Blessings
He lounged on the deck of his upmarket
beach house,
gazing out at his private dock, his sailing
yacht,
and the ocean beyond, and said aloud, ‘I’m
truly blessed.’
‘Oh?’
she asked, ‘who or what blessed you?’
‘God, of course.’
‘Of
course.’
‘I do work that I love and my children love
me;
I’m truly blessed.’
‘And you grew
up in a warm, supportive family?’
‘It was a golden childhood.
I really was blessed.’
‘And
you were popular at school?’
‘Captain of the First XI!
I tell you, I’m blessed.’
‘Why
you?’
‘Why me what?’
‘Why has God
blessed you
and not the
billions of suffering people
who languish in
poverty and misery?’
He shrugged and smiled charmingly.
‘I guess that they just made poor choices.’
‘Y’know, I once
saw an aerial photo
of a nice,
suburban subdivision
in Oklahoma
after a tornado
had ripped through it,
and all the
nice, upmarket houses
had been
destroyed, except for one,
and it had a
big sign painted on its roof
saying, “Thank
you Lord for saving us!”’
‘Well, it’s only right to give thanks. So?’
‘Do you think
that house’s neighbours
just made poor
choices, too?’
Agricultural
Environmental Aesthetics
He was big boy, a farm boy,
thick of shoulder and thigh,
more likely to shine at rugby than
basketball,
but he gave high-school hoops a go,
despite being one of the few Pākehā on the
team,
his size only partially balancing out
his lack of grace.
He volunteered to help me put in a fence
along the side of my section,
which I’d mentioned at training
that I’d dreaded doing.
Whilst working on it he glowed with pride
and told me that his dad expected him
to do jobs like that right,
and that was that.
He also told me how his dad and uncle
had cleared out a few hectares
of dark, ugly, useless, bush on their land
and replaced it with
nice, flat, green paddocks.
Beautiful!
Beyond
Superficiality
The people we meet –
and we meet people every day
on our twice daily expeditions
around the park
and the neighbourhood footpaths –
often stop to oo and coo
and give a pat and a tickle
and otherwise bestow attention on him
(except of course for those
who assertively or even aggressively
flaunt their Muslim dog aversion,
and their wish-I-could-but-I-can’t
children).
The Little Fella loves it.
He is, undoubtedly, in the upper reaches
of any scale of cuteness around.
He
doesn’t seem cute to me anymore, though.
We spend our time at home together,
and I live with his quirks, his attitudes,
his wilfulness, his inconsistencies, and his
eyes,
eyes that study what’s there to see;
eyes that communicate;
eyes that project an unbroken line
to his familiar but unfathomable brain.
We joke; we negotiate;
we try to understand each other
the best we can, a best that usually
comes up hopelessly, inadequately short
on both our parts.
Cuteness is a superficial category
that condescendingly depersonalises
and implies inconsequentiality.
He doesn’t seem
cute to me anymore.
Well, rarely.
Soul Central
The way we’re used to aint gonna last
The smoke’s taking up the whole room
Searing our nostrils with ash and perfume
Standing Rock’s not really past
The way we’re used to aint good enough
Malls’re going vacant; cars are gonna rust
roads and bridges crumble; big business
going bust
Standing Rock was not a bluff
The way we’re
used to will be no more
Masses migrating
without destination
Millions
sentenced without commutation
Since Standing Rock we’ve known the score
The way we’re used to’s in for a shock
Easy Street’s going muddy, mired in a rut
a place where brutal, ugly bullies strut
Our soul’s home is back in Standing Rock
Surf and Turf
It was the
seventies in sprawling suburbia.
He wore fuchsia
or magenta shirts
with the
buttons undone
down almost to
his navel
and off-white
trousers tight about his basket
and flared from
the knee to 26 inches at the hem,
just covering
his five-inch platform shoes.
He snorted as
much coke as he could get.
He did all
right with the ladies,
the shiny ones
at the glitter discos.
He was an
entrepreneur,
with his late
daddy’s money,
publishing a throwaway
dining-and-entertainment
guide,
selling ads and
printing stories that were really ads,
to people of
his own cultured tastes,
so he wrote his
own restaurant reviews,
expecting
advertising revenue in return,
as well as free
dinners for himself
and his always
provocatively attired dates.
Knowing that
his readers’ idea of class
was pretty much
the same as his,
the second
paragraph of almost all his reviews
began, ‘I
decided to order the surf and turf
in order to
test the range
of the
kitchen’s abilities’,
which
were always up to snuff.
A plate of
sirloin steak and lobster
with fried
potatoes and an uneaten salad,
for free once a
week,
as regular as
shepherd’s pie in a boarding house,
then
unencumbered sex.
A crème de la
crème kind of life.
A
Cultural Oddity
She told me
that her uncle,
a white
American Christian
country-music
person,
whom she
adored,
had told her
never to show her teeth
when she
smiled,
but I don’t
remember her telling me
about his
explanation
for
why.
I imagine it was probably
because he believed that
toothy smiles aren’t
polite or well-mannered,
or maybe just not nice,
or that people who are
polite, well-mannered, nice,
or all three
just don’t show their teeth when they smile,
but these explanations beg the question
of why it isn’t and they don’t.
Maybe he thought a show of teeth
is a sign of aggression –
the bloody fang, and all that –
or maybe it’s because where he came from
rural white American Christians
tend to have rotting and discoloured teeth
that are unpleasant to look at.
Maybe something else.
I sure as shit don’t know.
Incompleted
Goal For Hugging
I remember that
when people described my daddy
they often used
the term ‘heavy-set’,
but to me he
was just big and round,
with a round
head and a round face
and glasses
with round lenses,
and I was just
little,
so when I
hugged him,
my cheek
against the ribbing of his undershirt
and the smell
of his tobacco filling my nose,
I couldn’t get
my arms
all the way
around him;
he joked that
he had to lose weight so I could,
but he liked
sour cream or cream cheese
on it seemed
almost everything but meat,
and lots and
lots of fatty meat,
and he drove
himself entirely too hard,
and my mother’s
nagging and scolding
stressed him
out, so in search of comfort
he ate more
animal fat and worked longer hours
and
couldn’t stop smoking.
Maybe he was
waiting for me to get bigger
so that I could
eventually
get my hugs all
the way around him
without him
giving up his cream and pork chops,
but he died
when I was still too small,
my mother’s
nasty, querulous scolding
the last thing
that he heard.
American Presidents Since The Last Good One
Ronald Reagan:
a
prime example of the Dunning-Kruger effect,
a genial dullard with a seductive baritone
voice
who left most things to venal ideologues,
who behaved like pigs at a
trough.
G.H.W. Bush:
a
bland, faceless billionaire
who blandly and facelessly promoted the
interests
of other bland, faceless billionaires,
occasionally with a twinge of
conscience.
Bill Clinton:
charming
and full of shit,
the best Republican president since
Eisenhower,
the banksters’ buddy
with a passion for punishing
poor people.
G.W. Bush:
a
privileged, slow-witted, befuddled
instrument of the oil industry
and a cluelessly genocidal war
criminal.
Barack Obama:
a
warm, classy, intelligent, smooth-talking
purveyor of corporate dominance and
military imperialism
with a human face.
The Donald:
in
it only for himself, of course,
corruption his passion,
dickheadedness his guiding principle,
and if you don’t like it he’ll call you
names.
Rhonda
On The March
Some poor sap
with mental illness
was looking up at a bridge
contemplating suicide
when some poor woman tourist
strolled by enjoying the riverside,
and he killed her, instead.
A political-activist friend of mine
organised a march
from the riverside to the city centre
to Take Back The Night.
I happened to be walking
my late fox terrier, Rhonda,
when our route crossed that of
the march.
My attitude toward taking part in marches
has always been what you might expect
from a shifty-eyed introvert,
but my friend saw me and waved,
so Rhonda and I went with the
flow.
The chant was call-and-response:
‘What do we want?’
‘Safe streets!’
‘When do we want them?’
‘Now!’
Being less of a chanter than a marcher,
I just walked,
but Rhonda got into it,
and for several blocks it was:
‘What do we want?’
‘Woof! Woof!’
‘When do we want them?’
‘Woof!’
Neither The Problem Nor The Solution
Capitalism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Socialism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Globalism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Parochialism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Anarchy is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Communism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Consumerism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Naturalism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Religion is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Atheism is
neither the problem nor the solution.
Personal
freedom is neither the problem nor the solution.
Group
solidarity is neither the problem nor the solution.
Sex is neither the problem nor the solution, well sorta.
The problem is
people –
people being
stupid,
people being
venal,
people being
assholes,
people being
dickheads,
people being
wankers,
people being
shits,
and I can’t think of anything to do about that.
I’ve been an
asshole far too often myself to judge,
more so when I
was younger than lately, though,
and although
I’ve tried my best to desist,
mostly out of
shame from realising
I was being the
kind of person I dislike,
ingrained
childhood cultural conditioning
has let me down from time to time.
I suppose that
the only solutions lie in wisdom,
which is
difficult for people to recognise,
hopeless to
organise and mobilise,
ridiculously
easy to crush,
and almost
always attainable only too late.
Hole
I dream that I
live in a hole
dug out of the
side of a hill,
beneath a
peeling-paint old wooden house
with three
floors cut up into cheap flats.
I know none of
those living above my head.
A section of
exposed pipe
on my hole’s
uphill earthen wall
leaks water
constantly
down a clay
sluice
to an irregular
opening
at the far end
of the dirt floor,
which is where I piss and shit.
I enter and leave,
but mostly look out,
through a narrow
opening
no higher than
my knees,
that I sometimes
obscure
with an armful of twigs and brush.
I spend most
hours lying on my belly,
my head facing
the entrance,
observing the
world outside,
which is at its
best from dusk till dawn,
and during steady rainfall.
Often I lie
there with a gun,
a magazine-fed
sniper’s rifle,
my eyes alert
for justifiable targets,
whose kneecaps I
shoot from time to time,
before obscuring
my entrance
by pulling in
that garden rubbish,
and easing back
into the darkness
of my hole.
Porfirio and Sven
He was tall and
broad-shouldered and generally burly,
impressively
strong and physically commanding,
with a bushy,
reddish-blond moustache
that drooped
down on either side of his mouth to his chin,
and thick,
shaggy, strawberry-blond hair down to his shoulders.
His
name was Porfirio.
He was lithe
and finely proportioned and of medium height,
olive-skinned
and uncommonly graceful, an intuitive dancer,
with flashing dark eyes, and flashing white
teeth when he smiled,
and smooth, dark hair, a dark, two-piece,
pencil-thin moustache
that he occasionally stroked with his long,
thin, gracile fingers.
His name was Sven.
People don’t always look like their names.
They were born on the same day in the same
obstetrics unit,
if that makes any difference.
