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.

  

The World of Sport

          Drink It, You Gits

Few things seem more boring

or less newsworthy

than those identical eight-second bytes

on the sport so-called news

of the winners

of motor so-called sport events

shaking those jumbo bottles

of expensive champagne

and spraying it

all over the place

onto no-sane-person-cares-what.

What would be newsworthy

is if they didn’t.

             Not Entirely An Old Pig

I don’t generally watch golf on the telly

– even with the sound off –

but there was something about that Norwegian golfer

at the top of the LPGA event’s leader board

that caught my attention.

I began having fantasies

about her colourlessly pale Norwegian pubic hairs.

After she’d won, though,

the boringly cliché champagne-squirting ritual

turned me off completely.

          Basketball As Dance

Although I’m non-competitive,

I was a basketball coach for twelve years.

I saw it on the individual level

as a process of teaching skills

and nurturing attitudes,

and at the team level

as orchestrating challenged choreography.

When it all came together well

it enabled me to experience

creative aesthetic pleasure

that all this playing with words

has never matched.

                           Mo Cheeks

After the 2011 Rugby World Cup ended,

Maori TV started showing

what it calls classic 1980s NBA games

on Saturday afternoons.

Watching with the sound off and some music on

in order to mute the voices

of the American basketball commentators,

who as I recall have to fail an intelligence test

and be able to shout a minimum

of five mindless clichés a minute –

with emphasis,

I was delighted to notice one of my old favourites

out there on the floor several weeks in a row:

Maurice Cheeks.

That’s Moe-reece, in the unanglicised American pronunciation,

and not Morris, in the anglicised UK-NZ-Caribbean way,

but he went by the nickname Mo, anyhow.

Every time I beheld his homely countenance

there on the musically silent screen

I couldn’t help but recall

what a female basketball-fan friend of mine

once told me about him.

She said that he was why

she and her girlfriends watched basketball –

and referring to the callipygian splendour

of so many African-American stars,

and the tight shorts that they wore back then,

she exclaimed, “We just wanna see mo’ cheeks!”

                        Women’s Muscles

When I mentioned that she had a great body

they were all over me like a sudden squall,

soaking me with demands that I explain what I meant.

Instead of coming back with a facile and superficial – if true – reply

about her tits and ass,

I thought for about a second and answered, ‘Toned.

She swims and runs and does yoga and has well-toned muscles.

I liked that.’

The conversation moved on.

I was thinking about that as I watched the Commonwealth Games

on and off sometime later.

The women athletes almost all seemed terribly attractive to me:

The shot-putters and the distance runners,

the badminton players and the weight lifters,

the boxers and the hockey players,

the high-jumpers and the judokas –

looking at almost all of them,

whether square and bulky or long and lean,

or pretty much every body type in between

turned me on –

except for the gymnasts.

I’m not into paedophilia, man.

                  Olympic Volleyball

There was a time

when I used to fantasise

about being gang-raped

by the Cuban women’s Olympic volleyball team.

¡Aii! ¡Mamacita!

But now I’m too old,

and can’t stand being that pathetic –

I couldn’t last all six of ’em out

anymore

even if they wanted to,

which, of course,

they never did

and never would have.

My queer neighbour

has it for the weightlifters,

come the Olympics,

not the swimmers.

He told me he likes his men with hair on ’em.

            Midriff Impressiveness

Watching amateur Auckland club softball

on Maori TV with the sound off,

I found myself more than impressed –

Some significantly, gloriously

magnificent beer puku were on display

at the plate.

Wow! Serious effort went into those.

         Dangerous Fat People and Angelo Dundee

I guess it’s because both my mother and my elder sibling

bullied me relentlessly and also tended to be overweight

that throughout my life I’ve had a physical fear of fat people.

This fear has not been entirely groundless.

Perhaps the most obese person I’ve ever known,

the owner of a delicatessen who briefly employed me,

once threatened me with the handgun

with which he shot target practice

in the garage of the office building where the deli was located.

I didn’t go back to work the next day.

Once, when Muhammad Ali was keeping in shape

in the absence of any serious contenders

by regularly taking on all comers in what the press called

a ‘bum of the month’ policy,

a reporter asked Angelo Dundee,

Ali’s trainer and cornerman,

whether Ali was taking his next opponent seriously,

because the bum couldn’t hit.

“Anybody who weighs 230 pounds can hit,”

Dundee explained, as I recall,

“I don’t care if he’s a broad.”

                     Inclusiveness

One of the things I admire most about rugby

is the effort that it makes

to include even those with severe disabilities.

I mean, even at its highest level,

every rugby team seems to be careful to include

at least two or three players

who were apparently born without necks.

                 Emotion Worth Reliving

The other team were the clear favourites;

they obviously expected to clobber us,

fancying themselves as unquestionably superior,

and the game was at their gym.

My girls played to the game plan from the start, though,

which was to be relentlessly aggressive

with our trap-zone defence,

and when we couldn’t get a breakaway layup,

and had to set up on offence,

to get the ball to the shooters.

We quickly raced away to a big lead,

stunning the opposition show ponies,

but the aggressive defence had its price,

and in the second half foul trouble made itself felt

and the other team slowly made it back into the game.

With eight seconds left

they took the lead from us for the first time –

by one point.

Two quick passes and the ball was in the hands

of our fat girl,

our starting centre having fouled out,

but the fat girl sank a two-pointer right on the buzzer.

Her face shined as if that was the finest moment of her life.

Maybe it was indeed the high point of her life,

other than having children, of course.

My eyes were moist as I keyed this onto the screen.