Is like

is like

waiting to play at a brass band competition in a cluttered school music room amongst

people expressing the jovial bonhomie of those who meet only annually

and who spend their time trying to out-practice the opposition

by riffing on difficult arpeggios or running through the nasty bits with ease or

blowing notes at length to show their breath control;

is like waiting to play at a singing competition

in a back room where sometimes suppers are served

and where the contestants aim to outdo each other in dress sense,

make-up, and the highest of heels, deepest of cleavages –

if such are available - and where the guys turn up

in suits, or tuxes, or something that shows they can

spruce up nicely thank you, (unintentionally impressing the girls);

is like waiting for a delayed plane at a cramped airport

with too few chairs and nowhere to lie down and

drinks that are fizzy or caffeinated, and pies with burning

chopped steak and mushroom, and panini with tired salad fillings

that look good in the glass or plastic cases but taste

like plastic (though never like glass) when purchased;

is like waiting for the telephone call from your wife to say

she’s started her labour pains with the about-to-be-first-born ˗

or your second-born ˗ or your third-born ˗ or subsequent-borns;

is like waiting for news of the interviews you’ve squirmed through over

previous weeks, or haven’t made the grade for, or missed out on

entirely;

is like waiting at an assigned meeting place for someone who,

unbeknownst to you, thought they were meeting an hour later;

is like waiting to go into an important exam you don’t feel in the

least bit prepared for, where you know you will fail and won’t understand the questions and

all the multi-choice responses will be meaningless, and none of the material will be at all

familiar;

is like waiting in the hospital waiting room – the chairs are

too plastic, or the backs are too far back for comfort, or as hard as steel, or cold, or

just chairs that no one in their right mind would sit on, and your

child is in the surgery possibly dying, possibly reviving, possibly

about to come through and in a month or two everything will be

forgotten, including the uncomfortable chairs;

is like waiting for the

dentist in one of those chairs that leave you lying on your back with a

headrest that some go-ahead inventor not in his right mind

concocted and which isn’t at all at the angle to stop your head from feeling as though it’s

about to snap at the neck, and it seems as if the dentist has gone for a

tea-break, or a vacation, or a long-overseas trip from which he may or may not

return, and the nurse is fussing about clanking sharp knives and long daggers and

implements of unimaginable torture, and everyone of these she’s

throwing on the round steel table just so you know your teeth are in a

desperate state of decay, and it’s likely each and every one of them will need to be

removed before the afternoon is out, and the weather outside, which you can just

see out of the corner of your eye is glowering, turning from a sunny

morning into the stormiest two o’clock you’ve ever seen, and

suddenly here comes the dentist as if he’s never been away, and

picks up every tool at once in his innumerable hands and throws each and

every one of them into your mouth, screwing some of them tight into your

gums, and poking others into the holes you’d thought he hadn’t noticed, and

grinding others right across the surface of your teeth so that you know when you

next look in the mirror you’ll see irremovable skid marks, or children’s

handprints in cement, and with another tool he’ll dent a tooth that was

perfectly fine when you left home this morning, and with another he’ll be picking at

the spaces between your teeth and finding plaque by the globle-ful and tut-tutting, while the

nurse is swabbing your mouth and rinsing it out with a vacuum-cleaner that leaves you more

soaked than dry, and in the meantime your throat needs to swallow and needs to do it

now! and with all this stuff in your mouth you’re going to croak it, you know it, because

the dentist has never himself experienced the horrors of being on the other end of those

tools;

is like waiting unstimulated on a desert island, bookless, or without a bit of music to play, or a thought in your head, or a pen to write with (and nothing to write on anyway), and

only the searing sun and the trees dropping coconuts heavily on your unwary

noggin and sand getting into everything from teeth to cracks between the toes to the

hair amongst your private bits to the hair under your arms to the hairs on your head, and

nothing can get rid of it and all the warm and friendly ideas of a tropical island are

dissipating fast and you wish you were home beside a cosy fire with a book, with some

jazz in the background and the newspaper ready to read when the book proves to be

unreadable, and the telly to turn on if you’re desperate, and your wife in the kitchen singing

some old pop song she learnt as a teenager and which is revived when she’s at her happiest, and she’s making date scones which you’re not very fond of but you’ll eat because when

she makes them they’re always much more mixed-spicier than you imagined, and the

kids will come down the stairs and play Monopoly at your feet, and the fluffy dog you

thought you would never have loved will be standing, front paws on your knees, pleading with big brown eyes to be allowed to jump on your lap and lick your hand and flump his

head across your arm – or maybe go for a long walk up hill and down dale. 

The day I cut my finger off

The day I cut my finger off –

my index finger, now made

smaller than my little finger –

I cooked my childhood favourite,

carrots and parsnips mashed, for tea;

it was the day my wife’s work sent

flowers in memory of her sister

who had died on the other side of the

world.  It was the day my wife was

gib-boarding the upstairs bathrooom,

the day I had a heavy cold and

should have been in bed, the

day the dog ate some of the carrot I

dropped on the floor, but not the

parsnip; the day I catalogued three

shelves of books onto an iPad app;

the day we were to go to a

quiz night at the Kensington, and

answer trivia; the day my two

daughters went to see

New Zealand’s Got Talent along

with thousands of others who wanted to

be seen in the audience and didn’t

realise it would be too dark and

that the audience is only there to

provide a noise.  It was the day the

two Jack Russells next door decided to

fight, with one of them nearly biting off

the tail of the other, the day my

son-in-common-law came to

pick me up from A & E since my

wife had to stay home to mind our

grandson, and he was the only one

free.  It was the day we almost had

soggy pies for tea, because I put them in the

microwave, and defrosted them too

rapidly, but saved them from

destruction by cooking them hot

and strong in the oven.  It was the day I

said to my son-in-common-law that

these things always happen to me,

and he didn’t agree, since he’d

cut off his own thumb at an

earlier point, in a wood splitter. 

It was the day – or maybe it

wasn’t – that all these things and

much more happened to me. 

Memory is deep, and memory

remembers what it wants, and

forgets what it wants, and

suddenly decides to bring a

history to light that years had

forgotten, and there’s a program on

TV, which is called Unforgettable –

only it isn’t, since it runs to a

formula every other cop show on

TV runs to: a main character, a

sidekick - male to female in this

case - with a know-it-all boss,

and a couple of lesser cast

members who fill in the gaps, and

in this case a heroine who can’t

forget anything, but if that was

truly the case she would be halfway

round the twist, which she plainly

isn’t. What she remembers are

only those things vital to the

plot, things that most of us would have

forgot, like a face seen in a cafe, or a

photo on a wall, or a shadow on a

gate.  Wait, all these things, the

carrot and the parsnip, the flowers,

the biting of the tail and cutting

of the finger, the cataloguing,

the gib-boarding, trivia quiz,

the NZ’s got talent, the picking up from

A&E have happened; I remember them all,

Yet there’s one thing I have to confess:

I didn’t cut my finger off at all.

Like it or lump it

Like it or lump it is common in English, and

‘lumpers’ unload from United States docks

(such as Gloucester in Mass.), but the

Germans (as often) make best use of Lumpen,

a rag-word (not ragwort) pursued by

a ragtag of rag and bone words like

Lumpensammler, and

Lumpensgesindel, and dear old

Karl Marx’s (maybe insulting)

Lumpenproletariat,*

those at the bottom, the

ones most degraded, the

working class, poverty-

ridden, prone-to-diseases,

consumptive, those dying too young,

those losing their children, so that

one single name might be

used for two infants, (confusing

descendants and family historians),

for whom children composed

all their wealth, and the loss of one,

two, or more was like losing the

bank notes hid in your mattress, or

having a thug mugging you down some tight

alleyway, coshing you, uncashing you,

or a man skyscraper-leaping on

hearing investments have gone down the

plughole. 

     Lump is a mass undiffer-

entiated, the lumper the man who

understands mass, who humps on his

single hump the weight of a camel whose

double humps saddle the mass of a

man.  Lumpensgesindel, the

rag-taggle rabble, whose weight

dear old Karl wrangled into his

brain, commonsensical,

dialectically logical,

straining to see, to bring to

reality the Proletariat Dic-

tatorship, to envisage the

people, the workers, the mass in

charge, to see the demise of the

capitalists, to see inequality

quitted.  Marx was the

Lumpensammler, the rag-and-

bone man whose revolutionary

ideas were red rags to

bulls who horned them up,

tossed them, crossed them and

in general lost them.  Red was the

colour of their true love’s hair, but

this girl was blood through and

through.


Footnote
Hilary Clinton's equivalent is 'the deplorables.' 

Untitled Sestina

Attempting a complex approach to a sestina, with both the first and last words of each line working through the sestina pattern...there are also two ongoing rhymes...

I light the black wick in the glass;

You carry it calmly to Gray.

He takes the flame outside to pray;

We watch as he kneels on the grass.

‘You people, now hear what I say!’

They listen, and file quietly past. 

They reflect on all that has past -

I saw you reflected in glass,

You came first to hear what we say,

You painted a picture so grey -

We spread out the lunch on the grass -

He, meanwhile, continues to pray.

He spreads out his long arms to pray.

They consider all that’s gone past;

We eat from the spread on the grass,

I pour out the wine in your glass,

You notice the sky’s glooming grey;

You have almost nothing to say:

You never have too much to say,

He asks why it is you don’t pray,

You glance up quite quickly at Gray;

They glanced at we three and then passed.

I drank all the wine in my glass;

We stained both our skirts on the grass.

We shake all the crumbs on the grass,

You cry out, accuse me, you say

‘I saw you reflected in glass!’

He closes eyes, focuses, prays;

They wheel down the drive and go past

You pick out a hair that’s gone gray.

You find that more have gone gray.

We pick up the cloth from the grass;

They tumble on down through the past;

You now have so much more to say,

He sobs and we can’t hear him pray,

I smash on the ground the fine glass.

You brush away Gray and you say

We hate the grass, why does he pray?

They shatter past; I shatter glass.                                            3.8.12

Gone

Gone.

On the bathroom windowsill,

pre-redecoration, we had twin

white containers of conditioner and

shampoo (or as Egyptians

delightfully pronounce it, shamboo); the

clear glass denture cup; the

man’s small travelling

shamboo called, in best masculine

fashion, Dominate; the baby

shampoo and the baby oil – though

we’ve been babyless in this

house for some years - and the

Alpha Keri, intended once for

my dry skin, but proving to be

allergenic round the nose and

sinus areas; (a smear of one percent of

Hydrocortisone in Aqueous Cream

combined with half a percent of Menthol

cleared the skin instead).

Gone.   All gone.

The windowsill, post-redecoration, is

clear: no white containers of

shamboo or conditioner, no glass

denture cup, nothing to Dominate, no

baby oils, shampoos, no Alpha Keri to

increase my eczema, and where

before the bottles and containers

formed themselves into

military arrays (as seen from my

prone position in the bath, with the sun

shining through the bevelled glass), or

formed themselves into oligarchies or

hierarchies, with the larger containers

dominating the smaller, or the smaller in

rebellion against the larger, or into

various dramatic tableaus that came from

some long-forgotten nineteenth-century

play in which the cast were required to

stand still for minutes at a time

allowing the audience to reflect on the

passions of the characters – or

lack of them - or on the

drama inherent in being able to

observe a group of people formed into

patterns amongst which you’d

discern the hierarches based entirely on

whether the actor was upstage or

downstage or seated or standing or

higher than all the others on some steps or

rostrums that in previous incarnations had

been the focus of a different play entirely.

These days they’d call them

Happenings, or installations.

Gone.  All gone.

Drum

Drum

I lie in the dentist’s chair, mouth numb,

teeth glum at the fact of being there. 

Out on the street, there’s a drum beat:

student protesters - one chewing gum -

shouting some slogan; in the midst of the scrum

the chewing gum student looks dumb;

dumb, keeping mum, he wants to know

why he’s driven along by the throng, and

slumbering inside his head, the slogan song

stunning the air that he breathes, choking his

conscience: there isn’t a crumb in this function for

one such as he; he’d sooner be slumming at home,

strumming his new-strung guitar, leaving the

politicos, activists, radicals thrumming

the sum of their discontents, discharging their

duties as soon-to-be-citizens, getting it out of their

systems before they succumb to the same old

reactionary plums offered new chums by the 

Old Boys clubs.  Whatever may come thinks the

chewing gum boy, being less than the sum of his parts.