Thought experiments

I love inventing little scenarios in my head where I can put my mangled French to use for my own entertainment (and, rightfully, practice). 

Today's petit scénario en français is 'Joel à la pâtisserie', inspired from my all-too-often recontres terrible with the dubious service at Canele. Some of the staff there are just incredibly snooty with the whole "are you sure you know what you're doing, sir" look about them and an attitude that's so full of.. of... je ne sais quoi (snickers). This is my imaginary, albeit terribly cowardly, revenge on those pissfaces.

[Enter Joel, gesticulating wildly] 

"Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour! Ahh, cette pâtisserie est trés beau! Ahh, le chocolat, j'aime beaucoup, ahhhh les macarons, j'adore ça!" (Good day! Good day! Good day! Ahh, this patisserie is very beautiful! Ahh, chocolate, I love it muchly! Ahhh, macarons, I adore them!)

"Hi sir, can I help you?"

"Bonjour! Bonjour!" (Good day! Good day!)

"Er... bonjour?"

"Bonjour! Attendez un moment, sil vous plait! [answers handphone] Salut Mummy! Oui, je suis  à Canele! Ah? Ah hah? Ah, non, je n'ai pas prendé mon médicament! Alors, j'ai oublié! Non, non, c'est pas probleme, je suis en forme. Okay, bye bye Mummy, milles bisous! Muacks! [turns back to patissier] Pardon. Comment ça vas?"

(Good day! Oh hold on a moment, please! [answer handphone]. Hello Mummy! Yes, I am at Canele. Ah? Ah hah? Ah, no I did not take my medication! Oh dear, I forgot! No, no there's no problem, I'm feel fine. Okay, bye bye Mummy, a thousand kisses! Muacks! [turns back to patissier]. Sorry. How're you doing?"

"Er, sorry I don't parlez français?"

"Pardon?"

"I don't speak French you laksa-eating wannabe."

"Alors, parlez-vous français?" (Ah, do you speak French?)

"No, I don't parlez français."

"Ah? Vous parlez pas français? C'est trés choquant!" (Ah? You don't speak French? That's very shocking!)

"Sorry sir, er. Voulez vous quoi?"

  

"Ah! Trés bien. Je voudrais des macarons, sil vous plait." (Ah! Very good. I would like some macarons, pelase!)

"Pardon?"

"Je voudrais des macarons, une boîte de six piéces, sil vous plait. Un assortiment, preferablement. Pouvez vous choisir pour moi?" (I would like some macarons, a box of six pieces, please! An assortment, preferably. Can you choose for me?)

"Pardon, I don't comprend you?"

"Alors, c'est trés mal! Ici est une pâtisserie française, non? Vous vendez les pâtisseries françaises, non? Pourquoi vous ne parlez pas français?"

(Ah, this is very bad! This is a French patisserie, no? You sell French pastries, no? Why can't you speak French!?)

[Enter manager]

Manager: "Parce qu'on n'est pas français. Alors, bienvenue à Canele, qu'est-ce que vous voulez?" (Because we are not French. Welcome to Canele, what would you like?)

Joel: "Oh screw it, you're no fun. Merde!" [storms off] (Oh screw it, you're no fun. Shit!)

Lemons

Even lemons shrivel in this place

you exclaim, as if surprised that

something so natural could happen in

your home.

 

We are trying to leave the house

and you cannot bear to leave behind

things as they have migrated

across the floor, settled

onto tabletops.

 

You tidy a lemon, wipe it clean

of age and dust,

satisfied that they have been suitably

fixed and arranged.

 

Pottering out of the house, you

give them a quick glance;

overripe to a dull yellow,

perhaps they will turn to each

other in our absence and make

mischievous love. 

It's taken me a while, but

I.

I’ve thrown God off my shoulders

let him crumple behind my feet

and there is no enlightenment

no rasping cough and gasp that usually

follow such unwrangling

God, when you’ve reduced him to

stardust- niggling doubt

settling sandlike on a bed of coral-

is really no more than an

awkward silence

 

you talk… and talk,

it is important to exercise strange words

when you learn a new language

it is important to ask the usual questions

to get a grasp on someone new

II. 

it makes life strange to see with such

frightening clarity- all of a sudden

like scales removed from eyes

the mind breathes greedily

when the body feels so clean.

 

The emptiness they warn you of

‘godless void’, they call it,

is really the vacuum left behind when

anger at thou shalt nots

implodes with that final, knowing amen 

III.

Dinner, ‘heavenly father bless

the food before us that it may

nourish and strengthen us

in Jesus’ name amen’

 

Tooth-picking at cockles,

one fingers the grey, hardened thing

but all attention and desire is for the

raw, red warmth inside

to be picked clean of grit and sand

 

smut between the thumb and

forefinger.

one finds strange

satisfaction at teasing and smoothing

shit between one’s fingers

 

the cockle is all bleeding heart

warm like primal breath,

checked against the light, it proves

clean, plump and fresh.

 

I think I hear rolling thunder

but it is my head flushed with

hunger for symbolism

 

A final communion, body and blood

all at once, I take my piece of heart into my mouth

suck, bite into muscle and with a soft

pop it spills thick, sweet and forgiving

 

and I know, somehow, now that I have been

bathed by the blood of the cockle,

that I am truly clean and free and

saved. 

Every night

I walk into the room and

see you lying on the

couch.

 

A movie is playing

but you nod in and out

of scenes, and

 

I wonder if it is the

lying down or the thought of

reclining at the end of the day

 

(to watch a movie

thumbed apart,

smudged by the heaviness of your eyelids)

 

that you value like it is

time

snatched back

 

from the day that trod on your feet

 and knocked against your knees

until you keened forward, breathing hard

 

you say

‘Look’ and fold your arms across

your sleepy chest, battered legs cradled

in pillows,

‘look how I claim

 time back from you’,

 

and you

stubbornly blink to sleep

as if tomorrow might prove kinder. 

Culture

It sometimes saddens me to think

of my humanity and how

it brings me in gnashing inside

sucked into this seething, churning

culture- it froths, heavy with the

hot, wet breath of eating

and drinking, of living- cannot

stop even when turgid, swollen

paled and cracked at the seams, bubbles

rising in the heat of victors,

soured by those emaciated

in panic to live and produce

life- sponges, spoils milk and honey,

snapping wheat, such rancidity

knows no dignity, meteoric

though the rise, come the fall this

culture screams to be fed, it shrieks

deflating, limp and useless and

     really, it’s

just so saddening. 

Theology

The world, primordial, lies beneath

  God, hermit world, greyclasped, blackened

like the deep rocktomb, vacuous

  inside Man’s aching heart and bones.

 

Stargazing eyes will feed souls struck

  by the vastness of all things;

arms stretched beyond mortal trappings

  harvest meaning to break the dark

 

dark is the night of Man’s spirit

  who in naissance was cast onto

dirt and gravel, see, one so new

  lone, carnal, grabbing from the grit.

 

We sat, ourselves played out as now

  on Time’s precipice, creating

cosmos, companions, attempting

  vengeance on Nature’s tooth and claw.

 

O life where is thy sting? Fable

  we smear as salve upon your brief,

ephemeral, transient

  loneliness.

  

Isolation

  rocks God’s cradle.

Write a novel

It’s on nights like this that you

think of writing a novel

a night like this follows a day that while,

not bad or sad, but middling and tepid,

reminds you of how unremarkable it is

that days like these and nights like these

are all you can fall upon to call your life

 

and you think of writing a novel

because it would be putting a finger on what

substance you feel gilds your mind

your heart, the quality of your thought

that people all around who take their positions

to judge worth and not-worth

can see and read and admire and

quantify

 

people, after all, are all that matters

one is pressed in always by people

caked clodded crammed with people

and what good does it to a soul

to be just a person down the aisle

along the corridor on the bus

but feel so singular

all the same?

 

It would make far more sense to write

a novel and tell a tale in that great

expanse than to think about what life

what night you settle into only

to wake up tomorrow and find it all

the same.

Hm

I think I finally know why I so detest children

on the surface, it is a feeling quite like watching National Geographic- particularly the monkeys or gorillas, and the infants that cling so pathetically to their mothers (mournful, swollen things) while the alpha male father charges about cocksure and virile and obnoxious. It is the feeling I got today when, sitting on the bus, I saw in front of me a man carrying his little two-year old daughter- before boarding the bus, at the interchange, the same little girl had been bawling her brains out ('wo yao wo yao!') and I thought at that moment 'if I were the parents, I would beat her brains out'. Seated, the girl became a groggy little monkey brat so vulnerable and helpless, it reminded me of monkeys or gorillas and how much they irritate me. I looked at the father, stroking the girl's hair, rubbing dirt from her face, and I thought 'how animal it all is', this business of making children, like chest-beating or shitting territorially. 'Look at me' he seemed to say, offspring clinging to his singlet, 'look at my sperm'. 

I try not to be so disparaging when I look at children, but I can't help it. People reproduce too much, as if all of humanity weren't black and dirty and tiring enough, people keep on coming and coming. And these children, for what they're worth, they go through a moment's cuteness, and then they become vile little screeching things, and then they learn to talk instead of bawl, and they combine both where convenient, and mouth off and act intelligent (precocious children are the worst of the lot) and then they grow up some more and become noisy schoolchildren on buses, screaming, gloating creatures with burgeoning senses of what hurts others and what feels good, and then it's downhill into adulthood- teenhood is just adulthood with far more stupidity and less power to wreak havoc on the world, and by the time he realises what's happened, he's made more and more and more, chug chug chug and we wonder why the world's behaving the way it is. 

and then at the end of it, I think all this might be denying some hidden truth, like I know it's a niggling doubt at the back of my head- I look at children and the breeders that cradle them, and I think, maybe, I detest them so because I can never have one, or can never want one.