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.

  

Stars & Stripes

                 Staring Down A Barrel

It doesn’t matter what set it off,

so I’m not going to wrack my brain to remember,

but when we exited the expressway at Hildebrand,

both going east,

we were displaying our middle fingers at each other.

We stopped for the light side by side,

with about three cars in front of each of us.

It was a hot day, and our windows were down,

so he yelled something at me in Spanish

and I replied with a shouted, “¡Idiota!”

Then he pulled the gun on me.

It was a big revolver –

not being a gun person I couldn’t guess the calibre –

but the barrel I was looking down seemed fuckin huge.

It took me less than a second

to suss the situation:

being stuck in traffic he’d be a sure bet

to pad Texas’s bloated capital-punishment statistics

if he pulled the trigger,

so I shouted, “Shoot, motherfucker!

Go ahead, chickenshit, shoot!”

He put the gun away

and once again displayed his middle finger in my direction.

A few seconds later the light changed and we drove off,

he turning right on Broadway and me turning left.

              Big Countries

One of the main reasons

why the ruling classes

in Russia, the US, China, India, and Brazil

are so repressive and environmentally destructive

is that those countries

are just too damn big

to govern respectfully and responsibly

and can provide those ruling classes

with entirely too much plunder.

                            Nationalist Antipathy

I watched the Ireland-US pool match

in the 2011 rugby world cup –

with the sound off and some music on, of course –

because it was broadcast

in the afternoon,

free on the Maori channel,

and delayed, so I knew that Ireland had won.

If any of these factors had been absent

I would’ve just gone with the music and left the TV off.

It had to be on in the arvo because I go to bed early.

It had to be free, of course,

because although my pension means

that I’m not as impecunious as I used to be,

I still can’t afford pay TV.

It had to be on the Maori channel,

as even if I could afford Sky TV I wouldn’t have watched the game on it

because the militaristically American promos for their world cup coverage

turned me off completely.

I had to know in advance that Ireland had won

because I can only enjoy live sport if I don’t care who wins

and all that stars-and-stripes shit

disgusts me beyond words.

           The Little Things

A long time ago

I saw a photo

of an African-American man –

then called a nigger

and a boy –

surrounded by a mob

of self-satisfied-looking rednecks

who’d just lynched him

from the limb of a tree.

Most were grinning for the camera,

as people do.

His boots’ laces

remained neatly tied.

It’s impossible to know

what he was thinking

when he’d tied them

so neatly

that morning.

He’d shaved that morning, too, I suppose.

        American Cuisine

Y’know, I really don’t give a shit

if the hopelessly corrupt

American power elite

decided to classify pizza

as a vegetable for school lunches

in response to large political donations

from corporate interests.

If the US government

wants to enfeeble

the future cannon fodder

for its endless imperialistic wars

that’s its business.

  Right-Wing Politics and Underclass Culture

When the American ruling class

executed its de facto coup d’état

in the nineteen eighties,

for some reason

the primary secular music

of African American culture

began shifting

from soul to soulless.

This may or may not be connected –

although I tend to think it is,

since they both involve a shift

from community and compassion

to reptilian egotism.

  Southern Belle Back Then

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

when the only skills

that society allowed her

were graciousness and prettiness,

and all of the Suitable Young Men,

especially Simon Lee,

the one her folks preferred for her,

seemed to have minds

filled with huff-and-puff,

no ambitions beyond

their daddies’ businesses,

and pale, cold eyes

dead before their time.

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

to know that the Boy

who did yardwork for her daddy,

whose mother, Mary,

was the household cook

and whose name was really Walter,

was the most beautiful man

she was ever likely to see.

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

in love with a nigra

who was afraid

even to look at her,

no matter what tricks she tried

in order to get him to do so.

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

who was obsessed with

dreams and schemes

of finding a way

to run off to New York or Boston,

or one of those places,

with her Walter,

while sitting on the veranda

with horrid Simon Lee

when he came to call.

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

when the only way she could speak

to the man she loved

was to order him to do jobs for her,

and even then he’d just say,

“Yes, Miss,” with his eyes

firmly on the ground,

but somehow letting her know

that he felt it, too.

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

when her brother Eugene was watching

the one time Walter looked up

and their eyes met

with meaning

before he dropped his gaze

back to the ground.

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

to hear Eugene and her daddy

tell her how they and Simon Lee

had got together with

some Good Ole Boys

and hanged that nigger

that’d been bothering her

from the old oak tree

out past the crossroads,

“and you shoulda seen

his eyeballs bulgin’ –

it was funnier’n hell.”

It wasn’t easy

being a Southern Belle

back then,

or afterwards,

living with this until she died,

even after

running away to New York –

and becoming the kept woman,

of a cruel Black drug dealer

and racketeer

up in Harlem,

who beat her no more

than she thought she deserved

didn’t help at all.

                         Unamerican

The more a person with an open mind,

intellectual honesty, and a modicum of intelligence

learns about the history of the United States of America,

the more glaringly obvious it becomes

that the nation and its official ideology

have always been more bullshit than substance.