There will be fishing, but not by me.
I suppose there will be some filleting of fish, but, again, not by me.
Fishing makes me struggle uncomfortably with my conscience.
I will eat the fish, though.
I am good at contradictory behaviour.
I keep thinking about that dog with his head through an on-purpose hole in the fence
who barked and barked at us as though he were vicious,
but someone had put large, wooden flower petals around the hole,
which made his head look like the centre of a flower.
The fence made him a prisoner.
The hole in the fence made the state of his confinement seem more humane.
The flower petals rendered his tough-guy posturing comic.
None of that made any essential difference.
He was just a dog barking in a yard.
We were just on the side of the fence that made it seem funny.
When my parents were children,
television and magazines told them to dream about outer space
and the wild frontier and the way of the future.
When I was a child,
the future was almost now and sat small
beneath the hulking stature of the nuclear bomb and dread viruses borne by love.
Now, armed with the gadgets we dream about,
the future is a bleak process of making babies and making money.
What was once far away in outer space,
then close and terrifying to the touch,
is now the internal machinery of the mind.
We are the future factory grinding out consumption.
Nothing else matters.
Labels: the poetry
