Tug Dumbly # 64 - Obviously

Obviously

‘Epiphany’. Bad name for a girl. Worse in a poem.

Overused, like ‘graffiti’, ‘grief’, and ‘dust mote’:

(her grief an epiphany graffitied in dust …)

Words too easily reached for, like guns in films,

like condiments to smother plain fare.

Though sometimes, of course, those words are just right. 

Sometimes those words are just the words you need.

And if the thing’s the thing then the thing’s the thing.

Dreary me, policing's a killer. All this nit-picking

like you’re a monkey grooming the world.

Sure, sure, you gotta discriminate.

But not at the expense of sanity,

not at the sacrifice of social amenity, and friends, and …

  

… and all this forensic fault-finding, it’s just some sad

superiority quest from the fracked bedrock of childhood.

We get too hung up on specialness.

Obviousness can irk obviously. But avoidance of obviousness

can just be more obviousness, as you try and lead a life of

zealot singularity, not stepping on any gaudy cracks

and shunning contact with any impulse that might

compromise your strictly mercurial construct … 

well, it can just freeze you to death like a dry-iced wart

on a mummified monk.

Actually people aren’t obvious enough.

In fact clichés are lovely and beautiful and perfect,

like perfectly circular arguments for themselves

(I don’t know what that means, but I mean it sounds good)

and that’s why clichés have earned the right to be clichés.

In fact I envy clichés. That’s why I hate the little bitches.

I wish I was one. I might be popular.

But you know what I mean? Sometimes mountain ranges

are rugged, the sky is azure, the ocean is majestic, heaving

like a breast (actually that one’s good, quite fresh)

sometimes clouds are cotton wool (though I’d rather mashed potato)

sometimes your heart burns, your pulse races, and it’s okay

to call a spade a spade, coz like, obviously, I dig you babe.