Cloud

A week into my wife's trip

back to the old country

for her and the boys

to spend time with her mom
its like I never got married
never had children
and I quickly become deranged by something -
let us call it loneliness, or disconnection
the building is even more unusually quiet than usual
a carpeted and well maintained mausoleum
am I the only one alive?
no, the cockroaches in the kitchen,

the earthworms on the balcony
and our Spinifex mice in the basement
are still there when I visit them
but I crave human company
anything that has a body, and can speak
to try and penetrate the desperate silence
I feebly leave messages, send SMSs, write emails
the messages go unresponded to,
the emails vanish into the cyber-ether
again the heavy silence returns
they're shooting a short film in the park downstairs
I chat with the producer,

I could always bandy terms around
but really I've nothing to say to anyone
they’re all as dull and lifeless as me
programmed robots swapping programmed thoughts
I turn down awkward dinner invites
knowing loneliness in a crowd is much worse
but am then left alone with my barren thoughts
I look at pornography
like a fish struggling on a hook
watch tv and stuff my face
go for a swim in the ocean

hoping the cold will provide a different kind of numb
I smile at a plain woman on the beach
soon I may forget how to speak altogether
I drive around Sydney for hours looking for an earthly connection
but cannot bring myself to pay for it

convinced even in the acting out
what I seek will elude me
'til the body is weary, the petrol tank empty
and some kind of reluctant acceptance of my fate arises

___________________

Published in Poet’s Union Anthology 2010

______________________

Always

The day you or I left

it was raining softly

I took someone’s 10 speed racing bike

into the drive

past the parked yellow datsun

past the side section of the garden

where red and starry eyed we smoked dagga

and had conversations with each other and the goldfish

you were there, and Porat, all of us poised on the edge

of the unknown, every path and possibility still available to us

Johannesburg, South Africa, 1981

everyone remembers a time and place

all different in their specificity, all the same in the receding hairline

of inaccessible private memory

it was the beginning of our decade of youthful struggle

we shot out of our second womb, Joburg's Jewish Northern suburbs

I to Israel

you ‘round the coast before 1st year BA with Dani and Simon Nkoli soon to be a treason trialist, 

then the state of emergency, WITS project com, defiance, demonstrations, detention, communes, gender role confusion

and the flowering vine Porat Yosef  to UNISA and then a yeshiva in the Gush

with torturous secretive creation and Betzalel and first gulf war, waiting with no gas mask for a missile to strike him at midnight where I met him, as if by chance,

on an empty Jerusalem street.

for me piety and secularism and trying to become an Israeli and trying to become a man

and the never ending search for guides and gurus strung together on a thread of repressed longing

as I searched for an outline to hold my watery being.

The rain drops fell with a soft and sweet finality

something was dying, something beautiful beckoned to be born

already pregnant, our lives inheld
Joburg and Jerusalem
Cape Town, Berlin, Sydney

degrees and cul de sacs
joinings and partings
children and funerals, fleeting pain and fleeting pleasures

and a deep abiding throbbing joy beneath the

fertility, sterility, the uncertainty

with therapy and root canal

prosperity, mmigration and divorce
and going away to come back

on the divine hamster wheel

those heightened days now seen
as enveloped in the soft mist of inevitability

could it ever have been any other way?

how inscrutably mysterious that I could not see forward

to what was coming

but can look back to see it was already there

like the mighty oak in the acorn on the mighty oak in the acorn

that hangs on the universe and contains it

_________________________

dagga - marijuana

yeshiva – theological seminary where Talmud is studied

Porat Yosef – see Bereishit (Genesis) 49:22 'Joseph is a fruitful son, [like] a fruitful vine by the fountain, with branches running over the wall.’

Betzalel – Fine Arts Academy in Jerusalem, named after the biblical craftsman Betzalel who helped build the tabernacle.

WITS – University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, site of much anti-Apartheid protest in 1980s

projects com – projects committee – organised anti-apartheid demonstration during the 80s

UNISA – University of South Africa

Gush – (pronounced Goosh) Etzion – a kibbutz that was established in 1935, its inhabitants massacred by the Arab Legion and Arab irregulars in 1948. New Israeli villages were established in the area after 1967  

__________________

Rub and Tug

Occasionally

I have gone to a massage parlour

before going back to the ones I love

Once two women offered themselves

for a certain amount plus 10% on amex
and not in the least bit reluctantly
i said yes
one was from Thailand, the other Taiwan

the thai woman rubbed my feet ineffectually

but I felt too sorry for her to murmur anything but

how wonderful it was

the taiwanese women was more effective

and her english was better

and her act generally slicker

when I turned over from stomach to back she took charge

(she had a strange bony protrusion just above her coccyx

congenital or childhood accident?

she said other clients had also commented upon it

and stopped for a moment to examine herself

and feel the area above the buttocks

of the thai woman to compare)

then continued, wanting to get it over with, but I asked her to wait a moment longer

now sorry I'd paid the Thai to come along as she was really rather absent

as was I, as sometimes happens, I popped in and out of an irksome disembodiedness

watching it all unfold from a distance, while my body responded in its habitual arc

the Taiwanese whispered expletives in my ear and

I was like an actor

determined to play my role and support her in hers

but also wanting my money's worth, these visits being rare,

I asked the Siamese to sit behind me and hold me

so that I and the other women could be more together

(you see how men really are monagamous)  

so she held me and I held the Taiwanese

til her work was done, and she whispered

crude words perhaps some clients had liked

and I said I don't want fuck I want love

which is true, and bowed to them

the bhuddha on the massage table

they, immediately rehumanised

I, too awkward with my own shame to fully inhabit

mr sensitive but the sweet melancholy

I felt was genuine enough

for them and me and all creation

so far away from home

 

______________________

The therapist as an amoral free lance gun for hire

A woman calls and says she wants to urgently speak to someone because she is involved with a married man and he wants to leave his wife. The caller says this man does not know where to begin in terms of dissolving his marriage, and she wants to give him advice about how to proceed.

Of course there is bracketing, a non-judgemental stance, unconditional regard etc, but my super ego immediately becomes enormously judgemental of this man, and to a lesser extent of the female caller, and I refer them on to someone else...

It would be very difficult, I imagine, for me to be "for" such clients, and my preconceptions about honesty, integrity, self-avoidance and self-awareness would (again I imagine) constantly surface in the counselling room as preachiness, disaproval, sanctimoniousness and other such roadblocks to connection.

But at this time in Life, given my own recent biography, the idea of in any way colluding in, facilitating, aiding and abetting the break up of even a dysfunctional marriage with all the pain, sorrow and grief that that usually entails ( not that it is in my power to heal a relationship or to bring about its dissolution) fills me with a sense of disgust.

Ghandi said that "truth hates secrecy" and I have a religious belief in the idea that the energy required to keep something hidden, or secret, or even compartmentalised, is not compatible with an easy hapiness and contentment.

And yet I have heard of complex and complicated situations where people maintain dual stunted relationships ( unhappy, sterile or lonely marriages, alongside extra marital relationships with other persons married or unmarried) as working compromises, and the best that is psychically available to them. And if I am honest with myself, I don't know for certain that there is a better way for them. When I take into account that in these emotionally untidy ( as if emotions could ever be tidy!) situations there are also the additional ingredients of children, finances, sexual orientation, fear of loss, guilt, etc, it sometimes becomes a little easier to reserve judgement.

People are always striving to reduce their pain and suffering, even when they do so in maladaptive and counter-productive ways. Sometimes an addictive pleasure seems to offer a respite from suffering ( and suffering can look like boredom or greyness or barreness), but most, if not all pleasure ends in pain. To sympathetically accompany people on their journey, perhaps towards making this discovery for themselves (or perhaps not) may be one useful role a counsellor can fill.

Therapist - counsellor - psychologist friends, what do you think? How do you respond to clients who push your "moral buttons. " When do you know you cannot transcend your own point-of-view and that a client is not for you?