{Friday June 8 - #25 The Flagrancy}
Don’t you people speak American?
Did Hitler play golf with the melted-down gold clubs of the masses?
Do you have to breath so loudly?
Why is that baby crying so much?
Did that wave have to come in so strongly?
Why are you in my space?
Why do you have to say such
things to him, he’s only young?
How can people be communists?
{Saturday June 9 - #26 The Stereotype}
In they come, marching, like saints into the breach, not quite an
infinity but a mass, no less and they sift through my life, this new land,
maybe my periphery; saving me from cognitive expenditure with all the substance
to fill the greatest canyon; so it must be me that is lacking, shellacking the
colours of the immensity, limitless intensity beckoning.
There he goes, the man I’ve seen a million times on this, that and the other-the
stupid box. All his friends are here and the colours blur by sending me forward,
leaving me face-to-face with:
The ex US marine barks chest out, accent thick, genuine as sin. Him and
his Japanese-American wife are lovely and we speak of war and being stationed
and back again and then here, forever, and war, and there’s never enough time
to complain about how different it is and how ungodly, how heavy, the invisible
assault rifle on his back now is.
The cop from the slums of Chicago studies me with cold eyes, like a bitter
Chicagoan winter night. Eyes that I’d surmise are usually searching for danger
– fulfillment – danger and physically aggressive mandates are enlisted to
survive, I mean, serve the way they do. He insinuates his hurt on the
rope-soled lost and he feels like he’s in danger, as he’s missing his piece, strapless
and hapless without it, I’d say of mind, but I don’t need an invisible pistol
whip to the brow and we laugh and the birds fly through the trees, jostling
mid-air like lovers. “We are conflict,” he says. “You are my stereotype,” I
reply. “I can’t believe that fuckin Canadian asshole,” he rants endlessly,
conflict dancing in the blacks of his eyes, candless.
New Yorkers are so New Yorkerian. They exude it. What it is, only the
poem can tell. Hopefully the words are liquid enough and lack viscosity. But
they’re good folk; worldly, clawing at the edge of it all and not giving a dang,
not giving in, stubbornly leering into the future the casm of humanity,
limitless again and I envy him and his world. Apparently jostling people on the
streets of New York is enough to get a man shot, stabbed, hanged, drawn, and
quartered, like a boy I know. Gazuntite. That other guy is Jewish, wow, he sure
is. “Where did you go to school?” People ask that?
And then there is the Japanese, barely a stereotype to by found here, as
I hadn’t invented them at all. What a lie. They run in a very straight line is
all I can say. Tiny steps. Onward. Oh, they also have this downcast eye thing
at times. But I’ll be honest, TV didn’t clue me up on this one. The stereotypes
I know never did the things I see.
And what about me? I am a stereotype? There is a slot for me, surely. Maybe
the friends and buds and quasi-acquainted citizenry above are cramming me in,
next to ‘down under doofus’ or ‘antipodean asshole’? Maybe sliding me snuggly
next to Steve Irwins corpse, rest him, rest them all.
Stereotypes terrify me, they are the yawn of existence; the laziness of
reality; a hole into which we all fall.
{Saturday June 10 - #26 The Future}
Slapped in the face with it again and again until I’m desensitized and
numb like the moral compass of a Nazi officer, his finger twitching from the
rabid acts of the day.
Meanwhile, dancing dead heroes throb through minute worlds, the static doors of colonies
of light leading us, the living into stupefaction. Slapped in the face again. "Here I am."
The world of belonging, the yester-year begs for forgiveness, as it’s all
so small in this village now, and everyone is both the nosy neighbour and the
arrogant, puffed up town mayor, also everyone plays the martyr but no one can
get that last nail in.
And our globe, our megamegalopolis, our endless city of madness and
inadequacy and love and malice and apathy and mainly apathty and always apathy
even in love and malice and malice unfortunately broods.
Yes, slapped in the face over and over until I’m desensitized and numb
like the moral compass of a Nazi officer, his finger twitching from acts of the
day. Oh, dear me another holocaust fragment; where’s the future in that?
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