What’s the Big Deal?

  
What’s the big deal about me doing gym three times a week?
 
You don’t need to, you say. Do a little more around the house. Like gardening.
 
Gardening isn’t cardiovascular, I say. It has a lot of health benefits but it isn’t cardiovascular. It isn’t enough.
 
And you’re seeing the skin specialist next week. What’s that all about?
 
Looking after myself, I say.
 
You fuss too much, you say. You even check your car out during the week. I’ve seen you in the driveway, wiping away the bird shit off your car. Birds gotta shit somewhere.
 
Sure but it eats away the paintwork.
 
It’s becoming a fetish, you say. And now you’re off to gym, I suppose?
 
I treat my body like my car, I say. It’s the vehicle I travel through life in.
 
 

The Search

I felt cheated

by the short story writer

whose piece

morphed

into a

sociopolitical tract

on racism

for page after phlegmatic page

leaving the characters fumbling

in the dark

in search of a plot —

and me, with them

Life Isn’t a Beanbag

I am reading a book of jokes

that looks like a book of poems

double-spaced typing, plenty of white space,

400 pages long.

almost unheard of unless it’s a ‘Collected’

& it’s by a comedian,

the comedian of comedians — Seinfeld

and it’s been 25 years in the making

so you’d think something with heft

like a comic ‘Crime & Punishment’, for instance.

Look, I wasn’t expecting Lenny Bruce or Richard Pryor

but this stuff was tame, kindergarten, Christmas cracker

material, vanilla, timid as marshmallow.

What I wanted to ask was:

where are the pangs, the pricks, the pranks

life has played on you? the prangs of relationships?

Your life couldn’t have been that cushiony, surely?

Life isn’t a beanbag, Jerry. Where is the dark matter?

All I’m saying is, you coulda done better.

After 25 years of  nothing in print,

you coulda done better, Jerry. Will you give me that?

Colonize

Please don’t try to colonize me.

I’m not unclaimed territory.

I own me.

*pic courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

… And Another Thing

And another thing …. What does it matter if you wear your hat inside?

 

My mate got told off by our host just for doing that. And my mate said, at least I don’t go around putting my feet on people’s poufs or coffee tables, having a dig at me.

 

Our host looked at both of us wondering what a pair of turkeys he had got in.

 

are manners truly arbitrary? which behaviours/ manners do you think are worth keeping?

A Long Angry Pair of Trousers

You could hear them growling

as they came up the street

bristling with fury

mumbling obscenities

the long angry pair of trousers.

They were rumpled.

They were crumpled.

They had had a bad night.

They did not want to be there.

On him.

Anywhere butt.

They were positively scopophobic

but he didn’t get it.

so they squinched his anatomy.

soiled the cuffs.

Had he not noticed?

But they were all he had

So he wore them

Those long angry pair of trousers.