Poetry 2

      Why Are You Reading This?

Sometimes the absurdity of it all

becomes absolutely clear to me,

and I wonder at the folly of writing it down.

                  Artistic Intercourse & Masturbation

I was whingeing to Martin

one day when we’d been rehearsing for a performance

about how many verses I had backed up on my hard drive

that I might never get the chance to perform,

especially since my editing work had declined drastically

since the managing director of the agency that sent me work

had fucked up its website due to his overwhelming

egotism and incompetence,

leaving me with time to compose a startling number of these

whilst sitting around and waiting for work.

Martin said something about, well,

the creative act is sort of worthwhile in itself,

but I responded that I’d rather have an audience,

as the difference between having my verses just sit there on the hard drive

and other people either reading or seeing me perform them

is like the difference between wanking and fucking.

The major problem, of course,

is that I’ve never had the confidence

to be adroit at the art of seduction,

let alone in the sense of

selling myself or my artistic efforts.

          Readings

It always astounds me

that people who are in attendance

when I perform my verses

without musicians

seem to enjoy hearing me do so.

I doubt if I would.

                           The Solstice Gig

It was just the way that things worked out.

We had this gig to perform

at a private party a block or so from my house

on the evening of the solstice,

which was the day that Martin finished shifting flats.

We never even got the chance

for me to read him the verses that I’d selected.

Since I hadn’t heard from him, for one reason or another,

by mid-afternoon,

I came to the conclusion that our performance would be cancelled,

and treated it like any other day.

What this meant, of course, was that I drank a bottle of cheap merlot

with my daily meal between three and three-thirty,

and then another one with my mystery novel

after walking the dog – between four-thirty and five,

and then drifted off to sleep.

Martin’s banging on my door awakened me.

The gig was on.

I don’t remember getting dressed, walking over there,

or setting up my music stand.

I remember seeing Vera, and that Ravi person,

but everybody else was a blur, like on the periphery of a dream.

I remember delivering the introduction I’d planned,

and wondering, as Martin plucked his bass with the first title,

how he was gonna fake it.

I don’t remember finishing the first verse,

or anything else about the performance,

except falling down twice.

I don’t remember walking home.

People told me later that, except for the falling-down part,

my performance had been a good one,

but the whole experience made me sad, anyway.

I’d liked that set when I’d put it together.

I would’ve enjoyed being there to share it.

          One Process

I write down notes to myself

about ideas for new verses

when I’m drunk,

and then complete or compose them

at the word processor

when I’m sober.

I’m not the one to say

if this process works.

                              What I Write

I unfriended some random dickhead from facebook

for engaging in some random, unprovoked, aggro verbal violence,

and in response he keyed something like,

‘Thank Christ! Now I won’t have to read his so-called poems!

They don’t even rhyme!’

I imagine he was drunk, but so what?

Now, putting aside the obvious observation

that nobody had ever forced him to read my posts in the first place,

this inconsequential piece of spleen-venting fluff

displayed a complete lack of comprehension

of what I write.

I don’t call these things poems.

Never have.

If other people do, well, they do.

I’m not going to argue the point.

I don’t like to argue, being highly conflict-averse

(unlike the abovementioned dickhead,

who seemed to seek out a good fight for its own sake).

Each one of these things is what it is:

an observation, a recollection, a description, a dream,

an introspection, a commentary, a fantasy, a rant,

or some combination of these things.

As a collective term for them I’ve used ‘bagatelles’ (look it up)

or ‘chingaderos’ (Spanish for ‘fuckers’).

I break em up into lines

to make them easier for me to perform,

since I don’t memorise them,

due to cranking out so many.

Poetry, like any art,

exists in the responses of those in its audience,

and not in what its creator tangibly produces and presents,

anyway.

           Pardon My French

If some asswipe shit-head

considers my fucking choice of words

to be ‘offensive’ or some similar bullshit,

all I have to fucking say to them

is that I’m easy as shit to avoid,

so fucking avoid me.

                  Flaunting Flaws

I read a poem,

more or less,

by Bukowski,

offering up some more or less universal advice.

It was on the internet.

I got the impression

from the number of versions available,

performed by various performers

and with a variety of arty visuals,

that it’s one of his more popular ones nowadays.

It’s only fair for me to admit

that I generally don’t enjoy

reading other people’s poetic efforts,

but Bukowski’s are usually

among the exceptions to this.

I also recall Hank giving me

all sorts of advice,

back when we drank together regularly in 1972.

Most, but not all, of it was crappy.

The poem in question,

called ‘Roll the Dice’,

is not one of the exceptions

to my poetic aversions,

and the advice it gives, by and large, sucks.

Hank sure as shit didn’t follow it.

That’s one of the things I love about Hank –

he was deeply flawed,

and flaunting his imperfections made him laugh.

Words Previously Spoken With Music

I look at photos

of past performances

and wonder, was that us?

was that me?

because the magic – for me –

of the moment is gone

from my soul

and I don’t know when anything similar

may take place

again.

More Actual People

                                 Bobby Bunting

When I was nine my mother, from time to time,

dumped me off with strangers,

one of them being one of my recently deceased father’s patients

who lived fairly close by

and had a boy about my age

named Bobby.

The first time I was there

Bobby invited me to go down to play in the cellar.

Sure. Why not? Cellars and basements can be fun places.

It was wash day, and Bobby matter-of-factly

went to play in the newly washed clothes and stuff.

I thought this was odd,

and glanced somewhat longingly

at all the cellar-appropriate junk here and there,

but was curious about this clean-clothes game.

It involved dressing up.

It involved dressing up in his mother’s undergarments.

I didn’t think that was much fun, but he did.

The second time my mother dropped me off there was another washday,

and Bobby took me down to the cellar again to play.

The same game.

It didn’t make sense to me, and I asked my mother about it later.

It was the last time she took me there to play.

That was in early 1956. As Bobby grew older,

I hope he managed not to learn to hate himself.

I hope he managed to avoid serious bashings.

I hope he managed societal disapproval with style.

I hope he managed latex girdles’ fall from fashion in the 1970s

without undue inconvenience.

I hope frilly, satiny ladies’ undies, bras, stockings, and such

have brought him life-long fulfilment.

          Isabel

I was seventeen.

I’d been drinking

raw local rum

for hours, it seemed,

dancing through the streets

of Christiansted,

even cluelessly trying to play

a steel drum myself

for a while after a Cruzan

slung its strap around my neck

so he could concentrate

on the rum.

Then a shortish, blond-haired girl

with a round, spotty face

dancing between

two huge Cruzan men

somehow induced me

to join them –

I don’t remember how.

Later we descended

to a below-street-level bar

to drink better rum.

Her name was Isabel.

She lived in DC,

where I was going to uni soon.

Contact info changed hands.

When sober I learnt

that her father,

Count Knuth-Winterfeldt,

was the Danish Ambassador

to the US, and the two Cruzans

were her police bodyguards.

We had fun for about a year,

hanging around the embassy,

raiding its kitchen for snacks

and plenty of Danish beer

before diplomatic functions –

friends but not lovers.

She invited me

to embassy young-people parties,

where I hung out with nobs.

Then the Danish government

transferred her dad to Paris

and I hung out with nobs no more.

About 45 years later

we reconnected on facebook.

A countess herself by that time,

she was running an equestrian school

in the mountains

of southern Spain,

a particularly healthy outdoor lifestyle,

judging by the posted photos.

We became compadres again,

both of us dog people –

a strange but good friendship,

despite living, as I googled it,

at almost exactly the opposite

sides of the Earth.

Then, the day before

her sixty-seventh birthday,

one of her daughters

posted a status on facebook

saying that she’d died –

no explanation included

or cause of death mentioned.

She was only a few months

older than me.

                       Zoe Watt

I was maybe nineteen or twenty

the first time I met a stripper.

She was a friend of one of my fellow stoner students

who took me to her apartment to get stoned.

She was about the same age we were,

and really gorgeous, of course,

but in her t-shirt and jeans just another hippie, really,

and despite being light years more mature than I was

she treated me just like a friend

as we sat there toking in her kitchen.

That impressed me.

Her stage name was Zoe Watt.

That impressed me even more.

I never saw her again,

and I never saw her dance.

I wonder if the sophisticates

who frequented the downmarket clubs where she worked

appreciated how the beauty of that name

enhanced her physical beauty.

           Hank & Me & La Hondureña

I’ve met a few noted poets,

but been friends with only one.

An ex-groupie junkie friend of mine

had a groupie friend from her groupie days

who somehow had a connection

with Bukowski.

My friend knew how much I loved Bukowski’s prose

and wangled me an invite.

Hank and I –

the ‘Charles’ was just for print –

drank beer together

two or three nights a week

from March through August 1972.

He gave me some good advice:

“It’s all mateerial, baby,”

“Wine’s the best thing to drink when you’re broke,”

and some bad:

“She dumped you? Go over and hit her.” (I didn’t.)

Then I got a roadie job with a management company

that ran club tours headlined by

has-beens and C-listers-who’d-been-on-TV,

and fell in love with a Honduran woman

who was the desk clerk who checked us in at the Sheraton Biloxi,

where we played the penthouse ballroom.

After my employers went belly up we moved into New Orleans,

where we got married and I found out that she suffered

from schizophrenia.

She destroyed my address book,

cutting me off from contact with Hank.

Mental illness doomed that marriage, of course,

and in the decades since I’ve bounced around,

any chance of really connecting

with anyone else

being really only a doomed illusion.

Thanks, Hank – you lived longer than you had any right to,

and I’ll live longer than I really want.

                   Police Authority

He was fairly tall and not all that old,

but his face was sagging prematurely,

accentuated by a pale, thin, drooping moustache,

thin, straight, colourless hair

hanging lank to below his collar,

and his gently paunchy body

sloping down from narrow shoulders.

He played drums in a working band from Indiana

that at the time was backing

a zoftig, forty-something chick singer

who seemed to exude all the desperate flashiness

and bourgeois vulgarity masquerading as hipness

that stereotypes everyday Las Vegas.

He told us in his soft voice

over beer and doobies

about how as a teenager

he’d enlisted in the Air Force

because he’d wanted to play in the Air Force Band.

They’d assigned him to the Air Police instead.

Almost as if in a daze, he recalled how,

before his first police patrol of an air force base,

he’d donned the white helmet,

Sam Browne belt,

holstered handgun, billy club,

and white armband with “AP” on it:

“It was against my will,”

he told us with his voice almost quavering,

“I didn’t want to, but so help me,

I swaggered.”

                       Two Texas Women

Cheryl came from Clarendon, a tiny two-horse town

out in the Panhandle, about 60 miles from Amarillo

as the pickup rattles.

She had that twanging-banjo West Texas accent

accentuated by a voice that’d shatter glass.

Her grandfather – or maybe it was great-grandfather –

was John Wesley Hardin, the legendary outlaw.

She was a serious alcoholic

and prided herself

in being able to drink me under the table.

By profession she was an on-the-ground

disaster relief provider with the Red Cross –

tents, blankets, bottled water – that sort of thing

for victims of tornadoes, hurricanes, floods – that sort of thing.

She’d seen my picture in the paper,

was breaking up with the man she’d been living with,

and had asked her next-door neighbour,

who worked at the paper and was a close friend of mine,

for an introduction.

Cindy came from New Braunfels in the Texas Hill Country,

a tall, blond ex-cop with big, strong hands,

having left law-enforcement

to work in a department store

to which I sold newspaper advertisements.

She told me that the best thing about being a cop

had been working the night shift

and ripping off drunk drivers for their weed.

She admired the way I drove,

from her professional perspective.

Early one evening I was expecting the ex-cop

when the outlaw’s progeny came by

to give me a kitten.

That was the end of it with both of them.

                          The Wisdom of Al

He’d been an adventurer,

a teen-aged pilot in the Amazon in the 1930s

and then a combat pilot in the Pacific Theatre.

He’d worked as a reconstruction quantity surveyor in the Occupation,

became fluent in Japanese,

then became involved with the, um, State Department,

who arranged for him to become fluent in Russian.

During the Cuban Missile Crisis he worked as a translator

of intercepted Russian military radio messages,

amused by the Russian pilots’ penchant for singing lewd songs over the air.

Of course he was in Vietnam,

living with some hill tribes along the Laotian border,

providing the US with quantity-surveyor information

about materials the villages needed for fortifications and so on,

learning their languages,

and, in order to secure their confidence,

marrying the women each offered him

(but not telling this to his Irish-Catholic wife during visits back home).

He was himself a secular humanist and a closet socialist.

After retiring he went back to school and became a teacher,

eventually teaching world history, Japanese, and Russian

to high-school kids who were absolutely unable

to recognise how cool he was.

I did my student teaching in the next room.

We became great friends, and I spent some time chilling with him

at his comfortable house in the country.

He tried to steer his luscious daughter in my direction,

but she was married to the Navy, for which she piloted helicopters.

He was addicted to gummy bears,

and by his mid-sixties had put on some weight.

Referring to this, he told me, “Y’know Richard,

men my age tend to get fatter and fatter,

until, of course, they get cancer,

after which they get skinnier and skinnier,

and then, just when they start looking good again,

they die.”

Saying this made him chuckle with impishly twinkling Irish eyes.

                   Gangsters to God

The last season that I coached basketball,

some time in the late nineties,

I struggled with Hamilton Girls’ High School’s

team in the local premiere league.

Once, when I was driving three players

to a tournament in Rotorua,

as my contribution to the car pool,

they played gangsta rap on a boombox

the entire way there.

No ‘Sweet Georgia Brown’ for them.

“It’s what,” the point guard explained, “gets our juices going.”

Well then, okay.

About a dozen or so years later

that point guard and her three children

moved into a place in Claudelands,

and I began seeing them around the ’hood.

She was always smiling and friendly,

as if we were old mates, when I did.

Her oldest boy had a job delivering something on his bike,

and she often helped him,

or serviced his route when he didn’t do it,

peddling her bike when she did

with glossy, athletic legs that emerged from white short shorts.

She almost always stopped to chat with me,

her smiling, full-lipped mouth distracting my attention

from those somewhat-less-than-half-my-age legs.

The major problem was that she’d found Jesus – fanatically,

and after I politely declined to see her boy’s performance

in her church’s xmas pageant,

even though she’d brought him by my house

to invite me personally,

she stopped dropping by.