Noticing Stuff

                          Weeds

Weeds are species

that grow wild

and profusely

among other species,

depriving them of space and food,

taking over their habitat,

crowding them out.

They reproduce aggressively,

and can harbour and spread

pathogens or other toxins.

Some even create environmental conditions

in which they themselves cannot reproduce.

Weeds tend to proliferate in human-disturbed areas.

Some become dominant when they enter new environments

that free them from natural enemies.

Sounds like homo sapiens –

the most virulent weed species of all.

                   How It Is, In Part

Sitting in my reading-and-drinking armchair

with the front door propped open,

I watched in fascination

as a small flock of sparrows

fought pitched battles with each other,

wings flapping with furious aggression,

contesting my bird feeder’s two perches.

These weren’t dance-like play fights;

they were serious.

Now, human aggression usually disgusts me,

but I’m completely non-judgemental

about their behaviour.

They do what they do.

It’s just DNA

and pursuing survival

in a hard world.

                 I Like To Walk

I’ve always liked to walk.

Even when I was a preschooler,

I’d skive off from time to time

to escape my unhappy domestic environment,

and follow the creek

that ran a block or so from my house,

fantasising about running away from home.

Since then I’ve walked,

whether with a dog, by myself,

or – rarely – with other people,

in many different cities,

along many rural roads and tracks,

up gentle mountain slopes,

and along many beaches – I can’t stand lying in the sun.

For me the best city walks

have been in cities with alleys –

I call it alleying –

and each city’s alleys have been different,

sometimes differing from one part of a city to another.

The best thing about alleying

is how few people

and moving motor vehicles

I’ve encountered whilst doing so.

Walking enables me to experience the seasons

and the changing skies

better than I could from any vehicle,

even a bicycle,

and to notice

such microcosms

as individual leaves and pebbles and blades of grass,

and how the volume of rubbish on the ground

increases

as my dog and I

approach

the Five Crossroads McDonald’s.

  

            Boy Fights & Girl Fights

In the mid-eighties I spent a couple of years

running the school jail –

officially In-School Suspension –

at an intermediate school

in a heart-wrenchingly downmarket area.

As ISS supervisor,

I was also the staff’s

number-two heavy – after George,

the big, beefy DP –

so one of my duties

was to help keep an eye on things

before the school opened each morning.

Poor kids fight a lot,

so George and I broke up

plenty of early-morning fights.

Fights between boys

usually involved

impressive quantities of

circling about,

bobbing and weaving,

feinting jabs, wild swings hitting only air,

and shouts of,

“Hold me back or I’ll kill him!”

and when we did hold them back they let us.

Girl fights were deadly serious.

They really did seem to be

trying to kill each other,

and even with me bear-hugging one

twelve-year-old girl from behind

and George, at 115+ kilos, fairly sitting on the other

they’d still be scratching each other’s faces

and managing to pull out

handfuls of each other’s hair.

               Visceral

It struck me

as I farted whilst I was pissing

that the smell of the inside of my body

when it’s outside of it

may not be particularly pleasant,

but is absolutely real.

             Icelandic Genetics

Iceland, or so I’ve read,

has about the most

genetically homogeneous population in the world.

Of course, I’ve read a large amount of

shit

in the many years that I’ve been reading,

but as the camera panned

along the faces of Iceland’s football team

during the national anthem

prior to a match against Croatia

(which is definitely genetically heterogeneous),

it struck me that many of them

could have been brothers,

and that they all

looked like at least close cousins,

so maybe it is indeed so.

But then,

how does Björk fit into this?

                                   Butch

I can’t recall ever knowing anybody named Butch,

whether via his – or her – birth certificate

or due to some fond family nicknaming during infancy.

I imagine, though, that being called Butch

would be likely to have an effect

on a person’s character –

or even physical competencies.

For instance, would somebody named Butch

be likely to have better-than-average fine motor skills,

and be a wizard at needlepoint or lace-making?

How many people named Butch have long hair?

I mean, one of the definitions of the word itself

refers to a particular type of short, closely cropped haircut.

Do people named Butch tend to prefer

Antiques Road Show to boxing or mixed martial arts?

Do they prefer to take their exercise

by playing rugby

or by Morris Dancing?

I don’t know, as I can’t recall

ever knowing anybody named Butch.

I myself, incidentally, am basically a wuss and totally non-macho,

but in many superficial ways I’m decidedly butch,

for whatever that’s worth.

I did know somebody, though, whose family called him Bunkie.

He was a flaming asshole.

Ended up with a career in the Army,

or so I heard.

           Think I’ll Read A Book

I turned the TV on.

As it came up

a Kiwi woman,

talking to another Kiwi woman,

said that Justin Bieber’s favourite food

is spaghetti and meatballs.

I turned the TV off.

                        Higher Education

When I was a uni lecturer it struck me and disgusted me

that most second-year students considered my courses

to be a game, the point of which was

to see how little they could learn

and how few academic and cognitive skills

they could acquire and improve

and still pass.

Many didn’t.

I wondered why they were there in the first place,

running up huge student-loan debts

for bugger-all in return.

Was it arrogance? Overconfidence? Privilege?

Or just stupidity?

                    Talent

I learnt long ago,

although not early enough,

that just because someone

can play a guitar or a piano passably,

and perhaps sing well enough

for others to tolerate or even enjoy it,

having such talent

fails to make that person automatically

not a nauseating shit.

Some Personal Stuff

           A Paradox

A major problem

with composing verses

about my personal shit

is that since I’ve been conditioned

to think that I myself don’t matter,

I can’t think of why anyone

would want to read or hear them.

         Fucking Up

I hate it when I fuck up,

and I fuck up plenty.

It’s not so bad

if it’s a minor fuckup

that affects only me

and not all that much,

although with even these

I tend to

– metaphorically –

kick myself in the ass.

I hate it when I fuck up, though,

and I fuck up plenty.

When it’s a major fuckup, though,

that affects other people

– especially people I love,

or people who are relying on me –

in a destructive,

or at least a negative, way,

especially with lasting,

or at least lingering,

and grave,

or at least potentially serious,

consequences,

my self-loathing and self-destructiveness

ratchet up to dangerous levels.

I hate it when I fuck up,

and I fuck up plenty.

       A Sense of Place

I thought it’d be cool

to spend my old age in a place

where people have lived

for many centuries,

with whitewashed-but-flaking

stone walls crowding narrow roads

winding along steep hillsides

overlooking the sea,

where siestas are the rule,

the old women wear black,

and the old men sit

in the shade playing dominoes

and drinking nasty local brandy.

But now I’m already in my old age,

and 150-year-old, far-from-the-sea

Hamilton’s my home.

Siesta is optional and ill-attended,

I have no public place

to drink and play dominoes,

and no life-long friends

with extended family connections

with whom to do so.

   An Honoured Campaign Pledge

It was 1964.

The uni had an authoritarian

in loco parentis attitude,

so the student ha-ha government

was completely impotent.

I decided to put myself forward

as a candidate for the student senate.

I put up one poster

on a board in the student centre.

It read,

“Expect Nothing?

Get It!

Your Student Government

Has Never Done Anything

I Promise To Uphold That Tradition”

I won a seat.

I went to one meeting,

where I sat at the back

doodling and saying nothing.

Then I transferred

to another university.

               Same Coin

One of the more cogent reasons

for my lack of leadership ability

is that I’m a terrible follower.

                     Asshole Soul

Lately, from time to time,

memories flood my mind

of times when I’ve been an asshole,

times when I’ve been the kind of person that I don’t like.

Not all of those times at once, of course,

because that would take too long,

but whilst walking to dog, or washing the dishes,

I remember at a trot

one or two occasions when, for instance,

I’ve made sexist or homophobic jokes or remarks,

or body-shaming comments,

or witty stereotypes of one group or another

or other vile streams of words left over

from my childhood cultural intake.

These flashbacks make me feel like shit, of course,

and make me feel like I am shit,

but I can think of nothing to do to make things right.

Apology would be pointless,

for it would be to a world-in-general

that just doesn’t care,

and would dismiss my sincerity if it did.

I can’t even guarantee that I won’t slip

and be an obnoxious asshole again later,

even today, or next week, or any old time,

solidifying my status as a hopeless case.

Of course I regret every one of these incidents,

and will continue to do so

until I die or slide into dementia,

just as I regret all those incidents

when I fluffed or backed off from opportunities

to have potentially deeply memorable

out-of-the-ordinary sexual adventures.

              Conditioning Tells

I was about to tell them

that if they’d help me with that little problem

it’d mean the world to me,

but I couldn’t

because from the dawn of my memory

my mother and my older brother

had conditioned me to accept unquestioningly

that nobody could possibly give a shit

about anything just because it matters to me.

The mother of my children

confirmed this relentlessly

over the course

of a decade and a half.

                 The Zen of Pee

Standing up to pee or sitting down to pee –

not something that most blokes think about.

Blokes stand up to pee

because sheilas squat when they pee and we’re not sheilas.

That’s one thing for sure.

But when I get up in the middle of the night

to have a bit of a slash

to relieve the pressure from the evening’s plonk,

well, I don’t want to hafta turn the light on

and I don’t wanna hafta aim in the dark,

so, well, y’know …

I’m still as butch as I ever was.

            My Hands Are Up

Hey-yup! You got me!

Fair and square.

It’s a fair cop, guv.

I have no self-justification, all right;

you caught me red-handed

in a contradiction

between two of my neuroses.

Guilty, your honour!

Of course, expecting them to be consistent

and not to contradict each other

probably isn’t too much to ask,

but there you go.

There it is.

I’m a seething mess of conflicting

disorders and anxieties

that really make no sense at all,

except for their interconnectedness,

which I concede is ultimately senseless.

So I’m both pathetically thin-skinned

and too timidly conflict-averse

to do anything about it

except sulk

unless I have to.

I may have little or no

self-esteem or self-confidence,

but I have plenty of self-respect.

I hate being nasty,

but I’m rather good at it,

when pushed far enough.

And so on.

                       My Wall

I have a wall.

It’s psychological, of course,

and I suppose a bit metaphorical.

Anyway, it’s not a solid wall,

like the ones around my patios.

A car couldn’t crash into it.

One reason for this

is that it fails to conform to the laws of physics.

It’s a one-way wall, y’see.

It keeps me in,

but it doesn’t keep anybody else out.

It might deter some people, though,

as it’s highly visible,

in a psychological, metaphorical way,

but anybody who wants to do so

can just go right through it

as if it weren’t there.

They just have to want to.

When toxic people join me inside it

I can’t escape,

other than by relocating

(isn’t that a gorgeously bureaucratic weasel-word?)

myself and my wall, together,

to some other set of coordinates

on space-time’s twanging grid

and hope that the fuckwits and dickheads

and their ilk

get the message

and leave my wall and me in peace.