These Things Must Exist
The images swim out of various
parts
of the anglophone cultural miasma:
Hearts and floral arrangements
and darling crayon drawings by
kindy kids
frame the tender depictions of
present-day madonnas
and the warm, fuzzy paeans of
purest love
that ooze out all over the
place
on Mothers Day
and its commercial build-up …
I imagine that’s real for most
people,
but it sure isn’t real for me;
I do struggle, badly, to be resilient,
somehow.
A long table covered with
home-made food
and surrounded by four
generations, with in-laws,
of a large and safe and
boisterous family;
kids of all sizes climbing on
trees or fences or furniture,
more than a dozen lifetimes of
interwoven experiences
inevitable disagreements
tempered by shared values,
with love the prophylactic
against distrust, or meanness,
or subtle challenges and
psychological threats ...
I imagine that’s real for many people,
depending on their culture and situation,
but my family’s
just not like that.
Two silver-haired Old Dears
looking lovingly into each
other’s eyes,
holding hands in the park or by
the sea,
or maybe on a shady front
porch,
their mutual empathy and trust
automatic,
their souls suffused with their
shared nearly-everything …
I wonder how real that is in
the city;
it sure isn’t real to me,
but I have coping mechanisms.
The
View From The Launch
A certain tension pulsates
beneath the surface
at buffets put on at minor
events
between: (a) the people who
brought
their signature snack delicacies
for the common board
and who want to see all of it
eaten,
as much to feel rewarded for
their efforts
as to avoid the trouble of
disposing of it,
and (b) everybody else,
each of whom is all too aware
of the opprobrium and ridicule
and the sneering about gluttony
–
sometimes via witty jokes or
comments,
but often, more tastefully,
through visible-but-unspoken looks –
that rain down on those people
whom our more judgemental
friends
feel they have reason to accuse
of making a pig of themselves.
It only has to happen once.
When only a bit younger I
didn’t give a shit
and tucked in heartily
when the goodies were good,
but now it just seems easier
to avoid risking that sort of
tediousness.
Nobody actually needs yummy snacks.
It’s only pleasure, after all.
The stars, the cosmos,
have no meaning for my dog.
Does this mean they have no
meaning at all?
Well, yes and no.
If you know what I mean –
or even if you don’t.
It depends on what you mean
by meaning –
and what the stars
and galaxies
and other points of light
in the night sky
(when the city lights don’t
interfere)
mean to you.
My dog has other things on his
mind.
Me? I like fresh fruit for
breakfast.
Mutant Amoebas
I happened to mention
that I like soy sauce on my brussels sprouts.
He snorted, ‘You can’t really like
brussels sprouts;
they’re nasty-nasty-nasty, and I should
know,
because I have Very Good Taste,
better than all those food snobs
and you sheeple who go ooh and ahh
over so-called food that you really can’t
stand
because you lack confidence –
fakes, all of you.’
I said, sighing inwardly
because I didn’t want him to notice
(but he probably did),
‘No, your hatred for brussels sprouts
just means that your TAS2R38 gene
has mutated to make a protein
that misconstrues certain substances
in brussels sprouts and other brassicas
for a chemical called phenylthiocarbamide,
which is unpleasantly bitter.’
He smirked disdainfully at me, sneering,
‘Are you telling me that I’m a mutant?’
‘Every living thing,’
I told him with little hope that it’d get
through,
‘from octopuses to oak trees
to pigeons to people,
including both of us,
is basically a mutant amoeba.’
He
smiled at me with condescending loathing,
‘Not
me, mate.
Speak
for yourself.’
The Solution
Human civilisation is a mess
That’s always been the case
(the record’s clear),
only now its capacity to
destroy itself
has become so sophisticated
and so powerful and so tempting
in so many different ways
that civilisational collapse
seems imminent and inescapable.
Of course, numerous individuals
and scattered clumps of people
have proposed numerous
reasonable ways
to at least delay this
self-destruction,
but without political wisdom,
these are likely to come to
nought,
and political wisdom is in
short supply,
as it always has been (the record’s
clear).
Philosophers and statesmen
(note the gendered term)
have since ancient days
argued over what is the best
way
to sort out people’s power
relationships,
but no system or philosophy or
ideology
has come close to being
what it needs to be.
I, however, have the best
solution
for the best outcomes for
everyone:
make me King of the World
(or Emperor or CEO).
The title doesn’t matter,
just that what I say, goes.
After all, I do have the optimal
values system, knowledge base,
higher-level cognitive abilities,
and acquired wisdom,
modest personal needs,
and just the right psychological disorders
for the job.
M.O.G.
If the rain is, indeed,
the tears of the Virgin Mary
weeping for our sins,
a whole lot of sinning
must be going on.
Fresh Grapes from Chile
The sun sucked up that little
spludge of water,
no bigger then the last joint
of my thumb,
sucked it up into a cloud from
somewhere in the ocean,
or maybe from a lake or a
swamp,
or the river two blocks from my
house
into which my urine also flows,
and it wafted all the way
across the Pacific
to the Atacama region of Chile
where it fell in a shower, or
maybe a thunderstorm,
onto a vineyard growing red
globe table grapes,
then rose up through roots to inhabit
a grape of exactly that size
in a bunch that some underpaid
person picked,
before other underpaid workers
packed it
into the hold of a
climate-warping airplane,
in which it rode for more than
10,000 climate-warping kays,
ending up briefly at the Vege
King in the Fairfield
before riding again,
muscle-powered, inside my backpack
to my kitchen, where I popped
it into my mouth,
and deeply enjoyed the moment
of that juicy grape-explosion
when my teeth crushed it.
Endless aeons of cosmic
expansion, geological activity,
biological evolution – of both
grapes and me –
and global human economic
development
created that one juicily
worthwhile moment
before my species fucks things
up for ourselves
more or less terminally,
and no more Chilean red globe
grapes
fly pollutingly to New Zealand
for worthwhile moments and transcontinental recycling.
A Cultural Phenomenon
Heavy metal,
it seems to me,
is a musical, attitudinal, and
sartorial expression
of a world-view
and cultural-values profile
that emphasises the grandness
of imperialism and conquest
and triumphalism and domination
and violence and cruelty
for people who may be
benefiting
from the historical
consequences
of such things,
but who feel cheated by the way
that those who still enjoy them
to the full
– especially the domination
stuff –
have eroded the metalheads’
enjoyment
into puffed-chest fantasies of
long ago
– especially the domination
stuff –
as their own life experiences
of their civilisation,
born of violent conquest as it
was,
and imbued with its rationale
as it is,
has turned, inexplicably to
them,
to shit.
Just One Little Thing
Most of my exes
(and I have too many of them
scattered about the globe)
would probably take me back
if only I were a different
person,
which of course I’m not.
