Stuff from December 2017

            Hope For The Future? 

There they were

in a supermarket

three 14-or-15-year-old boys

cavorting

jumping around

and dancing wildly but ineptly,

shouting adolescent inanities

to each other.

One of them

plucked a plastic packet

of potato pom poms

from a freezer

and tossed it

in a basketball-style

jump hook shot

smack into the wire trolley

one of his mates was pushing

on the other side of the freezer,

and they cheered and high-fived

before gambolling on their way

down one of the aisles.

I turned my 71-year-old head

to a bloke of similar age

standing gob-smacked

by the frozen veggies

and said,

‘We never acted like that

when we were that age, eh?’

and he allowed himself

a little smile.

Four or five cherubic boys and girls,

about ten or eleven years old,

were enjoying their bicycles

on a little-used driveway

at the park,

calling out to each other:

‘Where you fuckin going?’ and

‘Look out for that fuckin shit!’ and

‘I don’t wanna fuckin mess with that.’

and similar fuckin stuff,

and I thought:

My mode of speaking

has not disappeared

into the miasmic ether

of discarded fashions;

it’s not dying with my generation;

it looks as if

it’s gonna fuckin survive.

      21st-Century Freedom  

Maybe it’s just because I’m old

and therefore insufficiently trained,

but I dislike corporations or algorithms

telling me how to order my life and work;

it’s a constant battle,

or so it seems,

just to try to do things my way –

in ways that make sense

and are convenient to me –

a battle I’m constantly losing.

              Obvious to Him 

When puberty crept up on him,

he gave up on rugby after one season

and started devoting himself to ballet

and classes in jazz and modern dance,

and his mates asked him why?

None of them went to those classes,

which were full of nothing but sheilas!

He was the only bloke in any of them.

He couldn’t believe that they didn’t get it.

He just loved being surrounded by girls.

Contact with boys just didn’t

get his hormones pumping

or turn him on

at all.

          Indifference Tsunamis 

They don’t do it on purpose

They just can’t be bothered

to do what people have to do

to defend their sorry arses

from murderous thieves

when they have football games to watch

or blockbusters to rate

or celebrities to envy

or chakras to tend to,

or online strangers to call names

and there’s nothing wrong

with dancing till dawn

They don’t do it on purpose

They just can’t be bothered

They didn’t do it on purpose

They just couldn’t be bothered

Her Poca-hottie

and his Big Chief Loincloth

Indian costumes were just fun

I mean, you can’t be political all the time

So they’re oblivious to the nastiness

of sexualised cultural stereotypes

They’d never be disrespectful on purpose

They just couldn’t be bothered

They don’t do it on purpose

They just can’t be bothered

They don’t mean to let

those jumbo blood-sucking mosquitos

breed out of control

and come slobbing up to the suburbs

from their diseased swamps

They don’t do it on purpose

They just can’t be bothered

They don’t do it on purpose

They just can’t be bothered

to question making sacrifices

and doing without, gladly 

to keep the grey gunboats

cruising up and down the river

They don’t do it on purpose

They just can’t be bothered

She didn’t do it on purpose

She just couldn’t be bothered

She didn’t intend to make his hand bleed

or to destroy his cosy peace

by exposing him to a relentless chill wind

She didn’t do it on purpose

She just couldn’t be bothered

    The Universe, Extinct Species, the Bible, & Me  

The Earth somehow survived

all those billions of years

with no humans present with language

to immortalise time

with observations and speculations and lies,

whilst millions of species

evolved and became extinct

as hundreds of millions of years rolled on,

without one member of any of them

leaving an intentional legacy:

the amphicyonid bear dogs lasted for about

forty-four million, four hundred thousand years

dying out less than two million years ago.

They lived, just as we live now.

And there were the gomphotheres,

related to elephants,

who lived from about twelve million years ago

until just 9,100 years ago,

when humans, who’d been around for about one million,

most likely hunted them into extinction.

Our unquestioningly that’s-the-way-things-are capitalism

has been around for, pish-tush, less than five hundred years,

and eternally immutable Islam for about fourteen hundred.

Compare all this with the countless forever of the cosmos,

and here I am feeling bad, ridiculously,

because of stuff that others in my species,

particularly the few whom I know,

either do or don’t do.

No wonder the young-earth, myths-are-real crowd

pathetically refuse to accept that they’re not the reason

that the universe exists,

as if it needs a reason,

especially one that puffs up people’s egos.

  Visualisation Limitation

I have a friend

in the rowing business

and so I see

the facebook view

of the rowing community.

One rowing-world photo

captured my attention

because of the complexity

of the story it told,

as all fine photos do:

it depicted a rower

receiving some award;

a champion rower,

a young woman,

accepting the silverware

in a glamorous frock

with a short hem

cut higher at the sides

at the middle of her

massively muscular thighs …

At which point,

as I was describing this,

Stan called out,

‘Stop! Stop!

‘It’s too much!

‘I can’t take any more!’

Stan must have

a highly visual

and suggestible

imagination, eh?

             Big Junior’s Flunkies

It’s not getting out

It’s not staying in

It’s why we never get to win

Twisting things beyond a doubt

It sure is the way it only is

listen to the paid spin whizz

It may not be what we’re ready for

We’re not backing down any more

It’s not rising up

It’s not staying down

It’s just a failure to get outta town

while drowning in a white café cup

No time to retrench

Just breathe in their stench

It’s a futilely fought alchemy war

We’re not backing down any more

Big Junior’s flunkies

own personal island retreats

Domination junkies

sending out cruel tweets

jingling their trunk keys

in their corporate box seats

They’re standing over you now

They won’t let you see how

you can possibly run away.

It’s not cutting through

It’s not circling around

It’s grinding your face into the ground

Big Junior smirks to you

that you choose it

you can’t refuse it

His game is deadly when he scores

We’re not backing down any more

            Spider On A Mattress

Spider, who’d once been a hammerhand,

said that he couldn’t sleep

in a bed all by himself.

Not that he went to bed all that often,

amphetamine being what it is,

but somehow, hanging out on the street

in Toronto, of all places,

in 1967, of all years,

and with long, tangled, unwashed hair and beard,

being quite a hairy arachnid,

he always managed to crash,

whenever and wherever,

with some hippie chick beside him.

        Only Human

It’s life, is all it is,

and My Lord, that baby

was life all by himself,

a compensation

for the horror of that rape;

so bright and sweet,

filled full of tomorrows,

not what’s done and gone.

Mary forgot her baby’s father –

he was only human, after all.

It’s life; it’s how it goes

Her cooking skills

outweighed her shame,

and Missus kept her on

despite the fatherless child

who grew to be a hard worker

around the big house’s grounds.

His name was Walter;

they called him Boy

and paid him a dollar a week

after room and board:

a one-room cabin

he and Mary had to share;

forget the damp –

they were only human, after all.

It’s life, so it isn’t fair

that Missy had to take a shine

to Mary’s Walter, who knew better;

even when she flirted at him

with her she-devil’s sugar-voice,

he kept his eyes to the ground

and his speech to ‘Yes, Miss’

and ‘No Miss’ and ‘Right away, Miss’,

but Mister, and Brother Eugene,

and a wagonload of nasty white men

murdered him in public

for messing with her anyway,

hanged him from a tree –

he was only human, after all.

It’s life, and nothing more,

and they never thought twice

about keeping Mary on

after lynching her boy.

She was a good cook, after all,

and a well-trained crow mammy,

with the fear of God and white men

sure to keep her in line.

Except that she began to add

certain herbs and powders

to their soups and gravies

until they all became painfully ill,

and greedy-guts Brother Eugene

wound up half blind in a wheelchair,

which is when Mary disappeared,

some said on the night train

to California,

or Seattle or some such place –

she was only human, after all.

             Chocky Birthday To You!

For your birthday I’m gonna make you

the chocolatiest cake you’ve ever eaten,

with three moist, double-chocolate layers

and my sticky chocolate fudge between them,

all covered with my chocolate ganache icing.

You’ll love it!

          Well, actually, I’m not all that fond of chocolate …

I don’t believe you!

I’m a chocoholic myself,

because chocolate is, well, everything good:

it’s like a love affair

it’s a guilty pleasure

it’s full of antioxidants

it’s hedonistic comfort food

it’s pleasingly bitter

it’s dreamy

it sparks up the serotonin

it lightens the spirit

it’s the most luscious luxury

it’s good for your heart

it connects you with your higher self

it’s an aphrodisiac

it’s the answer to every question

it is life.

How can you live without chocolate?

           Cinnamon.

What?

           Can you make my birthday cake cinnamon?

           – made with a spiced rum batter?

           – topped with butterscotch icing?

           Please?

No. I still don’t believe you.

It’s gotta be chocolate.

You deserve the best.

  

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.