Tug Dumbly - Morning Thoughts of a Sentimental Sociopath

Morning Thoughts of a Sentimental Sociopath

When did you last sleep

without your phone, 

humidicribbed

in its viral halo?

You wake from a dream

of a greasy old steam engine

named the Orson Welles.

A cheerful dirty faced

woman engineer

pulls you aboard.

What can it all mean?

Everything and nothing.  

Your acts of Microheroism 

have earned a badge -

loving puppies and flowers,

not stepping on ants,

as selflessly brave  

as saving a kid from a shark.

But then you go and razz it all

by cutting a stranger on the street,

for the arrogant cock of the cunt’s head.

Where’s the consistency?

So much petty you can’t rise above.

What’s a psychopathic saint to do?

Pull prayer beads from the arse

like ben wa balls?

Sing a song of pity?:

‘I don’t wish to suffer

so I suffer proper and good

just turn and turn like a threaded screw

in a rotten piece of wood’.

You medicate on melancholy,

sauce yourself in black bile.

Fuck this rancid menu.

The sun’s a fried egg to be

spatulaed onto the plate of the day.

Just have some breakfast, son.

Tug Dumbly - Still Life

Still Life

The straightaway sad      

of a just vacated room   

the meekly crook’d neck

of the desk lamp, absolving

the collapsed grey veins        

of the carpet

the tired rape of the curtain     

ripped back over again

Mongol face of the power socket

starving to receive

light switch grimed 

with the history of a sticky fingered 

race to be leaving the scene  

with the burgled goods 

of last nights, last rites. Just a swag

of textured emptiness dumped behind.

They praise a good entrance.

A good exit is not so easily designed 

so say the little floating bananas

of motes, knifed in a sunlit slit

falling to communion,

a glutenless eucharist      

a patina of departure

in which to trace yourself at last   

this was my body, this my blood

offering up a plate of dust.

Tug Dumbly - How Many the Dead?

How Many the Dead?

Quantify them, like numbers matter.

The more pneumatic the better.

Or the worse.

Or at least the more impressively bankable.    

Think big and give the sad whistle 

a death camp train: six million!   

Numbers matter. Until they don’t.

Lear’s bitch daughters to the king:

what need you 100 knights?

what need you 50?

What need 25?

What 1?

Armenia, Nanking, still whoppers.     

Though Dresden’s quarter million

has simmered down to 25,000.

Does it cool the enormity?

Who’s telling the story here?

Whose interests served?

Police estimates of demonstration numbers

versus protester figures. Such disparity.

Xerxes Persian army half a million!

But beware of Greeks bearing grifts.

We wishful thinkers, we liars to a cause.

How many saw your band / exhibition / play …?

Yeah, right! 

How many in the blitzed town?

How many taken by the wave?

(‘no Australians are believed hurt …’).

Body counts read like pedometers.

Mall shooters try and outskeet each other

in competitive massacres, atrocity tallies,

crack new records in school / office / disco turkey spree.

How many gone in the Roman arena, in Pompeii?

The lotto winning corpse counts of Stalin and Mao?

These tallies, these trembling figures,                        

these rubbery dead. It matters 

until it stops mattering.  

After the first few dozen you scoop them out  

like slurry, weigh them by the pound.