Stuff from May & June 2018

            Nom de Bar

 

Linda told me,

‘I never give men in bars my real name.

I tell ’em it’s Cindy.

Or sometimes Sandy.

Cindy if I’m in town;

Sandy if I’m at the beach.

It’s easier to keep track of that way.’

               Her Answer  

The editor of the Weekender

told me that he wanted a story

about the women who go to clubs and bistros

and what they’re looking for – what they want.

I thought it was an okay assignment,

as it gave me a chance, an excuse,

to approach unattached women

in that sort of louche environment,

something I ordinarily found hard to do.

One slender woman with a bony, jutting jaw

in a somewhat upmarket boozerie

looked at me with dead seriousness and said,

‘What do I look for in bars?

I’ll tell you what I look at.

Crotches.

Crotches and asses.

It depends on whether they’re coming or going.

Of course, if they’re coming,

that means they’ll be going to my house.’

Best impromptu answer I ever received

to any interview question I ever asked.

We ended up having a bit of an affair

that lasted for a month or so;

I forget why we broke up.

Thirty-seven years later

and I can’t remember her name

off the top of my head,

though I remember that answer

word for word.

                  Guinea Pigs  

When I was about five or six,

soon after I began watching sport

on our first-ever black-and-white TV,

my mind started to imagine myself

playing American football.

I especially liked it when the ball carrier

would slip through the middle of the defence,

dodging and squirming into

the opposition backfield,

and I imagined myself doing that

and, being little,

slipping by between their legs

whilst they failed to tackle me,

grasping at the air above my head.

The image came to my mind

of a pack of guinea pigs –

small, fast, squirming rodents, lots of them –

thoroughly befuddling the thick, burly linemen;

thinking of it today it seems

a remarkably imaginative image for a five-year-old.

When I burbled this to my family

my two-years-older-than-me brother

started to chant, in the timeless bully’s singsong:

‘Riki thinks he’s a pi-ig! Riki thinks he’s a pi-ig!’

I actually tried to explain to him

how that wasn’t what I’d said,

but he just kept it up, louder and longer,

clearly relishing my frustration and vexation.

For several years afterward he would

from time to time slip into conversation

remarks such as, ‘Well, you said that you’re a pig.’

For years and years.

Taught me a lesson, he did.

       Distance, Size, and Time 

We look up and see clouds moving

far above the tops of our heads,

huge floating things that make us look little,

but they’re really laughably close and small

compared to the stars and the galaxies and the void.

I’m relatively old for a human,

but my age is hardly a moment

compared to the age of our species,

which is piddling

compared to the antiquity of DNA,

which is next to nothing

compared to the age of everything.

I’m full of wonder that we humans have evolved

with a sense of wonder

about what’s beyond ourselves

in terms of distance, size, and time;

we have the urge of curiosity about such enormities,

and the desire to find out what we don’t know,

but the insecurity necessary for our survival

and a bloated sense of our own importance

has led us to convince ourselves,

or at least to pretend,

that the stories that we have made up

to explain things that are beyond our ken

actually have some basis in reality:

it’s called effing the ineffable.

I prefer revelling in my uncertainty and ignorance

in regard to what’s beyond me:

it’s called wonder.

     What & Who 

What are you?

Are you a Christian?

What are you?

Are you an atheist?

What are you?

Are you a refugee?

What are you?

Are you a pansexual?

What are you?

Are you a woman of colour?

What are you?

Are you a Gemini?

What are you?

Are you a Muslim?

What are you?

Are you a Texan?

What are you?

Are you a Jew?

What are you?

Are you a rape victim?

What are you?

Are you a vegetarian?

What are you?

Are you a Kiwi?

What are you?

Are you a disabled person?

What are you?

Are you a straight white man?

What are you?

Are you a Canadian?

or an American?

Knowing all this kind of what-you-are, though,

tells me jack-shit about who you are.

              Unworthy 

I’m not surprised

when people who pretend

to be my lovers and friends

have acted as if I’m a thing, just an It,

and discarded me like an empty wine bottle

without a second thought

when they fancied

I was no longer of use to them.

The way my mama brought me up

meant that I went out into the world

convinced deep-down

that I’m unworthy of love.

The ability to be loved

is a skill

that people have to learn

when we are little.

I didn’t.

        Not True Or False 

When somebody says or writes

the phrase, ‘the fact that …’

as the lead into expressing an opinion

in my mind

they immediately lose credibility

for anything at all

they have to say or write afterward,

or else I just ignore it.

Some people might call this

a snobby, elitist overreaction,

but I value integrity highly,

as I do accuracy in language,

so those people can stuff it.

     Cold-Weather Customs 

Walking my dog

on an icy-cold morning,

me wearing six layers,

a beanie, and a hood

and still shivering

(old age and all),

watching the high-school kids

walking to school,

some of the boys wearing shorts,

this being New Zealand and all,

and some of the girls

wearing hijab scarves

wound tightly about

their head and ears,

undoubtedly glad that the things

have at least some uses

in addition to pleasing their parents,

this being New Zealand and all.

More Motherly Love

              Maternal Effort

When I read the facebook postings

of struggling solo mums

with whom I’m acquainted

and who are clearly doing their best

for their sprogs,

I sometimes think of my own privileged mother

who clearly did her worst for me,

and only did her best for herself.

  Slow On The Uptake

I knew throughout

my adult life

that my mother was

a disgusting person

whom I couldn’t understand,

and that I preferred

to avoid her company

if at all possible,

but it was only after she died

that I considered the possibility

of hating her,

and then close to another decade before

I realised many of the ways

that she’d ruined my life

and the extent

to which she’d done it.

            Hard As

I was in my mid-thirties,

as clueless as ever

about other people,

when my maternal unit

summoned me to her presence

in a low-rise, upmarket

condominium in the Keys

in order to show me her wealth

and to renew her delight

in dominating and bullying me –

with a touch of cruelty, just for spice –

face to face.

Still under the delusion,

despite a lifetime of evidence otherwise,

that I somehow owed her

filial devotion and emotion,

I attempted to hug her upon arrival.

She responded

by digging her fingernails painfully into my sides.

Clueless or not,

I realised that that, at least,

was inappropriate.

                    Two Shirts In Key Largo

Some time when I was in my mid-thirties

I succumbed to pressure,

as I’ve always tended to do until lately,

and made a pilgrimage to my mother’s condo in the Florida Keys

to pay homage to her greatness and money

and to provide her with multiple opportunities

to bully me and generally treat me like less than shit.

On an excursion from her home in Marathon to Key Largo,

a distance of 81 kays along the Overseas Highway,

she took me to some hideous clothing emporium

and selected two tropical shirts for me.

She ordered me to go into the changing room and try them on.

When I came back out wearing the first one she said,

“You didn’t like the other one? Why?”

I cracked up laughing.

She’d slipped.

My laughter clearly disturbed her

and she demanded to know the reason for it.

I told her that the buy-two-shirts-you-didn’t-like-the-other-one dodge

was a cliché example of maternal guilt-mongering

that Jewish comedians and memoiristes

had beaten into submission in recent years.

What I didn’t tell her was that

the overall maternal stereotype they had evoked

had never been even close

to how savagely malicious and unlovingly inhuman

she had always been to me.

Understandably unappreciative of my silent discretion,

she huffed and puffed

and plotted revenge.

                    Grape-Bunch Outrage

My mother was determined to control me as much as possible,

and one of her many sicko methods

was by expressing outrage

that turned into just plain rage

in response to any deviations

from her bizarre sense of how people

– particularly, but not only, me –

should do various inconsequential things.

My mother was easily outraged and offended;

she seemed to love it,

and she also had a tendency

to inflate her capricious taste preferences

into serious and universal moral truths.

One of these involved the correct way to eat table grapes,

which was by plucking a small bunch

off from the larger one,

eating the grapes thereunto attached,

and then daintily disposing

of the remaining truncated stem into the bin.

Plucking a grape or three off the main bunch

and leaving their stems protruding from it

was a crime against nature,

as far as she was vehemently concerned.

She couldn’t fucking stand it!

Damn, it pissed her off.

I’ve been plucking grapes off the bunch

one-by-one

ever since I escaped

her immediate supervision

many decades ago.

                          The Hot Rod Club

When I was fifteen,

and about to get my driver’s licence

I thought it’d be a good idea

to acquire some basic knowledge and skills

in regard to simple auto repairs and maintenance.

The problem was that I had no one to teach me.

Then one of my neighbours

had the bright idea

of having the school

sponsor a club

for kids who wanted

to learn some skills,

or to sharpen ones they already had,

in regard to fiddling with car engines.

To sex it up for the kids

he called it the Hot Rod Club.

Of course my mother wouldn’t let me join.

No son of hers was going to race hot rods.

It didn’t matter how carefully I explained

that I wasn’t going to race cars,

I just wanted to learn how to work on them –

No dice.

When I became an adult, of course,

from time to time,

when the occasion offered itself

or the mood struck her,

she indulged herself in savage put-downs

of my hopelessness

when it came to

working on cars.

    Too Old, I Guess

I must’ve been four

when my mother decided

that she wasn’t going

to tuck me in at night

or sing me lullabies

any more.

I felt lonely and unlovable,

but I had to accept it.

I had no choice.

                          Deep Fashion II

My mother, responding to the first signs of senile dementia

with as much dishonesty as she could muster – which was plenty –

decided that she wanted a pied-à-terre in the city where I lived

for motives too ghastly for me to contemplate.

She bought a ridiculous hand-carved Chinese

fold-out home entertainment bar

and then began obsessing on buying new linens.

Everything seemed to be linens-this or linens-that.

So I took her to a retail outlet I’d once sold ads to,

explaining on the way that they sold designer sheets and stuff –

what we call manchester

and my mother called linens –

at cut-rate prices after their designers

had come out with newer lines.

She came out of the place fuming,

huffing and puffing in outrage

because that excuse for a store

didn’t have the latest fashions in linens.

How dare they!

She was obviously just taking advantage of an opportunity,

however flimsy, pointless, and unjustified,

to drive home my basic worthlessness to me,

or else mistaking me for her newly acquired to-the-manor-born

(or so they claimed)

upmarket condominium friends –

me!, who’d been brought up listening to her boasting

about her killer bargain-negotiating skills

in automobile showrooms and third-world markets,

in addition to enduring her from-out-of-nowhere character assassinations.

As I compose this the sheets on my bed in the next room

are almost a quarter of a century old.

Her example had taught me well about values.

                  Well …

When my hideously inhuman

horror of a mother

discovered that I had

something of an aptitude

for the written word,

her first thought,

or so she told me,

was of course the grossly egocentric notion

that one day I would write

a book about her

and what a remarkable person she was.

Well yeah,

remarkably abusive, destructive,

and just plain nasty.

                  Mama Mia!

I think that it’s enormously unlikely

that individual souls

retain their identity

after the people they inhabit die,

but if they do,

I’d rather not run into my mother’s

when that time comes.

If that should happen, though,

I suppose I might welcome the opportunity

to give her evil soul

all the vituperation

that it deserves.

Some Human Stuff

        40,000 Years Ago

Huddling for warmth by the fire

far from the retreating ice,

wondering about the stars

and the aromas on the wind,

even the taste of sweet berries

and the way they felt in your mouth

wasn’t satisfying enough,

so you scratched the shape of your soul

in abstract patterns on some rock,

not because you had to,

but because you had to.

Sorta like me in a way,

weren’t you,

beloved cousin?

   A Double-Barrelled First-Up Lesson

I was six or eight days old,

or something like that,

and, I’ve been told,

they gave me a sugar cube soaked with rum

to suck on before somebody snipped off my foreskin

to the sound of somebody

chanting some mumbo-jumbo in Hebrew.

I agree with my rationalist friends

that this was a barbaric thing

to inflict on an innocent baby,

for barbaric reasons,

but it did serve two real-life purposes:

it taught me from the onset

that life is filled with pain,

which has proved to be true,

and also that grog helps.

                               Biological Imperative

I knew it from the moment I first felt that tingling in my prostate,

through to the shudder of the send-off of my sperm in their sea of semen –

although of course I could have been mistaken, but I wasn’t –

this wasn’t just another fuck, no,

this fuck was the fulfilling of my biological imperative;

And when, after the usual gestation period, plus a couple of extra weeks,

my first daughter was born

and I made her promises she couldn’t understand,

I felt a happiness the like of which I’d never known.

I believed I had reason to live.

Now, tough shit, I realise that in the mocking face of the universe

my sense of biological fulfilment and paternal happiness and promise,

was, along with my species’ niche within the universe’s ongoing life,

little more than part of the straight line of a cosmic joke,

perpetuating punchlines of sadness and suffering,

and extending my biological imperative into a future

unlikely to have any imperatives for my progeny

at all.

                  Ordinary People

Ordinary people seem to take great pleasure

informing me about what a beautiful day it is

during the hot, sunny, blue-dome weather

that I dislike intensely,

yet react with shock and argumentation

when I comment on what a gorgeous day it is

during the cool, high-overcast, breezy weather

that I love.

                    The Appeal of Cruelty

I learnt early in life

that some people enjoy being cruel.

As a child I didn’t know why or understand how

my mother and my brother

enjoyed being so vicious and unfair

toward me,

or enjoyed tormenting me so often,

but I accepted it as just they way things were,

the way that children do.

At school and at play

I observed dumfounded as bullies

– both kids and teachers –

lavished cruelty on those

with whom they could get away with it.

It made no sense to me,

so when I was twelve I took to teasing a boy who talked strangely.

It made me feel terrible then

and for the rest of my life.

And now – it’s 2014 – I read on the internet

over the space of a few days

how young men from privileged countries

in the English-speaking world

are flocking to the Middle East

in order to get in on the cruelty action,

either with the Islamic State in upper Mesopotamia

or with the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza,

to engage in self-righteous, savage viciousness

they’d never get away with back home

in order to inflict torment and suffering

on innocents who’ve done them no harm.

Its appeal still perplexes me,

but I know that it’s what the word evil means.

                     Creeps and Jerks

Every sentient being is either a creep or a jerk.

At least that’s one way of looking at things.

Executives are creeps;

hourly workers are jerks.

Fashion designers are creeps;

consumer fashion slaves are jerks.

Corrupt cops are creeps;

honest cops are jerks.

Sexual predators are creeps;

hopelessly lovelorn romantics are jerks.

Cats are creeps;

dogs are jerks.

Wall Street bankers are creeps;

small-business owner-operators are jerks.

Ad-agency artistic directors are creeps;

taggers are mostly jerks.

Hipsters are creeps;

hippies were jerks.

Meat and dairy agribusiness operators are creeps;

nearly all livestock, poor things, are jerks;

but most of the workers in abattoirs are jerks, too.

Bought-and-paid-for politicians are creeps;

the people who vote for them are jerks.

Of course, nothing’s that simple.

The world has plenty of jerky creeps and creepy jerks,

and creeps with some jerk characteristics,

as well as jerks with some creep characteristics.

Which are you?

I myself am a jerk through and through,

damn it.

       A Failure Of Imagination

I saw a screenshot on facebook

of a Twitter message

that someone had sent to a lesbian singer

saying, ‘I stopped listening to your music

when I found out u were a lebanese.. God

wanted man with woman..’

Seeking empathy,

I tried to imagine

what it would be like

to be that dimwitted,

but it was beyond me.

                    Chichén Itzá Rocks

We wandered around the ruins,

my part-Mayan bride and I,

as thousands had before,

our eyes drinking in

the impressive monuments

made from rocks piled high.

We climbed to the top of a pyramid or two

and up the narrow spiral staircase

inside the 1200-year-old astronomical observatory,

as thousands had before,

the narrow steps and stairways

built for people much smaller and narrower than we were.

I don’t know how many of those thousands of visitors

had wondered why or how the ancient Mayans

had gone and built such grandiosities,

when they clearly didn’t have to in order to eat,

and I’m guilty of not being conversant

with all the theories that archaeologists have put forward

in regard to the Mayans’ motivations

for building such fantasies,

but whilst walking from one rock monument to another

my eyes focused on

the huge number of solitary, not-too-heavy rocks

that were just lying about,

willy-nilly, here and there,

on the ground near the footpath,

and I felt a kindergarten-like urge to start piling them up

and building some kind of mound or wall or something.

Maybe the ancient Mayans,

people like you and me,

and with whom I was related by marriage,

had felt a similar urge.

           Distant Cousins

The paintings in the caves

in palaeolithic Europe

and who knows where else,

I wonder how they differ

from the assemblages

of brightly coloured daubings

that I produce

and which now clutter my walls.