Stuff from July & August 2017

               To Express Dissatisfaction

‘Hey.’

‘Hey.’

‘How yuh doin’?’

‘Not too bad. You?’

‘Can’t complain.’

‘Oh, yes you can.

Everybody has plenty to complain about.

You just gotta have some gripes; You know you do.

Go ahead! Don’t suffer in silence. Let it out.

Grizzle till you run out of gas. You’ll feel so much better.

Think of the catharsis! Think of the release!

Your job sucks and your boss is a shitnozzle?

Fuckwit drivers don’t know how to use their turn signals?

Bitch about it.

Your fucken car?

Burglers?

Cops?

The opposite sex?

Your power bill?

Assholes on the internet?

Your landlord?

Your family?

Bank fees?

Predatory corporations?

Food fads?

Neoliberalism?

The government?

Young people nowadays?

How about human greed and cruelty?

Money?

C’mon! Indulge yourself in a bit of a whinge!’

‘Well, it has been raining a lot the past few days.’

‘Well done! The weather’s always good for a grumble.’

  

             Consequences Last

My mother’s abusive behaviour toward me,

starting from the dawn of my memory in the 1940s,

still fucks me up in 2017,

and nothing seems to have much effect on that.

Because consequences last,

and last,

and last,

in my mind I always come in last.

Anything else feels unnatural.

Other people seem to be able to sense this

and exploit it when the occasion arises,

like carrion crows,

if I’m not already less than shit to them

and not worth the trouble

of even considering last.

I don’t cast aspersions on them for this.

I realise that’s just the way it is.

Their behaviour toward me is only natural and right.

I accept it.

Of course I don’t like it,

but nobody has any cause to give a shit

about what I like or don’t like

except for me, naturally,

and I don’t count.

And to all the smug, smirking

evangelists of positive thinking

who tell me that I can shed this baggage

if I only want to do so and Just Do It,

I can only explain my failure to assert myself

by agreeing with them that I’m their inferior,

and will they please just shut the fuck up.

Consequences last.

            Yeah, Yeah, Yeah

Ringo just claimed in an interview

that Paul had died in 1966

and that an imposter named Billy Shears

has been impersonating him

for the past half-century or so.

Paul replied publicly that Ringo is senile

adding a few other dismissive adjectives.

Social media took up the debate.

Now, back in 63 when the Beatles first hit

I danced with clumsy white-boy enthusiasm

and sang, ‘I wanna hold your gland!’

loudly off-key over the record,

just like so many others did,

and in 67 I got stoned and lost myself in Sgt Pepper,

just like so many others did,

but when I saw this public stoush

and considered some of its potential consequences,

I realised that, in 2017,

which person was telling the truth there

had no effect whatsoever on my life

one way or the other,

even though the truth is always important,

and decided it was time to take my old dog for a walk,

and then make myself a cheese and tomato sammie

for supper when we made it back home.

I don’t eat as much at one sitting as I used to do.

I wonder if this goes for other old people,

like Ringo and Paul-Or-Not-Paul, too.

 

       It’s The Jews, He Told Me

Conspiracy theorists say that they think,

and furthermore say that they think

that they’re bucking the establishment

and battling against those who oppress the rest of us

by suppressing information.

One problem with this, for me at least,

is that it serves the purposes of the oppressors

by diverting energy and outrage and media exposure

from the way that they, the plutocracy,

are actually ruining billions of lives

by focusing on trivialities.

I mean, it makes no difference to me

if NASA faked the moon landing

and has spent a large chunk of its budget since then

paying hush money to everyone on the film crew

who did their dirty work –

and it would’ve been a fairly large film crew.

It makes no difference to me if all those involved

want to spend large amounts of energy and money

suppressing evidence of visitors from outer space

for no reason that I know of.

I’ve been drinking fluoridated water

for most of my life

with neither my neighbours nor myself

suffering any ill effects.

And so on.

It does make a difference, though,

if they can get people to blame

a medium-sized London merchant bank

(((The Jews)))

for all of the oligarchy’s crimes,

and then some.

  

                             No Debate 

It’s another New Zealand election campaign season,

and glancing at the comments section under political posts,

which I’m indeed old enough to know better than to do,

it struck me how generally worthless political arguments are.

Look – you wanna vote for the National Party? Fine.

If the National Party embodies your values,

that is, if you think corruption, mean-spiritedness, lying,

bullying, and kissing the arses of rich pigs –

both Kiwi and multinational – is desirable,

and you think the Greens are –

oh, I don’t know: a bunch of poo bums,

or some similar name-callers’ epithet,

then I think you should definitely vote for National –

No debate there. No argument.

Simple, eh?

And Labour? Well, y’know,

if you’re comfy in the narrowing middle of the road,

with good intentions blunted by corporations’ donations,

go for it!

Now, seen any good movies lately?

      Respecting Others’ Cultures

The matador fucked up,

for whatever reason,

and died from impact with the bull’s horns.

The Spaniards, as is their cultural tradition,

hanged the bull by his neck,

a terrible, agonising death

for the uncomprehending soul

who was only defending himself.

The 40-year-old Yemeni family’s friend

married their eight year old daughter,

as is the Arabian cultural tradition;

she died of internal bleeding

on their wedding night.

In Yulin, China the villagers laugh

as they shove a struggling, tortured dog

into boiling water

as part of their cultural tradition

that calls for this.

A court in Belgium found eight princesses

from the United Arab Emirates

guilty of slave trafficking

on a stay in a luxury Belgian hotel,

the ownership and mistreatment

of slaves as domestic servants

being a traditional cultural status symbol

back home in the Gulf.

French farmers and gourmets

savour the cultural tradition

of torturing geese before slaughtering them

for their artificially enlarged livers, or foie gras,

that satisfy the gourmets’

traditionally pampered palates.

Many people in East Africa’s Great Lakes region

act on a traditional cultural belief

that the body parts of albino people

have magical properties,

by killing and butchering albino children

to get the ingredients

for their magic potions.

Poorly educated people in the American South,

who identify themselves as white people,

including some poorly educated college graduates,

revere displaying the Confederate flag

as emblematic of their most dearly held

cultural traditions,

specifically proud memories of a war

their ancestors fought to deny the humanity

of the ancestors of people in whose faces

they – traditionally – prefer to wave it.  

                    A Career In Sales

I reached into my letter box

on my way out to walk the dog,

groped out an envelope,

which wasn’t from the Council or the Government,

and stuck it in one of my hip pockets, right next to my

heart.

It was addressed to ‘Resident’,

and was from the Slingshot mobile-phone-number company.

A blurb on the outside of the envelope

offered a six months not-quite-free something or other.

It made me feel a sharp sadness.

New Zealand has a shitload of telecom service providers,

Slingshot isn’t among either the most popular

or the most highly rated by its customers,

and most of us have other things to do

than go through the hassle of changing phone companies.

That poor bastard in charge of Slingshot sales!

Think of the shit our system puts people like that through.

Think of the pressure from the bosses,

who are too cheap to let the pathetic patsy

offer the punters a real incentive;

think of the cost of direct-mail advertising –

think of the desperation!

I wouldn’t be surprised if the poor mug

ends up riding an avalanche of P right down the gurgler.

                    Spousal Abuse Witnessed

One time Smoky asked me

if my step-father ever abused my mother.

I cracked up, almost spraying my coffee in front of me.

Nobody ever abused my mother;

it was my mother who abused other people.

This was as certain as the sun setting in the west.

It brought to mind the evening before I married Helena,

and we attended a pre-nuptial soirée for family and friends

in a flash duplex suite that Howard, my step-father,

had taken in some flash French Quarter hotel.

Howard had an alcohol problem, and he’d tucked into a

person-with-an-alcohol-problem’s ration of bubbly,

but he was harmless, standing off at an introvert’s distance

with a silly smile on his face, somewhat unsteady on his pins.

My mother, however, took exception to his condition

(maybe he’d told her he’d do it teetotal – I don’t know)

and started tearing shreds off him

with the sort of persistent, venomous nastiness

for which she had few equals in this world.

Unable to escape her, Howard raised his hand in anger.

She coldcocked him, a roundhouse right

that would’ve flattened him

if a piece of furniture hadn’t been fortunately in place

behind him to catch his fall.

He didn’t arise again immediately,

and the party was as good as over.

No, my step-father never abused my mother.

If any abusing was to be done,

she’s the one who was going to do it.

              Captain Beefheart Is Dead

A dry, aromatic Southwestern canyon breeze

ruffled the cypress and the juniper

and the hair on my arms as I toured the log-façaded villa.

Captain Beefheart is dead.

Some geniuses are so simple that they’re difficult,

but they can respond to simplicity, and easily;

business can fuck up anything but the source of the music.

Captain Beefheart is dead.

Nighttime in the desert exposes unchanging majesty;

the desert animals come out to its welcome,

the sun’s crazy blazing blocked off by God’s golfball.

Captain Beefheart is dead.

Music slips in between a barrage of rainfall,

being randomly structured, but rigidly composed;

raindrops are matter; the stars are matter; we’re matter, too.

Captain Beefheart is dead.

Nerds and geeks and earnest-looking weirdos

packed the sour-smelling room shoulder-to-shoulder

and knew all the word and free-form instrumentation phrases.

Captain Beefheart is dead.

The Blue Grosbeak takes no cash for its musical efforts,

dogs don’t charge each other for the poetry of their scent,

crisp, grey autumn days dispense their magic for free,

Captain Beefheart is dead.

That deep, gravelly, expressive blues voice

that captivated the Captain’s devoted cult following

chuckled warmly at my little joke.

Captain Beefheart is dead.

  

                 Thingness

   (a song lyric needing music)

We’re a dildo, not a cock,

you and me.

We’re not a person, just livestock,

we’re a porn flick not a lover;

with no feelings, with no cover.

We can just forget about the blues;

we’re only there for them to use;

we’re the doormat, we’re the football,

you and me.

They tell us that we’re special in God’s eyes,

you and me,

but act like we’re too inert to despise –

We can just forget about the blues;

we’re only there for them to use;

we’re the doormat, we’re the football,

you and me.

We’re soulless and disposable,

like a condom or a tampon,

ornaments they can tramp on,

hardly even decomposable;

we’re a something, not a somebody;

maybe useful, maybe shoddy –

just an it – you and me.

We’re not citizens, just consumers,

you and me.

targets for their nasty sense of humour –

you and me.

We can just forget about the blues;

we’re only there for them to use;

we’re the doormat, we’re the football,

you and me.

Unless, of course, you’re one of them –

you, not me.

Unless, of course, you’re one of them –

you, not me.

      The Verbalator

I have it! I have it!

The Next Great Superhero,

good for a franchise

of scads of movies

and piles of pingas,

will be – ta-DAH!

The Verbalator!

By day an inarticulate kitchen hand

working the lunch shift

at a cheesy chop house,

Our Hero transforms into

The Verbalator

when the sun goes down,

befuddling bad guys

with elegant verbiage,

a cracking vocabulary,

and savagely excellent grammar and syntax.

A suave, urbane, cultured sort,

The Verbalator will sign off each episode

with a wry smile

(or a shy smile,

or maybe a grimace)

and the catch-phrase:

‘Words work wonderful wins.’

Or maybe, ‘Words win wonderful work.’

Or maybe, ‘Win with wonderful word work.’

Or something like that.

I’m open to suggestions

if they’ll help get this idea off the ground.

I visualise myself in the role, of course,

although it might be better box office

for The Verbalator to be a woman.

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.