Stuff From February and March 2018

 Smokers’ Etiquette & Science 

It was just lying there,

without volition of its own,

a crushed, empty cigarette pack

in about the middle

of the park footpath,

maybe 30 or 40 metres from a bin,

and I thought,

shaking my head sadly,

‘Smokers sure do tend to be shitty people,’

and then I caught myself,

and castigated myself

for my logical fallacy

of jumping to a conclusion

based on insufficient data;

despite having seen

a plethora of stomped-out butts

and other tobacco-based detritus

on the ground all over the place

throughout my long life,

my observations have been

unsystematic and without

scientifically robust controls

to compare them with

how much crap other people

throw on the ground.

Bastards, all of ’em,

anyway.

                Factors 

Smart phones

Dumb people

That’s how the situation rolls

Smart phones

Dumb people

Tumbling wild out of control

Smart cars

Dumb drivers

Unenlightened about nature’s laws

Smart cars

Dumb drivers

Gotta eighty-six the human cause

Hot bods

Cold feelings

Forget the losers far from the top

Hot bods

Cold feelings

Fuck that brainy, PC, no-fun slop

Cheap talk

Grand promises

Love’s gonna find us by this afternoon

Cheap talk

Grand promises

We’re gonna set it right now really soon

Soft hearts

Hard lessons

The open door is starting to shut

Soft heart

Hard lessons

We’re floating then we’re kicked in the butt

Smart phones

Dumb people

It’s so easy to be mystified

Smart phones

Dumb people

We’re getting dizzy on that downhill slide

     Why I’m Not A Lawyer

I earned my bachelor’s degree

in political science

with a respectable grade-point average

at a university

with a prestigious

and well-connected

law school,

but I never even considered

filling out an application

for admission to that law school.

Nothing would have made my mother happier

than for me to become a lawyer.

That was reason enough

for me not to apply for law school

right there.

              Faith

I don’t believe you.

It’s nothing personal.

I don’t believe much.

Actually, when it comes to, well, stuff

I try not to believe anything,

although I don’t doubt

that a sustained, rigorous investigation

could uncover instances

in which I’ve fucked up

and been taken in,

me being fallible and all.

When it comes to people

my default setting is mistrust,

but from time to time,

whether out of loneliness

or a craving for love or friendship –

or any other form of human closeness –,

I have let my guard down

and trusted and believed someone,

and of course have wound up

getting kicked in the arse,

metaphorically speaking,

trust and belief returning

to tarnished memory.

                       No Polemic 

I’m incapable of feeling empathy

with bigots, sexists, wowsers, prohibitionists,

and people who are obsessed

with other people’s sexual proclivities.

I have enough trouble just trying to be myself

than to work myself up into a froth

about who other people are

and what they’re up to.

Sure, I definitely have a dislike

and an occasional unkind word

for psychopathic narcissists,

maliciously sadistic bullies,

aggressively superstitious blowhards,

and phonies who pontificate authoritatively

on subjects about which they’re pig-ignorant,

but experience has convinced me

that nothing I say or do will change them,

so I just confine myself to avoiding them

as much as I can,

and limiting my unkind words to them in general,

but not individually by name –

because that could lead to interpersonal conflict.

Dickheads are everywhere,

and that’s the way it’s always been.

One can’t fight them all.

                   Just Like That 

Some people are just like that.

I was walking my dog

along a street lined with regal oak trees

when she called to me from a deck

on the other side of a fence

to come in through the gate

for a glass of wine.

Fifty years old, she told me,

and wearing dreadlocks and baggy mid-calfs, I noticed,

she turned out to be an attack conversationalist,

launching one personal attack or innuendo

after another,

her objective being

to poke reactions out of me,

as she told me after one egregious insult,

which she readily conceded that

she herself thought was awful and didn’t believe.

She seemed to think that I was enjoying this.

Some people are just like that.

I was soon looking for a polite way to escape,

but she’d given my dog a huge bone,

which he, at least, was enjoying enormously.

Still, after 15 or 20 minutes

of sustaining repeated attacks,

I stuffed the jumbo livestock joint

into a plastic bag I had in my pocket,

as a responsible citizen,

for picking up dog shit,

and retreated out through the gate

to the tree-shaded footpath,

where it felt good to breathe

again.

Some people are just like that.

               Dalí Doesn’t Rhyme With Tolstoy

          Dalí didn’t dilly-dally, did he?

          Warhol wasn’t wishy-washy, was he?

          Shelley shouldn’t shilly-shally, should she?

          Wordsworth wouldn’t wiggle-waggle, would he?

          Kindergarten fartin’

          played a part in startin’ a smartin’ spartan

          goin’, ‘holy moley, roly-poly,

          you’re losing your bruising and

          your cruising and your boozing, whilst

          you’re fusing and refusing, which makes

          your schmoozing bemusing,

          so you’re losing it once again.’

          Meanwhile,

          their cobber’s slobber clobbered your throbber,

          and their clubber’s blubber

          scrubbed a grubber that wouldn’t rub her

          the right way anymore.

          Geisel groaned no gibble-gabble,

          Chomsky chawed no chitter-chatter,

          Picasso pooh-poohed their prittle-prattle, and

          Tolstoy told no tittle-tattle.

          Meanwhile,

          Paisley’s partly pickled party gherkin

          was workin’ the java that was perkin’ away

          for every jerk and patsy in the park.

          Dalí didn’t dilly-dally, did he?

          Warhol wasn’t wishy-washy, was he?

          Tolstoy told no tittle-tattle,

          not a snotty jot of it, no!

                  The Consequences of Immodesty

                  She removed her hijab headscarf,

                  fluffed her hair a bit,

                  then wrapped it back on her head,

                  right there in the windy park,

                  far from anyone,

                  but I saw it happen

                  from a hundred or so metres away;

                  I saw her forbidden hair, I did,

                  and I wondered if some sort of hellfire

                  would ensue for me,

                  but none did,

                  or hasn’t as yet.

                  I have nothing to report

                  about any hellish consequences

                  for her,

                  but I think not.

             Comments 

I never listen to talkback radio,

but occasionally I fail to avoid

noticing internet comments

of the nasty and dimwitted persuasion.

I almost envy

those internet Comments arseholes,

as it must be comforting for them

to huff and puff self-righteously

about how people

who are less lucky than they are

are really inferior

in all sorts of ways

(So much safer for the commenters

than claiming to be superior themselves),

and it must feel grand

to get a deep-down-in-the-glands thrill

from stomping on helplessly defenceless people

who are already down,

and to do it

with a holier-than-thou conscience,

if that word applies.

              Fancy Fucking 

Lenny Bruce said

that the difference between

pornography and erotica

is the difference between

plain fucking and fancy fucking;

depicting ordinary, everyday fucking,

he maintained, is pornography,

but if you can, as he put it,

‘tear off a piece of ass with class,’

that’s erotica.

My experience of fancy fucking,

way back before old age

made me terminally unattractive sexually,

was of those times when,

whilst pumping away,

whether with class or without,

I experienced the illusion, or delusion,

that I had become one with my partner,

and that we were inextricably joined

spiritually as well as genitally.

The fucks resulting in zygotes,

to me at least,

were even fancier still.

     Repeated Kicks Up The Bum

The thing is

I have come to know

that what holds me back,

that what’s always held me back,

are psychological disorders,

and I know where they came from,

so I know that the ways

that they make my mind work,

as likely as not,

are objectively suspect

as well as dysfunctional, but

the thing is,

all my real-world experiences

of relating to other people

and human institutions

have consisted of

repeated kicks up the bum,

which has reinforced my disorders

and provided me with the niggling thought

that they really are indeed

true and accurate

representations of my reality.

             News of Death 

One thing that I will never know

is how my daughters will react

when they hear the news that I’ve died.

I wonder if my mother ever thought about this,

and if she thought her death

would provoke copious tears.

I wasn’t there to see it,

but I expect that my brother

play-acted whatever parts

he thought would impress

whatever audience he had

when he had one,

his mind, meanwhile,

focused on the money.

Personally, I felt nothing at all

when I learnt that she died,

and never even considered

going to her funeral.

I wonder if, in thirty or forty years,

my daughters will hate my memory

the way that I hate hers,

but, of course,

I’ll never know.

        A Hideous Deformity

Out of any randomly selected

group of one hundred people,

one is statistically likely

to be significantly richer

than the rest,

one is statistically likely

to be significantly more intelligent

than the rest,

and it’s extremely unlikely

for them to be the same person.

It must be infuriating

for the cossack rubes

to base their world-view

on the hatred of people

who are much more intelligent

than they are

while refusing to admit

that they’re not really smarter

than those who are more intelligent

than they are.

Politicians on the rich people’s payroll know this,

and have great success exploiting it.

               Wet Willies  

One of the more damaging

of the myriad techniques

that my two-years-older brother used

to bully, torment, and generally abuse me

during the first 14 or 15 years of my life,

when I was trapped

living in the same house as he was,

was to use his greater size and weight

to pin me down so I couldn’t move,

snorfelling with laughter

at my desperate but futile efforts free my arms,

to free myself,

and only letting me go after sticking

one of his saliva-moistened fingers

into my ear.

I’ve had nightmares,

more properly PTSD flashbacks,

in my sleep about this

throughout my life,

awakening screaming and kicking

and so badly tangled in the sheets

that I’d fall to the floor

escaping half-asleep from the bed.

They reached so much sleep-shattering frequency

that when I was 67 I began taking medication

to help me to control my dreams,

and during the subsequent four-and-a-half years

have only awakened, shaken,

from fraternal nightmares three times,

and two of those times

before an actual assault took place.

Not bad, eh?

Not good enough, either,

but I suppose it’s as good as it’s gonna get.

Stuff from January 2018

  Reptile Fossils, Pop Art, & Roses

Small to giant reptiles

once dominated the ecosystem

of this medium-small planet,

spinning its way through space

around a medium-small star

part-way up one of the spiral arms

of a galaxy that’s one of trillions

in this part of the universe;

they did this

for hundreds of millions of years

without telling anyone

and, as far as we know,

without reflection or wonder or self-awareness,

then went extinct or evolved otherwise

hundreds of millions of more years

before our species

evolved to study their fossil record,

and to think about it,

and to talk about ourselves,

doing which has made us think

we’re somehow significant –

an odd word in the context –

while in the mid-1960s,

in our quirky way of reckoning time,

Andy Warhol listened to the song,

‘Sally Go ’Round the Roses’

over and over again for hours

as he produced garish pop art

with the same old universe around him

that had surrounded the dinosaurs.

  

   Pathos & Scorn

A small blue car

bearing just the driver,

male or female,

I couldn’t tell,

zoomed down

the otherwise

somnolent street,

its engine all revved up

into a howling growl,

or maybe a growling howl,

the end of the street

and its stop sign

less than fifty metres away,

and I thought of the driver:

What a pathetic person!

Then it occurred to me

that I’m pathetic, too,

only not as aggressively

noisy about it in public,

and that,

when viewed dispassionately,

our entire species

is pathetic to the core.

         Eggshell 

We have protection

surrounding us,

an eggshell

dangling from a spider web

in a good, stiff breeze.

We have sustenance,

with vapour billowing

from our cloud cleansers,

where we wash off

the thin film of soil

that also sustains us.

We have transportation

inside of which we run errands,

mobile eggshell replicas

we can barely control,

and sometimes we die

when they crack or shatter.

We have jobs,

which bang us against

the inside of our eggshell

without our even noticing

or thinking twice about it,

because it’s there.

We look at each other

using mirrors and blindfolds,

sonorously exchanging

tall tales about worlds

without eggshell or dirt,

convincing each other

that make-believe is real.

    Small Compensation

Sometimes it seems to me,

probably stupidly,

that all our lives and deaths

are fractions of a world soul

that encompasses all of the

pleasure and pain,

joy and terror,

purity and pollution,

artistic experiences

and dull drudgery

of all living things,

and I rejoice myself

to observe my dog

adding to his enjoyment

of smells and fellowship

that I can barely imagine,

which adds to my experience

of the world soul

when it absorbs me

from my limitations,

although I can’t forget

that this is small compensation

for all the agonies and terror

resulting from human cruelty

inflicted on each other

and other animals

in our billions.

               Intimate Secrets

She hid her face in the pillow

in a paroxysm of embarrassment and fear,

and I said, ‘Hey! Don’t worry!

‘This is me that you’re talking to.

‘I’m never going to tell anyone,’

and so I’m not going to tell you now;

no, you’re not going to know her secret,

even though she later done did me wrong,

with heaps of hurt involved,

and told me all sorts of lies

along the way

that I’m not even

going to report now, either,

because it would embarrass me too much

to recount publicly, in specifics,

what a predictably pathetic mark I was,

anyway.

             The Smirk 

She smirked.

Then she said something

that she clearly thought was clever,

but was actually dimwitted and rude,

but it was the smirk:

the sides of the mouth

turned barely upward

and the middle of the upper lip

pushed down over the lower,

with the chin lowered slightly also,

to give just a hint of the impression

of looking down at the recipient,

the whole face arranged to convey

smugness,

self-satisfaction,

scorn,

condescension,

derision,

contempt,

and I’ve-got-your-number,

a nasty, affected travesty of a smile

that expressed no humour or warmth.

I have no ability to tolerate smirking;

it trips one of my triggers,

and only my commitment

to the principle of non-violence,

my aversion to being absorbed

into the criminal-justice system,

and the context,

a high-school hall

crowded with parents and teachers,

the smirker being one of my daughter’s teachers,

kept me from smashing that smirk

right off of her face.

       Colourful Surnames

 

I know, or have heard of,

plenty of people

in the English-speaking world

with the surnames

of White, Black,

Grey (or Gray), Brown,

Green (or Greene),

Gold, Silver,

and even a few

surnamed Rose and Blue,

and can google up people with the surnames

Pink, Violet,

and Redd (but not Red –

although Rossi is common in Italian),

but I can find no mention of anybody

with the surname Yellow

since 1653

(although Huang is common in Chinese).

I wonder why?

I wonder why about all sorts of odd stuff

when I’m walking my dog around the park.

                     From

I’ve been a bloke with an accent

for forty-five or so years,

and during those years

from twelve to fifteen thousand

essentially dull and superficial people

have asked, upon encountering me,

where I was from,

or some variation of this.

People with Asian facial features,

from what I’ve heard,

get hit with this at least as often,

no matter what their accent.

From.

Nadia from Pussy Riot rapped,

‘Don’t be stupid / Don’t be dumb /

Vagina’s where you’re really from.’

The superficials don’t like that answer,

any more than when I’ve responded,

‘From my father’s balls.’

From.

I feel like I’m from Hamilton,

since I’ve lived here longer

than I ever lived anywhere else,

but of course the superficials

won’t accept that.

I moved to Hamilton from Otorohanga.

I moved to Otorohanga from Guam.

I moved to Guam from Texas,

where the superficials also

interrogated me about my accent.

From.

Am I from my birth country?

We left when I was seven weeks old.

Am I from where my ancestors lived?

Recent or distant ones?

Am I from where I started school?

From.

Does having been a lecturer

make me from Academia?

Does my work as a labourer and

my grandfather’s trade-union loyalties

make me from the working class?

But my father’s working as

a small-town GP

makes me from the middle class.

From.

I’m from a dysfunctional nuclear family,

which is much more to the point

than where I went to school.

From.

My geographical location

a half-century or more ago

tells you little about who I am,

unless, of course, your objective

is instead to tell me what I am

and to jam me into a box

that’s the wrong shape

and far too small.

From.

Like John Frum and the isle of Tanna,

I’m not going back.