Stuff from January 2018

  Reptile Fossils, Pop Art, & Roses

Small to giant reptiles

once dominated the ecosystem

of this medium-small planet,

spinning its way through space

around a medium-small star

part-way up one of the spiral arms

of a galaxy that’s one of trillions

in this part of the universe;

they did this

for hundreds of millions of years

without telling anyone

and, as far as we know,

without reflection or wonder or self-awareness,

then went extinct or evolved otherwise

hundreds of millions of more years

before our species

evolved to study their fossil record,

and to think about it,

and to talk about ourselves,

doing which has made us think

we’re somehow significant –

an odd word in the context –

while in the mid-1960s,

in our quirky way of reckoning time,

Andy Warhol listened to the song,

‘Sally Go ’Round the Roses’

over and over again for hours

as he produced garish pop art

with the same old universe around him

that had surrounded the dinosaurs.

  

   Pathos & Scorn

A small blue car

bearing just the driver,

male or female,

I couldn’t tell,

zoomed down

the otherwise

somnolent street,

its engine all revved up

into a howling growl,

or maybe a growling howl,

the end of the street

and its stop sign

less than fifty metres away,

and I thought of the driver:

What a pathetic person!

Then it occurred to me

that I’m pathetic, too,

only not as aggressively

noisy about it in public,

and that,

when viewed dispassionately,

our entire species

is pathetic to the core.

         Eggshell 

We have protection

surrounding us,

an eggshell

dangling from a spider web

in a good, stiff breeze.

We have sustenance,

with vapour billowing

from our cloud cleansers,

where we wash off

the thin film of soil

that also sustains us.

We have transportation

inside of which we run errands,

mobile eggshell replicas

we can barely control,

and sometimes we die

when they crack or shatter.

We have jobs,

which bang us against

the inside of our eggshell

without our even noticing

or thinking twice about it,

because it’s there.

We look at each other

using mirrors and blindfolds,

sonorously exchanging

tall tales about worlds

without eggshell or dirt,

convincing each other

that make-believe is real.

    Small Compensation

Sometimes it seems to me,

probably stupidly,

that all our lives and deaths

are fractions of a world soul

that encompasses all of the

pleasure and pain,

joy and terror,

purity and pollution,

artistic experiences

and dull drudgery

of all living things,

and I rejoice myself

to observe my dog

adding to his enjoyment

of smells and fellowship

that I can barely imagine,

which adds to my experience

of the world soul

when it absorbs me

from my limitations,

although I can’t forget

that this is small compensation

for all the agonies and terror

resulting from human cruelty

inflicted on each other

and other animals

in our billions.

               Intimate Secrets

She hid her face in the pillow

in a paroxysm of embarrassment and fear,

and I said, ‘Hey! Don’t worry!

‘This is me that you’re talking to.

‘I’m never going to tell anyone,’

and so I’m not going to tell you now;

no, you’re not going to know her secret,

even though she later done did me wrong,

with heaps of hurt involved,

and told me all sorts of lies

along the way

that I’m not even

going to report now, either,

because it would embarrass me too much

to recount publicly, in specifics,

what a predictably pathetic mark I was,

anyway.

             The Smirk 

She smirked.

Then she said something

that she clearly thought was clever,

but was actually dimwitted and rude,

but it was the smirk:

the sides of the mouth

turned barely upward

and the middle of the upper lip

pushed down over the lower,

with the chin lowered slightly also,

to give just a hint of the impression

of looking down at the recipient,

the whole face arranged to convey

smugness,

self-satisfaction,

scorn,

condescension,

derision,

contempt,

and I’ve-got-your-number,

a nasty, affected travesty of a smile

that expressed no humour or warmth.

I have no ability to tolerate smirking;

it trips one of my triggers,

and only my commitment

to the principle of non-violence,

my aversion to being absorbed

into the criminal-justice system,

and the context,

a high-school hall

crowded with parents and teachers,

the smirker being one of my daughter’s teachers,

kept me from smashing that smirk

right off of her face.

       Colourful Surnames

 

I know, or have heard of,

plenty of people

in the English-speaking world

with the surnames

of White, Black,

Grey (or Gray), Brown,

Green (or Greene),

Gold, Silver,

and even a few

surnamed Rose and Blue,

and can google up people with the surnames

Pink, Violet,

and Redd (but not Red –

although Rossi is common in Italian),

but I can find no mention of anybody

with the surname Yellow

since 1653

(although Huang is common in Chinese).

I wonder why?

I wonder why about all sorts of odd stuff

when I’m walking my dog around the park.

                     From

I’ve been a bloke with an accent

for forty-five or so years,

and during those years

from twelve to fifteen thousand

essentially dull and superficial people

have asked, upon encountering me,

where I was from,

or some variation of this.

People with Asian facial features,

from what I’ve heard,

get hit with this at least as often,

no matter what their accent.

From.

Nadia from Pussy Riot rapped,

‘Don’t be stupid / Don’t be dumb /

Vagina’s where you’re really from.’

The superficials don’t like that answer,

any more than when I’ve responded,

‘From my father’s balls.’

From.

I feel like I’m from Hamilton,

since I’ve lived here longer

than I ever lived anywhere else,

but of course the superficials

won’t accept that.

I moved to Hamilton from Otorohanga.

I moved to Otorohanga from Guam.

I moved to Guam from Texas,

where the superficials also

interrogated me about my accent.

From.

Am I from my birth country?

We left when I was seven weeks old.

Am I from where my ancestors lived?

Recent or distant ones?

Am I from where I started school?

From.

Does having been a lecturer

make me from Academia?

Does my work as a labourer and

my grandfather’s trade-union loyalties

make me from the working class?

But my father’s working as

a small-town GP

makes me from the middle class.

From.

I’m from a dysfunctional nuclear family,

which is much more to the point

than where I went to school.

From.

My geographical location

a half-century or more ago

tells you little about who I am,

unless, of course, your objective

is instead to tell me what I am

and to jam me into a box

that’s the wrong shape

and far too small.

From.

Like John Frum and the isle of Tanna,

I’m not going back.

More Political Stuff

                      Courage and Support

I feel so inferior

to Pussy Riot, Julian Assange, Jafar Panahi,

and all those who publicise and challenge

the Chinese cadres’ information control,

the callousness of India’s elite,

the Brazilian state’s crimes

against the environment and indigenous peoples,

and every other abuse by the mighty and arrogant.

Those who resist and defy

bullying by governments,

corporations, religious organisations,

and other authoritarians

who are firmly convinced

of their entitlement to privilege

deserve all the support

that anybody else

can give them,

however little good that may do.

  

                        Spooky

Shortly after the US’s evil president

started killing eight-year-old girls

and other people in Baghdad

for no legitimate reason,

I went to the US consulate

to start the process

of renouncing my American citizenship,

having also held Kiwi citizenship

for yonks.

Figuring that making a point

requires doing something to make it,

I informed the media,

and TV3 sent along a crew.

After they interviewed me on camera

outside the office building housing the consulate,

a man approached us and requested,

in the sort of bland American voice and accent

a spokesman for Monsanto would have,

that it would be best if the camera didn’t show the building

due to the threat of terrorism.

The TV3 reporter asked him who he was and

what gave him the right to order us around.

He purred softly that he just helped out at the consulate

with security and stuff like that.

The reporter told him that,

in this country at least,

we have freedom of speech and press,

and he turned and left.

He’d been wearing neutral-coloured trousers

and a bland business shirt with no tie,

and within seconds I would have been unable to describe him,

his face had been so ordinary and bland.

I’d been face-to-face with a real-life spook.

The camera operator panned up to show the building.

                         Horrors

And so another horror committed by humans

had flitted across our screens,

replacing or eclipsing the previous horror,

depending on the degree

to which we can identify with the victims’

location, culture, ethnicity, prosperity,

and so on.

People have inflicted more horrors

on other people since the last lead-story grabber,

albeit in less sexy places,

and rest assured that more notorious horrors

will supplant the most recent one

in our attention span

as they occur.

After all, we live in a time of horrors.

I rather suspect, however,

that all times have been times of horrors,

as far back as we care or dare to look.

I don’t think that the problem

is the times in which we live,

but that it’s people, particularly assholes,

who are living in these times,

as our species did in such times

before instant worldwide video

and six-hour news cycles,

as when English-speakers committed genocide

on the native North Americans and Australians,

or when the biblical Israelites

did so to the Canaanites and Amalekites

in obedience to the One God.

       The Right Honourable

One thing

that nearly all people

who have enjoyed

what our culture defines as success,

and those who aspire to emulate them,

seem to agree upon

is that honour is contemptible.

           Internet Petitions

People all over the place

lie all the time, of course,

and many delight in justifying,

at least to themselves,

the domination and cruelty and destruction

in which they wallow

with arrogantly disingenuous hogwash

as a matter of habit,

as a matter of policy

– it’s just a part of who they are,

like being football club supporters

or connoisseurs of cheese.

It’s a daunting task,

challenging

their bullshit prescriptions and machinations

in any meaningful way.

The really powerful ones

can afford high-priced deniers,

who finance media dissemblance 

and produce consequent surveys revealing

that most people don’t give a shit

about the meaningful survival 

of anybody or anything,

even – in the long term –

of themselves or their progeny.

Those of us who view this nastiness

from inside emotional bunkers

– resulting from our being

shell-shocked and conflict-averse –

can only wonder if internet petitions

really have any effect.

          Fils de Baron Samedi

After reading something

about the Haiti of the Tonton Macoutes,

I tried to imagine what it would have been like

to have lived though that

and I couldn’t

because my mind wouldn’t let me.

  

               Power Imbalances

Close to the last time I talked

with an arrogant-dickhead uni lecturer

who used to pretend

to be my friend,

he and his then-current sycophant

were going on about some bullshit theory

advocating world government

based on somehow

them getting everyone else

in every culture

to adopt their values.

I noted that in my experience and scholarship,

the only value I’d found to be the same in all cultures

is that nobody likes to be bullied,

and somehow it got around to the sycophant

telling me that when I resisted bullies,

such as by not buying from companies

that bully others,

that I was bullying them.

I grew up with two born bullies in the same house

who naturally saw me,

the littlest one there,

as a natural target,

so I have this thing about bullies and bullying.

It’s important, for instance,

always to stand up to them,

and when that’s impossible,

it’s better to escape than to back down.

That’s the main reason why,

when I had the chance and the ability,

I became involved in a small way

with helping refugees, the world’s most bullied people.

I wonder if the sycophant

would put his sophistry to the test

and argue that the refugees

were bullying their former torturers

by fleeing, and depriving them

of the joy of torturing.

Reverse power imbalances, indeed.

              Graft As A Fatal Addiction

Functionaries such as he is

have always done things this way,

so he does them this way, too,

even though it’s obvious

that everything is collapsing around him,

that his corruption

is hurrying that collapse along,

and that doing things this way can’t last;

he keeps selling out to the highest bidder,

and any other bidders willing to front up

with the cash –

cash that won’t buy him jack shit

when everything to buy is gone

and no place remains to which he can flee.

                      Terrible Terrorising

I noticed that one of the unconvicted Syrians

released after twelve years of illegal incarceration

and probably torture at Guantanamo

for being a terrorist

said upon his arrival in Montevideo

that his priorities were:

(a) reuniting with his family,

(b) opening a restaurant, and

(c) supporting the Uruguayan national football team.

I’m terrified.

      Personal Versus Principle

During the early part of this century

I was highly active in the Green Party,

serving in many capacities

at the provincial

and even national levels.

After the 2005 election,

the party’s national

power elite

treated me with grave disrespect

and I cut back to just

chipping in ten bucks a month

and letterboxing

as much as the local coordinator

wanted me to.

Then a local party poobah,

whom I’d never met,

went beyond disrespect

to disdain,

behaving toward me as if

I were less than shit.

I was inclined

to end my association,

but the Green Party

remains the most sane and humane

counterweight to

New Zealand’s

reckless, egocentric, and greedy

right-wing fuckwit power freaks.

Personal dignity or duty to others?

I cut back to five bucks a month

and letterboxing the minimum amount.