Days
The days slip by,
as they’ve always done,
some beclouded by hope
and others clarified with
despair,
depending on occurrences
of positive or negative
reinforcement
from a human environment
that has its own fish to fry,
and also maybe depending on
diet, exercise, drink, smoke,
pills,
and how bad my back hurts;
winding them down
pointlessly and unrewardingly,
here in Hamilton,
a city that’s had to cobble
together
some kind of wafer-thin
history,
but does have a variety of
bridges,
at least for those of us who
walk.
For drivers they’re just
stretches of street
with no right or left turns
possible.
It’s a pleasant city,
with seasonal weather,
an unlikely target for
terrorism,
where hundreds of its
inhabitants
don’t ask me about my accent
or where I’m from.
Where I’m from.
Shit.
I guess everyone knows
where I’m going, though,
on one of these days
as it slips by.
Springtime
Dusk
I went into town
– the CBD –
after work one Friday,
and outside TimeZone
observed a gaggle
of teenage losers
wearing the current uniform,
dimwitted willing victims
with cigarettes dangling from their lips,
practising slow, clumsy, high
martial-arts-type kicks
that would be easy to
ankle-grab and upend.
They clearly considered themselves cool.
Maybe – but I doubt it.
Watch
On the Bridge
Walking
over the bridge
in
the flannel-soft early spring evening,
I
glanced at my watch.
The
kick-off was set for eight.
My
watch said seven thirty-five.
The
pub was about ten minutes away.
I
wondered if I was too early or too late.
Too
early and I’d have to hang around
waiting
for my mates,
surrounded
by drinking strangers –
something
uncongenial to Jewish DNA.
Too
late and I wouldn’t get a seat,
it
being a big game.
I
generally like to arrive
right-on-the-money
on time,
which
means that for social occasions
I’m
always too early.
This
time, though,
no
specific on-time was in the brief,
and
so I got there neither too early or too late.
A Physio Failing At Psychotherapy
The physio told me that the reason why
I did only slightly more
of the exercises that he prescribed
and didn’t go off to exercise at the pool
some unspecified number
of times per week was because I
chose
not to do what I could for my painful
back.
He ranted on for a while, using the
phrase,
‘You made your choice’ several times.
He didn’t explain why I made these
shameful choices,
leaving me to conclude
that my reasons were based
on some deep – or shallow – moral failing
within me,
just basic inferiority.
It wasn’t only because
he was about half my age and had muscles
on top of muscles
that I didn’t scream, ‘Bullshit!’ into his
face
and go for his throat.
There was also the paperwork that would be
involved
in a police complaint.
My actual reaction, however,
involving the words, ‘semantic sophistry,’
was enough for him to terminate
my course of physiotherapy prematurely.
When I lodged a formal complaint
with the Health and Disability Commission,
the hospital’s Head of physiotherapy
phoned me and spent a half an hour
with some laughably unconvincing ass-covering
before assigning another physio
to my case.
Cosmopolitan
and Sophisticated
Hamilton is clearly becoming more cosmopolitan and sophisticated.
As I was striding along on my morning walk,
a practice I refused to abandon after my fox terrier’s demise,
I saw a short, middle-aged Chinese man
with imperfectly groomed longish hair
and wearing a rumpled but expensive-looking dark suit
stumbling drunkenly and occasionally shouting in short bursts of
Chinese
on the Victoria Street
footpath at six-forty-five post-summer-dawn.
He crossed Alma Street
without looking
and then lurched similarly into Victoria Street
in front of an oncoming SUV,
somehow making it safely to the centre median.
I strode on without monitoring his further progress.
Nothing like this would’ve been possible thirty years earlier.
Hamilton is clearly becoming more cosmopolitan and sophisticated.
The Oakley Street Litterbug
It’s a tree-shaded residential
street,
but not all that quiet,
as it’s a connector
between River Road and Boundary Road,
since they don’t intersect,
Boundary Road flying over River Road
to become the Whitiora Bridge.
City buses use it.
It was on my walking route
to the Pak’n Save.
From time to time,
an enormous amount
of torn-up paper bits
surrounds one of the Oakley Street bus
stops.
When the weather goes in that
direction,
this mass of litter can spread
as far away as River Road.
It’s irritatingly ugly.
I remember reading about this
many years ago,
back when I read the paper
and before I lived in Claudelands,
I think.
The article said that the
litter
was torn-up Lotto and scratchy
slips.
The cops were on the case.
Well, it’s been seven or eight years now,
and they still haven’t stopped the litterbug.
Somebody cleans up his or her crap, though,
every time
– within a few hours.
Lottery Karma
I saw him on Victoria Street
sitting on the footpath
his back against a wall,
a bushy-bearded bloke
with sad eyes
and a sad message
bearing a hard-luck story
written on the torn-off side
of a brown cardboard box
on his lap.
I went to my favourite
downtown dairy
to buy my Lotto ticket,
where the friendly
middle-aged woman
at the register
always told me,
‘Good luck, eh?’
when she handed it over,
and I always answered,
‘Thank you.’
On my way back up Victoria Street
to the Claudelands Bridge
and home
I put my last dollar-ten change
in his beanie,
lying there on the ground.
He said, ‘Thank you very much.’
I said, ‘Cheers.’
That Lotto ticket,
by the way,
turned out to be just another
loser,
of course,
but that’s okay.
Sadness
An enormously obese woman on a
park bench,
the sides of her torso bulging
down almost to her knees
eating a large box of fried
chicken and chips
at ten o’clock in the morning,
her hair dyed a garishly
unnatural canary yellow –
almost greenish rather than
blond –
with coppery-coloured streaks,
a small boy sitting beside her,
unaware that this giant of a
woman
whom he clearly loved
was in the process of killing herself.
I didn’t stare, but just that
glimpse
made me feel sadder
than my usual low-level ambient
sadness,
which was hypocritical of
someone like me,
drinking myself to death, as I
am,
in a world that dishes out
death
and sadness
in enormous quantities
as a matter of course.
Intruding Into Personal Space In Public Places
A young dickhead
on the cusp between adolescence and young
adulthood
swaggering Ward Street
just outside Centre Place
called out,
loudly and confidently,
‘I really like your ass, baby!’
to a pair of girls walking by
– he didn’t specify which one,
but he got his mate to snicker.
I wondered how he could do that.
Brought up differently to me, I suppose.
Two days later,
outside Sky
City in Auckland,
I watched as a voluptuously fleshy young
Chinese woman
wearing skin-tight,
super-short cut-offs
strutted her stuff
along the footpath,
prompting one of the deros
sitting on the wall
to call out,
‘Get some clothes on!’
I didn’t wonder how he could do that.
Grog removes the ability
to give a fuck.
Two
Hamilton CBD
Women
Crossing Claudelands Road
at the light at Victoria Street,
she was still youngish – five years on either side of 30, I’d reckon,
in business drag with a sheath dress that emphasised a fit lower half,
although she gave the impression that her couture
and her fetching, determinedly ploughing-ahead silhouette
were not matters at the forefront of her consciousness;
she was carrying a stack of document boxes somewhat awkwardly,
her face tight with intensity, her lips pursed into a strained boxlike
shape,
sending out the overall impression of coping
with
everyday harassment and continuous moderate displeasure.
She strode
purposefully through Centre Place Mall,
a tiny,
child-height woman as thin as knotted rags.
Taken out of
context she gave no clue to her size –
everything from
her shoulder-length hair
to every visible
item of her clothing was naturally proportional.
She seemed, not
exactly unaware, but dismissive of her diminutive size,
as if it certainly
didn’t matter,
and anybody who
acted or even thought as if it did was a fucking fool,
but that didn’t
matter one way or the other, least of all to her.
No victim, her;
the casual, indifferent confidence in her posture and stride
marked her as a
woman not to be fucked with, despite her size,
as a woman who
would make you laughable if you even tried.
Secular
Smiles
The stink of tobacco smoke
disgusts the hell out of me,
and I feel only contempt
for those who direct the activities
of the
multinational tobacco corporations.
I’ve never been able to enjoy rap or hip hop,
maybe because I’m too old and white,
or that I prefer instrumental music
without any
voices.
Still, as I walked by Union
Park,
a pocket-sized patch on the quiet street where I live,
and saw the three young Kiwi Somali blokes,
all somewhere close to twenty years old,
hangin out
out of sight
from the flow of traffic to the mosque,
some four blocks or so away,
reciting rap lines to each other
in a good-enough mimicry
of African-American English
and smoking cigarettes
an hour or so before sundown
during Ramadan,
all of them laughing and smiling,
I smiled, too.
