More Dreams & Fantasies

                       The Skirt Was A Tip-Off

They needed me there to do something,

but I had to go somewhere else first.

Things kept interfering with my ability to leave the house,

but as I was finally going out the door

and down the steps and the little hill to the car,

I was having trouble getting the largish button

through the threadbare buttonhole

down around my lower belly above the zip,

and as I swung the belt-line around to get a better angle on it,

I realised that I was wearing a frayed, khaki-coloured skirt.

So I told the man who’d just stepped out

of the medium-sized white van with black markings

to deliver legal documents

in regard to long-term child abusers,

“Hey! I’m wearing a skirt. This must be a dream.”

And it was.

So I woke up,

had a drink of water from the plastic juice jar on my headboard,

and went to the loo.

                     Hanging On

I was behind the wheel of some car,

sitting in the driver’s seat –

not reaching over it from the back seat

like the time before;

managing it along the narrow road

was a piece of cake,

even though I hadn’t driven for years.

They say that driving is like fucking –

once you’ve done it you never forget how.

I don’t know who they are,

but I can think of some significant differences

between driving and fucking, myself,

so it’s safe to say that they’re not exactly alike.

I had to dismiss this from my mind, though,

as the road started to break up

alongside a flooded riverbank,

confronting me with treacherous potholes and boulders,

especially after it rose up again into the hills,

where it turned into little more than an obstacle-course track

before disappearing entirely.

I pulled off into a gravel scenic lookout,

and found a place to park beside a cliff wall,

which made climbing out of the car hard,

but not impossible,

despite you parking right beside me on the other side,

whoever you were.

The rising river began to cut off

the irregular oval of our parking area,

but I knew I was all right

because you were there,

whoever you are.

                        A Preference

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

I can’t remember who she was or what she looked like,

although I do recall that her face was round.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

She’d come up and sat beside me

on a sofa in a room filled with people,

put one arm around my shoulders, and just did it.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

As I recall it made me feel worthwhile

and also as if I belonged.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night.

It felt exceedingly pleasant,

and despite myself I became aroused.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night,

and when some of the people who were in the dream

made rude comments about our age difference,

something of which I was unaware,

she just shot back that she just didn’t care.

A woman kissed me in a dream last night,

but then I couldn’t find my shoes,

as sometimes happens in dreams,

and soon I had to get up to pee.

I never did get back to sleep

after that,

and eventually gave it away, made the bed,

and stumbled into another dismal day,

of course devoid of kisses,

as have all of them for years.

It’s no wonder I prefer sleeping to being awake.

              Oneiric

He dreamt of the ordinary –

something much to be desired,

but never attained.

                       Red Brick Transit Nightmare

It was like the time before, and, like the time before,

I couldn’t explain it.

There I was, driving my tiny car faster than I felt safe,

north through the night on the Industrial Highway’s middle lane,

surrounded on all sides by gigantic semi-trailer articulated trucks

tailgating each other and me, engine-braking and belching diesel smoke,

rumbling loudly way over the speed limit,

crowding me so tightly that my hands cramped on the steering wheel,

allowing almost no view of the night sky.

On either side of the highway giant four-storey factories,

their windows lighted against the night,

clanged and hissed and thumped and throbbed with production,

somehow having remained in place,

avoiding relocation to Asia,

their smokestacks spewing doom

into the already-black sky.

To escape the overbearing sense

of restriction and repression

I managed to exit the highway,

like the time before, and, like the time before,

to cross under a thundering six-track railway overpass

into a town of mostly red-brick structures,

most of them at least a hundred, maybe two hundred years old;

the redness of their bricks was grimed with soot,

as were the giant, ancient, leafless-winter trees along the road.

Metallic spray-painted tags expressing mindless egotism

covered the side-barriers of the overpass

and the trunks of the trees,

this exercise in personal narcissism and ugliness

perhaps providing the local young people

with the delusion that their existence

wasn’t bleak and hideously hopeless.

                        Architecture Dreams

Since childhood

some of my favourite dreams

have been about houses and buildings and structures.

Many have come repeatedly

in subtly varying forms,

making them familiar and usually welcome.

In one I’m in a mansion –

sometimes three stories, sometimes five –

with a major central switchback stairway,

rooms both large and small,

and numerous enclosed porches

looking out over a residential street.

Sometimes I live there,

sometimes I used to and now others do.

Another’s a sprawling, one-storey,

putatively modern residence

with sliding walls that continually change the floor plan.

A small studio apartment,

one of many up a flight of stairs

in a run-down two-storey building,

with the landlord living downstairs,

located where a street curves at the top of a hill

has also appeared often;

I’m fairly certain it’s in Southern California.

Further downmarket is the hole,

underneath some structure or other,

lined sometimes with rugs,

and with a dug-out entranceway

out of which I observe

a degenerate, disintegrating urban environment

entirely alone.

              Dressing For Dinner

It was a matter of standards.

The family dressed for dinner every evening

at the magnificent mahogany table

that Father’s great-great-grandfather

had brought back from Barbados

as a souvenir of the sugar trade.

The china was from the same period,

eighteenth-century Royal Worcester,

but the silver was much older.

The family’s prosperity,

although augmented by slaves and sugar,

prudent passive investments,

and then, between and after the wars,

active banking and finance,

did not have its sources in vulgar commerce,

but in land-holdings won

by the axe and the broadsword.

Dinner conversation focused on the weighty affairs of the day.

Liveried footmen in black and teal stood behind each diner

to assure that each course was served properly.

Chef had trained in France but knew

good English and Irish cooking as well.

The eldest son, who enjoyed how he looked in white tie,

had become something of a whizz

at rapid algorithmic trading in derivatives,

as well as at one-day eventing.

The second-youngest daughter

dreamed through these dinners about a life in leotards

in studios finished in distressed brick,

stretching the limits of experimental dance

with her wild-haired and smooth-muscled Ukrainian lover,

and so ignored the weighty dinner discussions.

It was a matter of standards.

        Desks

A recurring dream:

I find myself going

from office to office –

different businesses,

different agencies,

a newspaper –

and everywhere I find myself

I have a desk

piled high with

sundry dream-crap,

but I have

no work,

or if I do,

I don’t know what it is.

Afraid of being fired,

I get up and go out,

telling them

I’ll be right back,

but I just go

to another desk.

Everybody else

in each office

is busy

or eating

or doing something else

purposeful.

                                 Passing Through

Looking for work or love or something like that,

he went along with a sculptor who’d claimed his friendship

to the screen door at the back of the house,

one of a long block of old stucco two-storey houses with front balconies,

some luxurious, some faded, some crumbling,

some subdivided into numerous small

one-or-two room rental units sharing plumbing,

their week’s rubbish awaiting kerbside collection out front

behind an avenue of enormous purple-blossomed trees,

their branches from both sides of the street meeting over the roadway.

The screen door opened directly into the kitchen,

in which most of the surfaces were unpainted maple,

where his new friend’s mother,

her mousy-brown hair tied back loosely

with loose strands hanging and flopping by the sides of her face,

stared fixedly, her eyes focused on a scene from a sexless holiday

in the Cook Islands many years before:

the shade from the palm trees reaching almost to the petanque court,

the view set as a still photograph in her mind.

He told her to take it easy; he’d brought provisions,

and proceeded prepare squooshy overcooked egg noodles

in a sauce of butter, sour cream, cream cheese, and cottage cheese,

with dabs of vanilla extract and Tabasco sauce,

and bottled french dressing covering canned asparagus on the side.

She and her son, meanwhile, entertained him

with detailed descriptions of World-War-II-era warships

of all countries, combatant and otherwise.

After dinner they showed him their collection of tin-alloy miniatures.

He stepped outside for a smoke

and wondered about the details of the neighbours’ dreams and drudgery,

and of those in the world beyond the world

of the purple tunnel just past

the black rubbish bags at his feet.

Some Human Stuff

        40,000 Years Ago

Huddling for warmth by the fire

far from the retreating ice,

wondering about the stars

and the aromas on the wind,

even the taste of sweet berries

and the way they felt in your mouth

wasn’t satisfying enough,

so you scratched the shape of your soul

in abstract patterns on some rock,

not because you had to,

but because you had to.

Sorta like me in a way,

weren’t you,

beloved cousin?

   A Double-Barrelled First-Up Lesson

I was six or eight days old,

or something like that,

and, I’ve been told,

they gave me a sugar cube soaked with rum

to suck on before somebody snipped off my foreskin

to the sound of somebody

chanting some mumbo-jumbo in Hebrew.

I agree with my rationalist friends

that this was a barbaric thing

to inflict on an innocent baby,

for barbaric reasons,

but it did serve two real-life purposes:

it taught me from the onset

that life is filled with pain,

which has proved to be true,

and also that grog helps.

                               Biological Imperative

I knew it from the moment I first felt that tingling in my prostate,

through to the shudder of the send-off of my sperm in their sea of semen –

although of course I could have been mistaken, but I wasn’t –

this wasn’t just another fuck, no,

this fuck was the fulfilling of my biological imperative;

And when, after the usual gestation period, plus a couple of extra weeks,

my first daughter was born

and I made her promises she couldn’t understand,

I felt a happiness the like of which I’d never known.

I believed I had reason to live.

Now, tough shit, I realise that in the mocking face of the universe

my sense of biological fulfilment and paternal happiness and promise,

was, along with my species’ niche within the universe’s ongoing life,

little more than part of the straight line of a cosmic joke,

perpetuating punchlines of sadness and suffering,

and extending my biological imperative into a future

unlikely to have any imperatives for my progeny

at all.

                  Ordinary People

Ordinary people seem to take great pleasure

informing me about what a beautiful day it is

during the hot, sunny, blue-dome weather

that I dislike intensely,

yet react with shock and argumentation

when I comment on what a gorgeous day it is

during the cool, high-overcast, breezy weather

that I love.

                    The Appeal of Cruelty

I learnt early in life

that some people enjoy being cruel.

As a child I didn’t know why or understand how

my mother and my brother

enjoyed being so vicious and unfair

toward me,

or enjoyed tormenting me so often,

but I accepted it as just they way things were,

the way that children do.

At school and at play

I observed dumfounded as bullies

– both kids and teachers –

lavished cruelty on those

with whom they could get away with it.

It made no sense to me,

so when I was twelve I took to teasing a boy who talked strangely.

It made me feel terrible then

and for the rest of my life.

And now – it’s 2014 – I read on the internet

over the space of a few days

how young men from privileged countries

in the English-speaking world

are flocking to the Middle East

in order to get in on the cruelty action,

either with the Islamic State in upper Mesopotamia

or with the Israel Defence Forces in Gaza,

to engage in self-righteous, savage viciousness

they’d never get away with back home

in order to inflict torment and suffering

on innocents who’ve done them no harm.

Its appeal still perplexes me,

but I know that it’s what the word evil means.

                     Creeps and Jerks

Every sentient being is either a creep or a jerk.

At least that’s one way of looking at things.

Executives are creeps;

hourly workers are jerks.

Fashion designers are creeps;

consumer fashion slaves are jerks.

Corrupt cops are creeps;

honest cops are jerks.

Sexual predators are creeps;

hopelessly lovelorn romantics are jerks.

Cats are creeps;

dogs are jerks.

Wall Street bankers are creeps;

small-business owner-operators are jerks.

Ad-agency artistic directors are creeps;

taggers are mostly jerks.

Hipsters are creeps;

hippies were jerks.

Meat and dairy agribusiness operators are creeps;

nearly all livestock, poor things, are jerks;

but most of the workers in abattoirs are jerks, too.

Bought-and-paid-for politicians are creeps;

the people who vote for them are jerks.

Of course, nothing’s that simple.

The world has plenty of jerky creeps and creepy jerks,

and creeps with some jerk characteristics,

as well as jerks with some creep characteristics.

Which are you?

I myself am a jerk through and through,

damn it.

       A Failure Of Imagination

I saw a screenshot on facebook

of a Twitter message

that someone had sent to a lesbian singer

saying, ‘I stopped listening to your music

when I found out u were a lebanese.. God

wanted man with woman..’

Seeking empathy,

I tried to imagine

what it would be like

to be that dimwitted,

but it was beyond me.

                    Chichén Itzá Rocks

We wandered around the ruins,

my part-Mayan bride and I,

as thousands had before,

our eyes drinking in

the impressive monuments

made from rocks piled high.

We climbed to the top of a pyramid or two

and up the narrow spiral staircase

inside the 1200-year-old astronomical observatory,

as thousands had before,

the narrow steps and stairways

built for people much smaller and narrower than we were.

I don’t know how many of those thousands of visitors

had wondered why or how the ancient Mayans

had gone and built such grandiosities,

when they clearly didn’t have to in order to eat,

and I’m guilty of not being conversant

with all the theories that archaeologists have put forward

in regard to the Mayans’ motivations

for building such fantasies,

but whilst walking from one rock monument to another

my eyes focused on

the huge number of solitary, not-too-heavy rocks

that were just lying about,

willy-nilly, here and there,

on the ground near the footpath,

and I felt a kindergarten-like urge to start piling them up

and building some kind of mound or wall or something.

Maybe the ancient Mayans,

people like you and me,

and with whom I was related by marriage,

had felt a similar urge.

           Distant Cousins

The paintings in the caves

in palaeolithic Europe

and who knows where else,

I wonder how they differ

from the assemblages

of brightly coloured daubings

that I produce

and which now clutter my walls.

Religious Life

          “It Has Been Written …”

Humans of the egocentric persuasion,

of whom the world has far too many,

keep insisting that shit that people dream up,

such as – among other things –

their various apocalyptic, end-of-the-world fantasies,

actually have something to do

with a natural world and a universe

that couldn’t give less of a shit.

              Religion Logos

There they are,

clutching and brandishing

crucifixes, images of the Madonna, 

mezuzim, mogen dovids,

calligraphic verses from the Q’uran,

Vedic symbols, pictures of Krishna,

artistically rendered astrological signs,

and so forth,

not so much because doing so

provides them with spiritual nourishment

than that it makes them feel superior

to those who don’t,

rather like those who flaunt

the visibly chi-chi logos

of their luxury possessions.

Sometimes they’re the same people.

                      Beatitude

In the overwhelmingly unlikely eventuality

that the whole Jesus story

isn’t the ludicrous twaddle

that evidence and reason show it clearly to be,

the Holy Kingpin and Boss’s Kid Himself,

looking down

from wherever it is

that a Holy Kingpin and Boss’s Kid

would look down from,

must by now get the picture

that the meek aint gonna inherit the Earth

as things are now

and always have been,

and even if He were to come up with a miracle

the like of which He’s never performed before,

and managed to pull the trick off for them,

the savagely predatory

members of our species

would take it all back

within hours,

if not minutes,

anyway.

            Mourner’s Kaddish

For a year,

from the time I was nine-and-a-half

until I was ten-and-a-half,

I had to go to Beth Shalom,

the local Conservative

(middle-of-the-road)

Jewish temple

once a week

and chant the Mourner’s Kaddish for my daddy.

It was, first of all, embarrassing

for a boy my age

to stand up when almost everybody else was sitting

and looking at me –

accompanied by my nasty-piece-of-work brother,

who had an insincerely pious expression on his face –

amplifying the pain of my loss.

It was also meaningless,

as I had to do it in Hebrew,

a language I didn’t understand,

handily transliterated in my prayer book.

Shit, even the English translation on the facing page

didn’t make sense to me,

amplifying my incomprehension

about my deteriorating situation.

                      Good Christians

Despite the evil nature of their religion,

some good people who’ve known only that religion

for their entire lives since their childhood brainwashing,

and who are blind to anything better,

mistakenly profess their unwavering faith in Christianity

and somehow manage to remain good despite it.

            A Cultural Difference Noticed

For some reason Smoky,

who’d been raised a Kansas Congregationalist,

a denomination that serves the spiritual needs

of the hyper-respectable middle-to-upper-middle class

(nothing bombastic, please),

decided that since I’m Jewish

– ethnically if not religiously –

our daughters should have the experience

of going to a Jewish Sabbath service

at least once.

I think she was curious, too.

I didn’t and I wasn’t,

but that didn’t matter.

Anyway, one Saturday morning

we schlepped up to Auckland

– Hamilton having no shul –

and endured a boring hour or so of God-bothering,

Jewish style.

They put out a reception with bupkis for nosherei afterward.

On the way back home Smoky observed

that what struck her the most

was that all the prayers

used ‘we’ and ‘us’,

rather than the ‘I’ and ‘me’

favoured by the Congregationalists.

Yep, I told her, it is indeed a tribal religion,

like dancing around a fire together;

that’s why they don’t go looking for converts.

       The Persistence of Folly

I don’t think it’s genetic,

so it must be conditioning –

but even though I realise

that the whole idea

of an all-powerful supernatural being

that takes a benign interest

in the wellbeing of people

who talk to it humbly

is childishly ridiculous and patently fraudulent,

and have done so since before reaching puberty,

I still sometimes have to force myself not to pray

after buying a lottery ticket.

      The Other Side of the Street

She told me about how

two of her great-uncles

(if I understood the relationship correctly)

grew up in the 1880s

in a Catholic orphanage in Christchurch.

Just keeping the conversation going,

I offered the observation

that it probably hadn’t been

exactly a picnic for them,

or something like that.

She answered that for the rest of their lives

whenever they’d see a priest

they’d spit on the ground

and if necessary cross

to the opposite side of the street.

      Respecting What Deserves It

People who say that we have to respect

other people’s religious beliefs

have it all wrong.

To have a decent and liveable society

what we need to respect

is their right to their beliefs,

no matter how ridiculous, stupid, evil, and

contemptibly unworthy of respect

those beliefs are.