Tug Dumbly - The Real Me in Velveteen

The Real Me in Velveteen 

'Becoming aims at nothing and achieves nothing’ – Nietzsche.

‘Nothing is Real’ – Lennon.

We are all Velveteen Rabbits now

on the road to becoming real,

like a Bing and Bob movie,

and the real you doesn’t suicide

drink drug and try and screw

every wooden leg not strapped

to a thigh, doesn’t rip people off,

short change, sabotage, act with

malice and jealousy

and premeditated cruelty

and postmeditated cuntfullness,

doesn’t resent and fume and fester

and gossip and badmouth

and backstab and be sulphurically

licked out by the victories

of others and feel a curdled warmth

from their shitslips, doesn’t

reflexively lie and habitually

sidestep consequence and

responsibility and doesn’t pretty much

just grease piston number one. 

No, the real you doesn’t do that,

and prisons are fed from arsehole

to breakfast with unreal thems

just looking to be real,

all the theys who acted so far out

of character it’s just not fucken funny

your honour, and housing towers snicker

and groan with neglected geniuses

sucking goon and noodles    

and office blocks are stapled to the gills

with dissatisfied pissant ciphers

of other lives, would be Houdini

shitjam escape artists and makers

and consumers of some bullshit

artisan life sitting in little traffic jam

tins of tense flesh, mere negative

avatars copping the beating for their

real true selves, dummies taking the

blows for the freedom machines

romping in slow mo through the

lush meadows of some parallel

paradise with their own personal

string soundtracks, the real

thems put out to stud under

the heavy glistening pelt of another life,

because this life simply wasn’t them.

The real me is in a spiritual gulag

locked like Christ under the Vatican,

an exalted thing of apotheosis

and apogee, but just trapped, you see.

No that me you think you see

is not the real me, is not now

and never has been me,

and the real me is also someone

I’ve never yet seen, but if you

see the real me say hello

because ‘I’ve been to paradise

but I’ve never been to me’.