Stuff from June 2017

                 Young Earth People, part 1

Reality is hard to picture without imagination.

It seems to most people, understandably,

that things are the way they are – now,

and it follows that most people,

which are those who have little or no imagination

inadequate education, and a truncated ability to wonder,

think that with a few small wrinkles,

such as what telephones and pop music and fads are like,

things now are more or less the way things’ve always been.

The Treaty of Waitangi

started what we call New Zealand, more or less,

about 175 years ago,

and who knows anything much

about their great-great-great-great-great grandparents,

who lived back then, anyhow?

And then 30 or so generations

of Maori lived and died in Aotearoa

before the colonisers got things here under control,

more or less.

Sumerian civilisation lasted for about 2,500 years,

which was more than 100 generations,

much, much longer than the English language has been around,

but it ended about 4,000 years ago 

(imagine how many ‘greats’ to put before ‘grandparents’ there),

about the time that Chinese written history began.

Without imagination it could seem like the 80s,

or an egalitarian New Zealand culture.

All ancient history.

Reality is hard to picture without imagination.

                  Young Earth People, part 2

Reality is hard to picture without imagination.

It’s obvious why young-earth creationists think that way.

Who can imagine all the births and deaths

that went by before we could live?

We’re about 50,000 generations from being hominids,

compared to the young-earthers’ unchanging 250 or so.

Being simpletons, they simply cannot imagine

that much time and change,

or a universe that isn’t centred on them.

And if that’s too much, imagine how impossible it is

for them to imagine, for example,

that a species of egg-laying mammals

lived in Victoria, Australia for about 8½ million years,

but died out about 112½ million years ago,

far, far longer than people have been around in any form,

or than young-earthers claim that the whole universe has existed.

Minds that boggle at a thousand generations

must shut off entirely when the numbers reach the millions.

The light from the trillion suns of the Andromeda Galaxy,

(Imagination Failure! Imagination Failure! Ha-Oooga!),

the most distant of the twinkling lights

that people can see in the night sky,

took about 2,250,000 years to get here,

(Imagination Failure! Imagination Failure! Ha-Oooga!),

but when the End of Days brings the Rapture,

all the stars will fall from the sky, and why not?

Stars, after all, look like little things

that you could almost reach out and touch.

Some might even land in your back garden.

If you pray hard enough, though,

they just might land in your neighbours’ gardens

and leave yours alone.

        The Freedom Of The Ruling Class

They gleefully hoard more than they can ever need,

the rulers of the Earth,

but stay edgy,

all of them slaves to the bottom line at the end of the day.

They revel in their smug sense of superiority,

the rulers of the Earth,

souls being problematic,

desperate slaves to their inhuman business model’s needs.

They giggle like children as they befoul their playgrounds,

the rulers of the Earth;

consequences being for lesser people,

they themselves being simpering slaves to maximisation.

They’re chortling in their newly-grown beards,

the rulers of the Earth,

who can afford anything,

but are hopeless slaves to fashion.

           There’s A Word For This?

Walking into town along gracious George Street

the memory of a job I once had

whistled into my brain and filled it for a while –

the job was supervising the In-School Suspension program

at an extremely downmarket school in the 80s,

with an assortment of adolescents

coping with poverty and culture conflict and hormones

in an entertaining variety of ways –

especially the charming rogues,

and it struck me that it had been like living

in a Dickensian novel, only an Hispanic one,

but all this cranial tapestry was really just for me,

and this filled me with wonder.

It’s not quite an emotion, I don’t think,

but I was experiencing one of those feelings

that we don’t have a word for in English.

Maybe the Japanese have one

of their zinger words for it,

or the Germans one of their words

that take up an entire line of type,

or one that the Yaghan language of Tierra del Fuego

has encapsulated with pithy insight – I don’t know,

but the feeling was one of being simultaneously

keenly conscious of what an unlikely, magnificently amazing,

and beautiful phenomenon my brain is

and of how utterly insignificant all my neural activity

is to anything outside of my body, anyway.

  

      The Limits To Veracity

All my life, since I was a little kid,

one of the bedrocks of my self-respect

has been that I don’t lie.

Sometimes I may have had

to be a bit evasive, perhaps,

but when pinned down

I’ve always tried to tell the truth.

That’s one of the basic reasons

that brazenly lying people of power

disgust me as much as they do.

Oh judgemental me!

I do, however,

recognise an exception

to my no-porkies rule,

and that, of course,

is that it’s okay to lie to cops

in certain situations.

Maybe that’s why

corrupt politicians lie all the time –

they consider everybody –

you and me and reporters, let’s say,

to be something like cops.

Nah, Key and Turnbull and Putin and Trump

and their ilk have probably just been

psychopathic liars since they were little kids

and have some kind of a block in their brains

that prevents the truth from reaching their mouths.

                   Focused Passions

Robin scrubs each grape with a toothbrush

before popping it fastidiously into his mouth.

‘Hygiene is very important,’ he says.

Erana scatters the clothes pegs about on the ground

every time she removes her wash from the line.

‘I have a random-romantic personality,’ she says.

Ogden polishes his espresso machine daily

and won’t permit anyone to even say ‘plunger’ in his house.

‘Coffee is something to take seriously,’ he says.

Leonid painted all of his dog’s toenails

in high-viz reflective metallic orange.

‘Her safety and stylishness mean everything to me,’ he says.

Sam learnt glassblowing just so she could contrive

a water pipe that captures the smoke out of the bowl

and re-routes it back to the mouthpiece.

‘It’s a sin to waste marijuana smoke,’ she says.

                   Not A Cliché

She was wizard

with warm, comfortable relationships,

and a repeated victim

with passionate ones,

but passion is what she craved

despite the torment it brought her,

her being a suffering, talented, sensitive genius.

It’s difficult being that different

in that way,

and to be thoroughly aware of it, too.

                      Force-Fed Buzzwords

It came up on my screen as my device rebooted,

superimposed on some lame landscape photo I can’t get rid of:

“Get the apps you need for an absolutely awesome summer.”

and I thought:

‘Do people really need apps?

Like they need food and music and love?

Must people who don’t buy the correct toys

suffer through summers

that are less than absolutely awesome?

How have the lucky ones managed to tolerate

every summer until now without them?’

And what the fuck does ‘absolutely awesome’ mean, anyhow?

They could have just used the term ‘marketing-buzzword’ summer instead.

Same thing.

After all, how different is an absolutely awesome summer

to an absolutely fabulous one, Sweetie?

Before I was born they would’ve been pitching a top-drawer summer.

In the 70s and 80s it would’ve been an ultimate one.

Anyone up for having a world-class summer next year?

Or a fantastically inspirational one, or a quality one?

What if I wanted my summer to be woke?

Or maybe a just can’t-complain, not-that-bad one?

I mulled this over as the summer faded into autumn

without me buying any apps,

despite my screen nagging me multiple times daily.

I don’t think the summer I did have was absolutely awesome,

or even awesome without being absolutely so.

Hell, I’m in awe that I just fucking survived it,

but I rather think that no,

blowing my grog-and-weed money on apps

wouldn’t have helped it all that much

in the way of absolute awesomeness.

              Family Pride

If one of my daughters were pregnant,

which neither of them is,

and asked for my input

in regard to naming the sprog,

which neither of them would do,

I’d point out my preference

for honouring ancestors

by naming their descendents after them.

Now, my much-loved Uncle Joe

was a helluva guy,

much warmer toward me

than was his sister, my mother.

A former barnstorming semipro baseballer

and a World War Two hero,

he settled down as an interior decorator.

My father’s father was also Joe,

but I don’t remember him;

the stories I’ve heard about him, though,

portray him as something of a hard case.

He was a devout Communist,

and even an admirer of Stalin.

I believe he worked as a salesman.

In his photos he’s invariably dapper

and smoking a long, thick cigar.

Therefore, a grandson of mine could be Joseph,

or maybe Josef or Josephus or Jozip

or even Yossi or Yusef or Giuseppe or José.

A granddaughter could of course be Josephine,

or maybe Josine or Josey or Joelle or Joey or

Jolene, Jolene! JOLENE! JO-LEE-EE-EEN!

or maybe just plain Jo.

It’d be cruel to name anyone JoMama, though.

Make-Believe & Beyond

                            Signs

I knew the situation was hopeless

when the second thing she said to me

was, “What’s your sign?”

My sign.

Maybe she –

or one of her friends –

had stuck a ‘kick-me’ sign on my bum

when I wasn’t looking.

These things happen sometimes.

But maybe not.

Maybe I was supposed to have one of those

‘Hi! My Name Is’ signs stuck to my shirt pocket

with my name written on its blank space in marker,

but somehow nobody told me and I’m the odd one out.

Or maybe I wrote ‘Dick’ on it and stuck it to my flies.

But maybe not.

By the way, the sign I like the best,

in the abstract,

is ‘No U Turn’

a nice metaphor, eh?

but I don’t think that was what she meant, either.

I think she’s a birthday bigot,

and, like all bigotry,

I think that’s ugly, evil, and stupid.

Y’know, I bet she doesn’t care what I think, though.

She doesn’t have to.

All she has to do is know my sign.

She didn’t know it right then when she asked,

but no matter when my birthday is,

I’m just not her cup of tea.

Make my sign the one that says, “Exit.”

           Metaphysics

Sometimes it really pisses off

the child in me

that things that aren’t real

– magic, water sprites,

telepathy, matter transmitters,

and so forth – 

really aren’t,

but at least sometimes music

or psychoactive substances

or sleep

allow me to imagine

that they are.

        The Molecules

The molecules

inside my nervous system

dance,

and that dance is me

and what I have to contribute

to the universal soul.

In three weeks

all the molecules

in my nervous system

will be different ones,

the half-lives of molecules

being what they are,

but the dance

will be the same,

only incorporating three more weeks

of experiences.

      Sex and the Occult

I attended a séance once

when I was twenty years old,

having the day before

had sex with the young woman

who was acting the medium.

The séance, of course,

was a load of crap,

and I never had sex with her again.

A couple of years later

I had, for a few months,

the fortune to be the toy boy

of an ex-nun more than twice my age.

She paid some big-woo Hollywood astrologer

an obscene amount of money

to do my chart.

Its relation to reality

was on-target somewhat less often

than if its pronouncements,

which were mostly vague, anyway,

had been made completely at random.

        The Luck of the Draw

I can’t respect the intellect

of people who confidently assert

that there’s no such thing as luck,

luck being the unforeseen

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control.

Even attempts to control events,

being the cumulative

random consequences

of billions and billions of causal factors

beyond anybody’s control,

are really the result of luck as well.

The ludicrous fantasy

that things have been intended,

or were Meant To Be,

can be amusing at times,

but taken seriously is stupid and ugly –

something for stupid and ugly people.

       Sceptical Agnosticism & the Soul

I consider myself to be agnostic rather than atheist,

although the concept of the abrahamic god

is clearly ridiculous and pathetically childish,

in addition to being contradictory, anthropocentric,

contrary to empirical reality, and just plain ugly.

My problem with mainstream atheism

is its uncritical dismissal of the concept of the soul,

which seems to me to be an abandoning of scepticism.

Sure, it’s possible, even likely,

that when the circulatory system

stops feeding oxygen to the nervous system

that the energy in the nervous system

simply converts into potential energy

and loses all its data patterns.

It seems to me, however, that it’s also possible

that the nervous system’s patterned energy –

which could possibly exist as electromagnetic waves;

no one knows for certain –

could escape into the atmosphere, or even space,

retaining some of its data.

We don’t have the technology to test this hypothesis.

We can’t see television or wireless broadband

or other types of electronic waves

as they travel through the air

without the appropriate instruments, either,

and neuroscience technology is still in its infancy,

basically just tracking the flow of blood in the brain.

It seems like a maybe-maybe-not situation to me.

      Dream Magic

Air like dream magic

bloats the pale twilight

cool winds make people

think about gods.

I stay in my unit

where the air’s more consistent

and my loneliness seems

less acute but more hard.

You said that you’d see me

when I needed that and also

knew, as you did too,

that you were most unlikely

to return.

Despite the dream magic,

I know that the gods

are people’s creations,

like flower arrangements

and marzipan-frosted cakes,

but rarely so benign.

The night’s darkness softly closes

over the innocence of dusk,

caressing daylight’s hardness,

hiding banalities;

the raucousness from elsewhere

in the suburb and city

stirs up the spirits

in their godlike nastiness,

then subsides into the

air like dream magic.