Man/Girl

So I realised recently that I'm just a grumpy old man trapped in the body of a twenty-one-year-old girl. "Oh, you don't know grumpy," said Forty-Two at work the other day, "you just wait."

"You don't live with a psychopathic witch," I grumbled back at her, and it was true, she didn't. She ceded the point. And so doth youth ever deny age the wisdom of experience.

In honour of this new self-recognition, I'm smashing some last lingering youthful ideals. I figure the grumpy old man in me's gotta die at some point, I mean men only live so long, don't they? And assuming some kind of karmic regeneration process it follows that I'll probably end up as a six-year-old kid in the body of a thirty-year old or something, and that suits me just fine. So there'll be time to be all young and reborn later on. In the meantime I'm cultivating a doughty pessimism, pronouncing drearily on everything from the weather to sex shops, making an art form out of daily glasses misplacement, and lingering over-long around tobacconists. I'm also THAT close to buying a kitten, but I better not. I'd probably trample it or something.

build 'em up, cut 'em down

one of the inherent functions of being young and female, apparently, is to be unwitting instigator/audience member of the comments flung from car windows, pub huddles, construction sites and so forth by (mostly) men you've (mostly) never met in your life. i mean, it's just an educated guess - i've never been old and female, or male of any age - but in the meantime, i live in eternal hope of hearing something truly original amongst the generic babble of wolf whistles, "show-us-ya-tits" and critiques of various parts of my anatomy. the best i've gotten so far was the slightly perplexing "i fuck chicks!!" back in 2006 (implication: he'd fuck me? or a spirited defense of hegemony?) and today, when two cars sidled up to the intersection i was crossing on my way home. the guy driving the first car met my eye, whistled deliberately, said, "fiiiine legs, lady," and turned the corner. the guy in the combi van behind him pulled up and yelled, "fat bitch!"

In Back of the Real - Allen Ginsberg, 1954

railroad yard in San Jose

I wandered desolate

in front of a tank factory

and sat on a bench

near the switchman's shack.

A flower lay on the hay on

the asphalt highway

- the dread hay flower

I thought - It had a

brittle black stem and

corolla of yellowish dirty

spikes like Jesus' inchlong

crown, and a soiled

dry center cotton tuft

like a used shaving brush

that's been lying under

the garage for a year.

Yellow, yellow flower, and

flower of industry,

tough spiky ugly flower,

flower nonetheless,

with the form of the great yellow

Rose in your brain!

This is the flower of the World.