d be like
to
stop.
I
wondered, as the dog settled in on my lap,
if
I was just a comfy surface upon which to snooze,
or
if something personal within her nervous system
was
involved.
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