Stuff from May & June 2018

            Nom de Bar

 

Linda told me,

‘I never give men in bars my real name.

I tell ’em it’s Cindy.

Or sometimes Sandy.

Cindy if I’m in town;

Sandy if I’m at the beach.

It’s easier to keep track of that way.’

               Her Answer  

The editor of the Weekender

told me that he wanted a story

about the women who go to clubs and bistros

and what they’re looking for – what they want.

I thought it was an okay assignment,

as it gave me a chance, an excuse,

to approach unattached women

in that sort of louche environment,

something I ordinarily found hard to do.

One slender woman with a bony, jutting jaw

in a somewhat upmarket boozerie

looked at me with dead seriousness and said,

‘What do I look for in bars?

I’ll tell you what I look at.

Crotches.

Crotches and asses.

It depends on whether they’re coming or going.

Of course, if they’re coming,

that means they’ll be going to my house.’

Best impromptu answer I ever received

to any interview question I ever asked.

We ended up having a bit of an affair

that lasted for a month or so;

I forget why we broke up.

Thirty-seven years later

and I can’t remember her name

off the top of my head,

though I remember that answer

word for word.

                  Guinea Pigs  

When I was about five or six,

soon after I began watching sport

on our first-ever black-and-white TV,

my mind started to imagine myself

playing American football.

I especially liked it when the ball carrier

would slip through the middle of the defence,

dodging and squirming into

the opposition backfield,

and I imagined myself doing that

and, being little,

slipping by between their legs

whilst they failed to tackle me,

grasping at the air above my head.

The image came to my mind

of a pack of guinea pigs –

small, fast, squirming rodents, lots of them –

thoroughly befuddling the thick, burly linemen;

thinking of it today it seems

a remarkably imaginative image for a five-year-old.

When I burbled this to my family

my two-years-older-than-me brother

started to chant, in the timeless bully’s singsong:

‘Riki thinks he’s a pi-ig! Riki thinks he’s a pi-ig!’

I actually tried to explain to him

how that wasn’t what I’d said,

but he just kept it up, louder and longer,

clearly relishing my frustration and vexation.

For several years afterward he would

from time to time slip into conversation

remarks such as, ‘Well, you said that you’re a pig.’

For years and years.

Taught me a lesson, he did.

       Distance, Size, and Time 

We look up and see clouds moving

far above the tops of our heads,

huge floating things that make us look little,

but they’re really laughably close and small

compared to the stars and the galaxies and the void.

I’m relatively old for a human,

but my age is hardly a moment

compared to the age of our species,

which is piddling

compared to the antiquity of DNA,

which is next to nothing

compared to the age of everything.

I’m full of wonder that we humans have evolved

with a sense of wonder

about what’s beyond ourselves

in terms of distance, size, and time;

we have the urge of curiosity about such enormities,

and the desire to find out what we don’t know,

but the insecurity necessary for our survival

and a bloated sense of our own importance

has led us to convince ourselves,

or at least to pretend,

that the stories that we have made up

to explain things that are beyond our ken

actually have some basis in reality:

it’s called effing the ineffable.

I prefer revelling in my uncertainty and ignorance

in regard to what’s beyond me:

it’s called wonder.

     What & Who 

What are you?

Are you a Christian?

What are you?

Are you an atheist?

What are you?

Are you a refugee?

What are you?

Are you a pansexual?

What are you?

Are you a woman of colour?

What are you?

Are you a Gemini?

What are you?

Are you a Muslim?

What are you?

Are you a Texan?

What are you?

Are you a Jew?

What are you?

Are you a rape victim?

What are you?

Are you a vegetarian?

What are you?

Are you a Kiwi?

What are you?

Are you a disabled person?

What are you?

Are you a straight white man?

What are you?

Are you a Canadian?

or an American?

Knowing all this kind of what-you-are, though,

tells me jack-shit about who you are.

              Unworthy 

I’m not surprised

when people who pretend

to be my lovers and friends

have acted as if I’m a thing, just an It,

and discarded me like an empty wine bottle

without a second thought

when they fancied

I was no longer of use to them.

The way my mama brought me up

meant that I went out into the world

convinced deep-down

that I’m unworthy of love.

The ability to be loved

is a skill

that people have to learn

when we are little.

I didn’t.

        Not True Or False 

When somebody says or writes

the phrase, ‘the fact that …’

as the lead into expressing an opinion

in my mind

they immediately lose credibility

for anything at all

they have to say or write afterward,

or else I just ignore it.

Some people might call this

a snobby, elitist overreaction,

but I value integrity highly,

as I do accuracy in language,

so those people can stuff it.

     Cold-Weather Customs 

Walking my dog

on an icy-cold morning,

me wearing six layers,

a beanie, and a hood

and still shivering

(old age and all),

watching the high-school kids

walking to school,

some of the boys wearing shorts,

this being New Zealand and all,

and some of the girls

wearing hijab scarves

wound tightly about

their head and ears,

undoubtedly glad that the things

have at least some uses

in addition to pleasing their parents,

this being New Zealand and all.

Stuff from April 2018; #120 in this series

                             Fanfare 

My Lotto slip matched up three numbers and the bonus,

putting me in division zed or something,

which meant that instead of losing outright, as usual,

I had $23 coming to me,

off a seven dollar output,

so my margin was actually plus $16.

Still, better than a kick up the bum.

Impersonal things can be like that.

When the lady scanned my ticket

the Lotto machine played

a brass fanfare,

or more precisely the recording of one,

and I wondered.

I wondered who composed that fanfare –

was it someone specially commissioned to compose it,

or some semi-famous composer

who wrote it long enough ago

for it to be in the public domain and therefore free?

I wondered who it was that decided on it,

and indeed on a brass fanfare at all –

was it somebody in Marketing,

or some tech geek who put together the software?

Is it supposed to make me feel special and important,

celebratory and giddy with excitement,

and therefore likely to buy more Lotto tickets?

Do they – whoever they are – think people are that stupid?

Are people that stupid, at least some of us?

The world is full of these mini-mysteries.

I wonder if discovering their answers

would ruin everything.

                  Grumpus

I don’t know if it’s just me,

but the grizzled old stereotype

of people becoming more conservative

as our years pile up

into grumpy-old-fart territory

clearly misses the boat.

The older I get the more that what passes

in the current lexicon as conservative

disgusts and repels me,

and the more that radical change

in global social and economic

concepts and attitudes and systems and values

seems attractive and plausible to me.

I also have become less conservative

in my day-to-day efforts

to cope with the general crap

of the world of humans

and my situation in it.

I don’t feel the craving to cling to things,

or to depend on individual people,

as much as I may feel the compulsion to do so;

my desperation’s lost all its urgency –

urgency ignores the cosmos –

death’s not all that far away any more,

and stamping my foot and having a hissy fit

won’t change that, or anything, really.

I take solace from my cosmic insignificance,

old age having released me

from the distracting illusion of love,

and freed me to feel almost nothing

without feeling guilty about it.

                Dehumanisation 

I can’t pinpoint

even the approximate age

at which I first became aware of it,

but since early childhood

my perception has increasingly been

that the more that a person knows me

the more likely that person will

behave toward me as if I were a thing

rather than a fellow human being.

As my self-awareness

increased and improved over time,

I became convinced that it was me,

that one or more of my unconstructive

concepts and default behaviours,

which I developed whilst my mind was forming

in a dangerously toxic family environment,

radiates subtle signals

to others that I am, indeed,

no better than a thing,

and deserve no better treatment,

but then it struck me

how triumphant capitalism

commodifies everything and everybody,

and that this objectification and dehumanisation

were probably widespread realities

throughout the system.

Still, deep down in the core of my personhood,

I can’t escape the stubborn conviction that,

Nah, it’s me.

    Taste Arbiters & My Sociability  

If a piece of music –

or of writing or painting

or sculpture or comedy

or anything else

someone has created –

does something for me – or to me –

somewhere deep inside my nervous system,

or if it definitely turns me off,

or fails to do anything in particular

and just leaves me cold,

that’s what happens,

and it doesn’t matter who tells me

that I should or shouldn’t think that it’s art,

or that it’s great, or just okay,

or that it’s crap,

no matter how knowledgeable and respected

or numerous

such taste arbiters may be.

Sometimes, I suppose,

it would be socially advantageous

for me to fake my response –

oh, definitely! –

but I can’t.

                         72  

When I was just a wee thing,

maybe four years old,

it somehow got into my mind,

I don’t know how,

that my ‘lucky number’ is 72.

It soon expanded

in my child’s consciousness

to being a magic number,

and I’ve never been able to shake that,

even though I’ve been basically anti-superstition

since about puberty,

and thoroughly so since the mid-1960s.

So, every time I’ve had to come up

with a random number for anything

I’ve always put down 72 –

or seven or two if it had to be one digit –

and of course that’s made fuckall difference to anything.

But maybe, I used to think,

it was a stroke of prescience or something,

if such things are possible,

which they almost certainly aren’t,

and something major –

from my perspective –

is going to happen when I’m 72 years old.

Maybe it’ll be my age when I die,

or get rich,

or find happiness and fulfilment at last.

Well, my seventy-second birthday

is now well in the past,

and I haven’t experienced anything remarkable

or life-changing or life-ending yet.

I don’t notice much change from being 71, actually.

                          Luck  

Only occasionally, but far too often,

I’ve heard people say,

almost inevitably with smugly assertive pride,

‘I don’t believe in luck.’

Now, I’ve learnt from all-too-tedious experience

that people who say that they don’t believe in luck

are egotists who probably mean either one of two things:

There’s the ‘it’s all part of a plan’ crowd

(God’s plan, Nature’s plan – it doesn’t matter.)

So what?

It’s just my luck that God’s plan

has screwed me over so badly.

It’s just blind luck that Nature’s done the planning,

and not some ancient aliens’ digital device.

Then we have the ‘We make our own luck’

and ‘It’s all choice, not chance’ evangelists.

Right.

That toddler chose to have abusive parents.

Those 12-year-old girls chose to have thugs in military gear

invade their villages and rape them.

That middle-aged nurse chose to win Lotto,

and two million others chose to lose.

‘I don’t believe in luck.’

So pick another word for effects

resulting from innumerable causative factors

beyond anybody’s control,

like why that one sperm out of hundreds of millions in that spurt

fertilised that egg to create you.

As if belief has anything to do with it.

It’s like saying,

‘I don’t believe in the direction “down”.’

 

         Wake Up Sheeple! 

I awakened from my siesta

with this sentence ringing in my head:

‘In less than two weeks you’ll be at my door,

chasing your witch-wives away

with their own mules.’

I have no idea what it means

and can’t remember the dream that spawned it.

I wonder if reading this

has enriched your life?

Not much, I expect.

Oh, well …

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.