Stuff from September 2017

                No Begging 

She said:

Well, aren’t you going to

beg me to stay?

He said:

Well, if you want to stay

I suppose I can continue

to put up with you,

but if you don’t want to stay,

I sure as shit don’t want you

around here.

                    Not Pass Away

When the shit hits the fan,

or, if you prefer a rural locution,

when the effluent comes in contact with the tiller,

more people than you have ever met

are going to die.

That’s die.

They’re not going to pass away.

They’re going to drown in storms.

They’re going to incinerate in wildfires.

They’re going to starve slowly to death in droughts.

They’re going to freeze to death in the open

because they have no homes.

Men in uniforms are going to shoot and bomb them.

Hundreds of millions of us,

as complex and real and capable of sensual joy and pain

as you are,

their souls overflowing

with desperation and terror and agony and helplessness,

dying in agony and killing to survive

and being slaughtered themselves by others just like them,

anonymously, because so many.

They’re not going to pass away.

They’re going to die,

and although some units with human DNA

will probably survive,

what we think of as human

is going to die along with them.

Okay, well, maybe humanity, then,

is just going to pass away.

      Domestic Protocol  

Dog food and toilet paper

have more in common

than either does with wine,

for example, or paper towels,

in that they’re the two items

it’s always advisable to get more of

before you run completely out of them

and they’re totally, absolutely gone.

  

       Like Scrap Iron  

Sure I feel it.

Sure it hurts

when the blows land heavy

on my skull-top and shoulders,

I still come forward,

head down, chin in,

tight punches firing

with my bunched-muscle arms

when I can,

like Scrap Iron.

Sure it’s painful

Sure it burns,

but pain is only pain, baby;

the danger’s in going numb,

so I shrug the shots off

and keep coming forward,

no matter how tiring

it gets in the late rounds,

doing body work

like Scrap Iron.

Sure it’s pointless

Sure it’s bullshit,

but still I wade forward,

a distraction for booze-fuzzy eyes;

just keeping my head down

to keep my vision free from sweat

for a clear view of my whole environ,

which is always the wrong size,

too big and too small,

like Scrap Iron.

                Crystal Balls

Jeane Dixon was the number-one

US celebrity psychic of the sixties.

She had a crystal ball and everything,

including a real-estate company in DC,

of which her husband, F.W.,

was the nominal owner,

but he’d devoted himself

to some John Philip Sousa appreciation society,

so the famous fortune teller

also ran the business,

which rented me two different apartments

when I was an undergraduate.

I didn’t deal directly with Mrs Dixon, of course;

my contact was one of her underlings,

a crisp, youngish, bobbed-blond-haired, business-suited

Becky from Indiana named Connie Crigler,

who once, with an aura of repressed excitement and awe,

led me with some ceremony

into the exalted presence of the Great Lady.

The renowned psychic looked up at me from her desk,

smiled, and said, “You know,

you’d be a nice-looking young man

if you’d shave off that beard.”

And that was about it.

So much for my fortune.

                                             Not Burns

He was tall and blond and neither fat nor thin,

and in his mid-twenties, and neither handsome nor ugly,

although he did have that confident way about him,

as if his every whim were sacred

and his every opinion a universal natural law,

and his name was Ed Something-long-ending-in-‘ski’

and he played guitar in a covers bar band,

and he’d learnt trigonometry in high school,

and he’d got himself a trigonometry job

as the head of a land-survey party

back in the pre-computer, pre-GPS early seventies,

and he was aggressively misogynistic,

pretending to gag when he sneered pronouncements

about Helen Reddy and ‘I Am Woman’ and such,

and he played guitar in a covers bar band,

and of course he was violently homophobic,

ranting sneeringly about what he knew was semen

on David Bowie’s shoulder on that album cover,

and it had made him gag every time he’d seen it,

and he played guitar in a covers bar band.

And one time we were surveying a line through a field

and disturbed a nest of field mice,

and Ed had pinned one of the mice to the ground with his pencil,

and had called to Don, the instrument operator, his sidekick,

to roll our van slowly up to the mouse

in order to squash it beneath one of its tyres,

and I watched the pulse in the mouse’s neck beat rapidly

as Don eased the tyre just to where Ed’s pencil was pointing,

and I wanted to stop it but I couldn’t,

and the mouse’s eyes bulged and darted with terror,

and Ed was giggling almost hysterically,

and I turned and walked away.

Ed played guitar in a covers bar band.

              Soul Sisters 

Ronnie & Phil; Tina & Ike.

What was it about these charismatic

woman soul singers of the sixties

that brought them under the abusive control

of talented but psychopathic svengalis?

Was it cocaine and fame?

Was it a strutting need for dominance?

Was it the music’s hormonal intensity?

Was it business-as-usual in the music business?

Or was it the same-old-shit

sexism and deeply-rooted misogyny

that linger on in human cultures today?

Baby, I love you.

What’s love got to do with it?’

 

 Marie Laveau & the Consigliere Legale

She wasn’t the only person I’ve known

whose life seemed incomplete

without some feud with a neighbour,

but she was my wife and I loved her

and it was New Orleans in 1973.

The neighbour’s name was Ollie

and she worked as a checkout chick.

The feud ratcheted up

when Ollie made some Voodoo marks

on our front door.

For most of the New Orleans people I knew

Voodoo was no laughing matter.

My wife responded by stretching some black thread

across Ollie’s door at night

so that she’d walk into the symbolic spider web

when she left the house.

Ollie responded in kind, and the next night

I sat outside St Louis Graveyard Number One

parked at midnight in my wife’s Opel GT

while she scraped some brick dust

from Marie Laveau’s tomb.

Powerful gris-gris indeed!

Ollie eventually assaulted me

in front of witnesses in the checkout line.

The only social force in New Orleans

more powerful than the Voodoos being the Mafia,

at my urging my wife got her boss to refer us

to a Mafia lawyer whose services he employed,

and who kept one-third

of what Ollie’s bosses paid

for an out-of-court settlement,

which settled the dispute for good.

       Mantra for Clueless Postadolescents in the Developed World

Drink to get drunk.

Love to get laid.

Sink or be sunk.

Work to get paid.

 

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.