Stuff From February and March 2018

 Smokers’ Etiquette & Science 

It was just lying there,

without volition of its own,

a crushed, empty cigarette pack

in about the middle

of the park footpath,

maybe 30 or 40 metres from a bin,

and I thought,

shaking my head sadly,

‘Smokers sure do tend to be shitty people,’

and then I caught myself,

and castigated myself

for my logical fallacy

of jumping to a conclusion

based on insufficient data;

despite having seen

a plethora of stomped-out butts

and other tobacco-based detritus

on the ground all over the place

throughout my long life,

my observations have been

unsystematic and without

scientifically robust controls

to compare them with

how much crap other people

throw on the ground.

Bastards, all of ’em,

anyway.

                Factors 

Smart phones

Dumb people

That’s how the situation rolls

Smart phones

Dumb people

Tumbling wild out of control

Smart cars

Dumb drivers

Unenlightened about nature’s laws

Smart cars

Dumb drivers

Gotta eighty-six the human cause

Hot bods

Cold feelings

Forget the losers far from the top

Hot bods

Cold feelings

Fuck that brainy, PC, no-fun slop

Cheap talk

Grand promises

Love’s gonna find us by this afternoon

Cheap talk

Grand promises

We’re gonna set it right now really soon

Soft hearts

Hard lessons

The open door is starting to shut

Soft heart

Hard lessons

We’re floating then we’re kicked in the butt

Smart phones

Dumb people

It’s so easy to be mystified

Smart phones

Dumb people

We’re getting dizzy on that downhill slide

     Why I’m Not A Lawyer

I earned my bachelor’s degree

in political science

with a respectable grade-point average

at a university

with a prestigious

and well-connected

law school,

but I never even considered

filling out an application

for admission to that law school.

Nothing would have made my mother happier

than for me to become a lawyer.

That was reason enough

for me not to apply for law school

right there.

              Faith

I don’t believe you.

It’s nothing personal.

I don’t believe much.

Actually, when it comes to, well, stuff

I try not to believe anything,

although I don’t doubt

that a sustained, rigorous investigation

could uncover instances

in which I’ve fucked up

and been taken in,

me being fallible and all.

When it comes to people

my default setting is mistrust,

but from time to time,

whether out of loneliness

or a craving for love or friendship –

or any other form of human closeness –,

I have let my guard down

and trusted and believed someone,

and of course have wound up

getting kicked in the arse,

metaphorically speaking,

trust and belief returning

to tarnished memory.

                       No Polemic 

I’m incapable of feeling empathy

with bigots, sexists, wowsers, prohibitionists,

and people who are obsessed

with other people’s sexual proclivities.

I have enough trouble just trying to be myself

than to work myself up into a froth

about who other people are

and what they’re up to.

Sure, I definitely have a dislike

and an occasional unkind word

for psychopathic narcissists,

maliciously sadistic bullies,

aggressively superstitious blowhards,

and phonies who pontificate authoritatively

on subjects about which they’re pig-ignorant,

but experience has convinced me

that nothing I say or do will change them,

so I just confine myself to avoiding them

as much as I can,

and limiting my unkind words to them in general,

but not individually by name –

because that could lead to interpersonal conflict.

Dickheads are everywhere,

and that’s the way it’s always been.

One can’t fight them all.

                   Just Like That 

Some people are just like that.

I was walking my dog

along a street lined with regal oak trees

when she called to me from a deck

on the other side of a fence

to come in through the gate

for a glass of wine.

Fifty years old, she told me,

and wearing dreadlocks and baggy mid-calfs, I noticed,

she turned out to be an attack conversationalist,

launching one personal attack or innuendo

after another,

her objective being

to poke reactions out of me,

as she told me after one egregious insult,

which she readily conceded that

she herself thought was awful and didn’t believe.

She seemed to think that I was enjoying this.

Some people are just like that.

I was soon looking for a polite way to escape,

but she’d given my dog a huge bone,

which he, at least, was enjoying enormously.

Still, after 15 or 20 minutes

of sustaining repeated attacks,

I stuffed the jumbo livestock joint

into a plastic bag I had in my pocket,

as a responsible citizen,

for picking up dog shit,

and retreated out through the gate

to the tree-shaded footpath,

where it felt good to breathe

again.

Some people are just like that.

               Dalí Doesn’t Rhyme With Tolstoy

          Dalí didn’t dilly-dally, did he?

          Warhol wasn’t wishy-washy, was he?

          Shelley shouldn’t shilly-shally, should she?

          Wordsworth wouldn’t wiggle-waggle, would he?

          Kindergarten fartin’

          played a part in startin’ a smartin’ spartan

          goin’, ‘holy moley, roly-poly,

          you’re losing your bruising and

          your cruising and your boozing, whilst

          you’re fusing and refusing, which makes

          your schmoozing bemusing,

          so you’re losing it once again.’

          Meanwhile,

          their cobber’s slobber clobbered your throbber,

          and their clubber’s blubber

          scrubbed a grubber that wouldn’t rub her

          the right way anymore.

          Geisel groaned no gibble-gabble,

          Chomsky chawed no chitter-chatter,

          Picasso pooh-poohed their prittle-prattle, and

          Tolstoy told no tittle-tattle.

          Meanwhile,

          Paisley’s partly pickled party gherkin

          was workin’ the java that was perkin’ away

          for every jerk and patsy in the park.

          Dalí didn’t dilly-dally, did he?

          Warhol wasn’t wishy-washy, was he?

          Tolstoy told no tittle-tattle,

          not a snotty jot of it, no!

                  The Consequences of Immodesty

                  She removed her hijab headscarf,

                  fluffed her hair a bit,

                  then wrapped it back on her head,

                  right there in the windy park,

                  far from anyone,

                  but I saw it happen

                  from a hundred or so metres away;

                  I saw her forbidden hair, I did,

                  and I wondered if some sort of hellfire

                  would ensue for me,

                  but none did,

                  or hasn’t as yet.

                  I have nothing to report

                  about any hellish consequences

                  for her,

                  but I think not.

             Comments 

I never listen to talkback radio,

but occasionally I fail to avoid

noticing internet comments

of the nasty and dimwitted persuasion.

I almost envy

those internet Comments arseholes,

as it must be comforting for them

to huff and puff self-righteously

about how people

who are less lucky than they are

are really inferior

in all sorts of ways

(So much safer for the commenters

than claiming to be superior themselves),

and it must feel grand

to get a deep-down-in-the-glands thrill

from stomping on helplessly defenceless people

who are already down,

and to do it

with a holier-than-thou conscience,

if that word applies.

              Fancy Fucking 

Lenny Bruce said

that the difference between

pornography and erotica

is the difference between

plain fucking and fancy fucking;

depicting ordinary, everyday fucking,

he maintained, is pornography,

but if you can, as he put it,

‘tear off a piece of ass with class,’

that’s erotica.

My experience of fancy fucking,

way back before old age

made me terminally unattractive sexually,

was of those times when,

whilst pumping away,

whether with class or without,

I experienced the illusion, or delusion,

that I had become one with my partner,

and that we were inextricably joined

spiritually as well as genitally.

The fucks resulting in zygotes,

to me at least,

were even fancier still.

     Repeated Kicks Up The Bum

The thing is

I have come to know

that what holds me back,

that what’s always held me back,

are psychological disorders,

and I know where they came from,

so I know that the ways

that they make my mind work,

as likely as not,

are objectively suspect

as well as dysfunctional, but

the thing is,

all my real-world experiences

of relating to other people

and human institutions

have consisted of

repeated kicks up the bum,

which has reinforced my disorders

and provided me with the niggling thought

that they really are indeed

true and accurate

representations of my reality.

             News of Death 

One thing that I will never know

is how my daughters will react

when they hear the news that I’ve died.

I wonder if my mother ever thought about this,

and if she thought her death

would provoke copious tears.

I wasn’t there to see it,

but I expect that my brother

play-acted whatever parts

he thought would impress

whatever audience he had

when he had one,

his mind, meanwhile,

focused on the money.

Personally, I felt nothing at all

when I learnt that she died,

and never even considered

going to her funeral.

I wonder if, in thirty or forty years,

my daughters will hate my memory

the way that I hate hers,

but, of course,

I’ll never know.

        A Hideous Deformity

Out of any randomly selected

group of one hundred people,

one is statistically likely

to be significantly richer

than the rest,

one is statistically likely

to be significantly more intelligent

than the rest,

and it’s extremely unlikely

for them to be the same person.

It must be infuriating

for the cossack rubes

to base their world-view

on the hatred of people

who are much more intelligent

than they are

while refusing to admit

that they’re not really smarter

than those who are more intelligent

than they are.

Politicians on the rich people’s payroll know this,

and have great success exploiting it.

               Wet Willies  

One of the more damaging

of the myriad techniques

that my two-years-older brother used

to bully, torment, and generally abuse me

during the first 14 or 15 years of my life,

when I was trapped

living in the same house as he was,

was to use his greater size and weight

to pin me down so I couldn’t move,

snorfelling with laughter

at my desperate but futile efforts free my arms,

to free myself,

and only letting me go after sticking

one of his saliva-moistened fingers

into my ear.

I’ve had nightmares,

more properly PTSD flashbacks,

in my sleep about this

throughout my life,

awakening screaming and kicking

and so badly tangled in the sheets

that I’d fall to the floor

escaping half-asleep from the bed.

They reached so much sleep-shattering frequency

that when I was 67 I began taking medication

to help me to control my dreams,

and during the subsequent four-and-a-half years

have only awakened, shaken,

from fraternal nightmares three times,

and two of those times

before an actual assault took place.

Not bad, eh?

Not good enough, either,

but I suppose it’s as good as it’s gonna get.

Urban Life

                          Christmas In May

She had her tinny little electric keyboard thingy

set up on the footpath on Victoria Street

that cool and hazy May afternoon.

I like buskers, so I thought I’d go up and listen,

maybe make a request.

I thought that for a keyboard a good request would be

‘Whole Lotta Shakin’ Goin’ On’.

Good, old-timey stuff, y’know.

As I approached I was able to focus better through my cataracts,

and I saw that although her facial features

were regular and well-proportioned,

they were tight and pinched and serious and disapproving,

as if she were sitting in a non-dispersing cloud of a sour fart,

her beautifully strawberry-blond hair

tied back tightly in a skimpy ponytail.

She was playing a Christmas carol,

‘The first Noël’

over and over again,

in May,

her scrunched-up scowl frozen in place.

I decided against asking her to play some Jerry Lee Lewis.

When I walked by in the other direction

a half an hour or so later

she was gone.

Literally this time, rather than figuratively, as before.

                      Fairfield Shops

There they stood,

just outside the dairy

at Heaphy Terrace

and Howden Road,

both of them young women,

in their early twenties, I’d say.

One seemed to be Maori

and was wearing cut-offs and a heavy-metal t-shirt.

The other had Middle-Eastern features

and was wearing an Islamic headscarf

and multicoloured hijab clothing

that covered her from her chin to the footpath,

except for her hands.

There they stood,

eating ice cream and laughing together,

chatting the way that people

who’ve been close friends for years chat.

I felt cheated because I’ll never know their story.

                    Rangi on the Bridge

They were three abreast on the narrow footpath,

basically blocking it,

unsmooth-looking men in their late thirties,

at about the same spot where I’d come to grief

the last time I’d crossed the bridge in that direction

four-and-a-half weeks earlier.

The one on the bicycle, though,

pulled away and smiled a good-morning at me as he went by.

As I passed the other two I nodded, ‘Hey,’

and heard the shorter one say, ‘Richard.’

I turned around

and heard him say

to the medium-sized one with the round head and face,

‘Mr Selinkoff.’

Then he turned and faced me and we shook hands.

‘Do you know who I am?’

‘Ummm …’

‘I’m Rangi.’

And I saw the resemblance,

despite the lines on his face and the scraggly beard,

to the skinny little kid in my third-form English class

and junior basketball team

at Otorohanga College 24 years earlier.

His nana had been my postie.

‘Damn, Rangi,’ I said, ‘you sure aren’t thirteen anymore, are you?’

He laughed and we walked off in our separate directions.

Not being 43 anymore, I couldn’t recall his surname.

  Suburban Bunny Encounter

I thought it was a cat at first

in the half-light of dawn,

but when, strolling along,

I came closer to it

I saw that it was a rabbit

there on the Winter Street footpath.

My instant response,

an urge to kill it,

surprised and shocked me,

and I suppressed it instantly.

From what primeval

part of my brain

that bunnicidal reaction emerged

I’ll never know.

Apparently unconcerned by my approach

the rabbit

turned unhurriedly

into a driveway

and hopped past the hedge

toward a house

as if it knew

where it was going.

        Recognising Achievement

He was a sullen-looking kid,

maybe eighteen or nineteen,

working behind the display chiller

in the supermarket’s seafood section.

When he saw that I was waiting for service

he just short of glowered at me

and muttered something unintelligible.

I ordered a hundred grams of marinara mix.

He grabbed a small pottle,

spooned some of the mix into it,

and weighed it: 98 grams.

‘Hey!’ I said, definitely impressed,

‘That was really skilful!’

An enormous, happy smile spread over his face.

‘Nah,’ he said, ‘it was just luck.’

We smiled at each other for another moment

and then I was off to pick up some soy milk.

                                  Good Legs

Neither one of them noticed me.

I was just a harmless old man in the background

who looked as if he’d be worthless in a dust-up,

which is what I was.

The bloke, who was in heavy-metal drag,

came up behind the young woman,

who was wearing lycra work-out shorts,

while she was pushing keys at the ATM

and said, ‘Hey sheila, you got some good legs!’

She turned around and half-smiled and said,

‘Yeah. They keep me from bouncing along the footpath on my arse

and let me reach the money machine,

which I’m trying to concentrate on without being disturbed.’

He replied, ‘Y’know, you have a really cute smile,’

and reached a hand out toward her hip.

Her right uppercut sank wrist-deep into his gut –

or that’s the way it seemed to me,

my view being partially obstructed –

and a whole lot of air oomfed rapidly out of his mouth

in the instant before her high martial-arts kick

caught him just below the ear,

making him collapse in a heap.

‘Yep, good legs, eh?’ she said. ‘You bet,’

before finishing her business and walking away.

Neither had noticed me and I hadn’t said a word.

I walked around the man, who was struggling to his knees,

and used the ATM to get the twenty dollars cash

I needed to buy a tinny.

At my advanced age I find that this is a world

that I can appreciate better

moment by moment from the perspective

of a somewhat odd angle.

                     The Hols

If you want my opinion,

and it’s unlikely that you do,

the school holidays suck.

It’s not just that I couldn’t find a car park

at Chartwell Square when I went to renew my car’s rego,

or that the municipal natatorium

(look it up)

is overcrowded,

or that the burglary rate goes through the roof –

the worst thing

is that my beloved city

becomes increasingly fraught with ugliness

as the hols drag on

and those hideously reptilian,

egomaniacally sociopathic

pubescent children,

go swaggering along the footpaths

in their tedious uniforms

with time on their hands,

and cans of spray paint under their hoodies,

and raise the level of tagging from disgusting to disheartening,

lowering my quality of life

by exposing me to huge expanses

of public, dimwitted ugliness.

I want to spray-paint their bedrooms.

                 A Vocation Discovered

After I’d crossed Heaphy Terrace with my dog,

but before we’d crossed the footpath into the park,

a young bloke, maybe twenty or so years old,

with a decidedly downmarket self-presentation,

centring on bad and missing teeth

approached us on his beat-up old bike,

slowed down, and exchanged greetings with me.

He clearly wanted to chat.

This happens from time to time,

the conversations usually ending with an appeal for funds.

This bloke was different.

He was excited and wanted to share.

He told me that what he does is take care of old people.

I replied that I thought this was cool,

being an old person myself.

He went on to regale me with an account

of an incident the previous evening

when, just after dark, he’d spotted a ‘couple of young fellas’

at the far corner of the park

mugging an old fella in a mobility scooter.

Well, actually, he didn’t really know the term ‘mobility scooter’,

but we got there.

They’d knocked the codger off his machine

by the time my raconteur arrived like the bicycle cavalry;

he’d fought them off and then helped the old guy on his way.

We continued talking, him walking his bike and adding details.

He told me not to worry;

he was going to help old people cross the park after dark

from then on.

I told him I thought that was a really nice thing.

I haven’t seen him since.