Watcha Got Cookin?
She rode in here on the sloping
back
of an immigrant emu
wearing a hijab scarf and a
string bikini,
scattering confetti
made from shredded documents
of vital importance
to somebody who didn’t matter.
I could smell her body,
the real aroma and the flowery
bath products,
more clearly than my own
despite my determined
consumption of vin ordinaire.
Her purpose was obscure to me –
did she intend to crumble my
barriers?
Then why the outlandish
transport
and uncoordinated attire?
I put mushrooms in the pan with
a hint of garlic
and cooked them down till it
was time
to add soy milk and wholemeal
flour
and take the pan off the heat
before stirring it all into
sauce,
bowtie pasta gurgling on the
back burner.
Dapper.
As she stood beside me whilst I
did this,
I took the opportunity
to grope her globular ass.
She informed me
matter-of-factly
that she’d been waiting all her
life
for someone who didn’t put her
on a pedestal
and would casually grope her
ass
in the kitchen.
Definitions
and Perceptions of Love
The sexist quack
told me that men and women
have different definitions of Love.
‘All of them?’ I thought. ‘All
over the world?
‘Billions and billions divided
neatly
into A and B by genital
conformation?’
But of course I said nothing.
After all, she was behind a
desk,
had credentials on the wall
behind her,
and was in a position of power
over the well-being of someone I love.
‘Women,’ she went on in a
condescendingly pedantic manner,
‘consider love to be an
emotion, what a person feels,
regardless of the nature of the
interpersonal relationship,
whereas men define love in
terms of behaviour, what a person does,
regardless of the emotional factor.’
I thought about mentioning all of the abusive men
who insist that they really loved their wives or partners
despite having bashed or murdered them,
but the quack was behind the desk,
I was in front of it,
the certificates were on the wall behind her,
and my loved one’s well-being
was in her incompetent hands,
with serious negative consequences.
A Good Snog
I still really enjoy a good
snog,
despite being an old-age
pensioner
and knowing that it involves
sucking on a nine-metre-long
tube
with shit at the other end.
Wong’s Precise Sexual-Preference Aesthetic
His name was Wong and he came from California
He had a round, chubby face and a confident smile
that expressed unquestioned self-assurance.
He told us straight off about his sexual preferences,
as if we were
all dying of curiosity about them.
He liked skinny boys and fat girls.
“If a girl’s skinny,” he explained, pulling a face,
“I’d rather have a boy, thank you,
but if a boy is
fat I’d much prefer a girl.”
I thought at the time that this was cool,
especially since I was far from skinny,
but I wonder now, many decades later,
how well this would sit
with the twenty-first century politics of body image
and objectification.
A Snappy Bon Mot
It was at a frat party in the mid-sixties.
I only heard about it from an eye witness
because I didn’t belong to a frat.
Anyway, this drunken dork
whipped out his dork,
plopped it onto a tray of snacks
and offered it to a young woman.
Picking up a cracker with a piece of cheese on it,
she smiled and said,
“Ooooh, that looks just like a penis –
only smaller.”
His Ex And Her Ex
The very first thing she told
her new man,
before anything else,
was that she hated to be
controlled or manipulated:
‘Being a part of someone’s
plan,’
she insisted, ‘would kill me.
Literally.’
She’d gone on to tell him about
her Ex,
and about what a control freak
he was,
down to his preferred place for
every little item in the house,
and especially in the kitchen,
which he hadn’t let her use,
and how this had driven her to
a nervous breakdown,
and how he still controlled the
custody-sharing arrangements
for the kids, driving her nuts with
powerlessness.
Her new man had told her not to
worry,
that due to his own mental
problems
he had a deep-seated aversion
to exercising control,
whether directly or indirectly,
over anybody about anything,
and that his default setting
was to let people be themselves
and for him to make decisions
for himself and nobody else.
Over the succeeding months he proved to be
accurate in those self-descriptions,
at least in regard to his deference to her,
whilst she rigorously controlled
and subtly manipulated him
before giving him the old heave-ho,
at which time he came to the conclusion
that her Ex had probably been
something like a cross between a prince and a
saint.
My
Former Lover
She was apparently eager
to get naked with me,
something I can’t imagine
anybody else would want to do,
and her face as she orgasmed
was about the most beautiful thing I’ve
ever seen,
but I never really knew her
after almost a year,
and from time to time
she cut me off
from any contact
at all
with her or her life
for a few
weeks or months,
so I couldn’t let my myself
let my emotions become involved,
but, abjectly, cravenly,
I enjoyed her mind
and her body
every chance I got
until that became impossible.
She was many different people.
When it was definitively over
I missed some of them bitterly,
and some of them
I was glad to be without.
Soulful
Passion and Mental Health
The number of women
with whom I’ve been involved
over my long and rocky lifetime
is more of a testament
to my inadequacy as a person
than to my sexual
attractiveness
or prowess as a lover.
It seems worth noting, however,
that the two who have lodged
themselves most firmly
inside my soul,
and who still weigh the most
heavily
on my mind
both suffered
from serious mental illnesses
when we were together.
Maybe it just hurts me
that I was inadequate for their
needs.
Right For The Wrong Reason
I was twenty,
one of the youngest
participants
at a writers’ workshop in an
off-season ski resort.
She was a few years younger,
a runaway from a relatively
nearby mining town.
She picked me up.
We got drunk.
We went to my room.
We climbed into bed.
We started kissing.
I started groping.
She said, ‘Richard, no’ somewhat softly.
Now, I was only twenty
and, although in full
possession of all the requisite hormones,
embarrassingly inexperienced.
I’d heard those presenting
themselves as worldly wise
expound, knowing smirks of
their faces, on the phenomenon
of women saying ‘No’ when they
really mean ‘Yes’.
This had always seemed to me to
be a really fucked-up game,
devoid of honesty and integrity
and truth,
values that even then meant
heaps to me.
So, thinking, ‘Okay you phony
bitch, if that’s how you want to play it,’
I said, ‘Okay. No it is,’
thinking that I was disappointing her.
I rolled over, and eventually
fell asleep
next to that eminently
desirable and half-dressed girl.
We slept chastely together,
as she had nowhere else to go
that night.
