Five Sheets or Less
POETRY: passion’s fading spark; the end of pornography; littered hinterlands
“Don’t you think it’s time to go?”
I say, as Bambi, Helga, Flo,
writhe naked, smiling, on the floor.
You see, they’re being such a bore
just lately, with their teasing games,
their latex shine, their ankle chains,
made-up faces, phoney names.
A drag, these days, to spend my time
with Babette, Brandi, Caroline,
who mimic each other as much as they can:
red nails, blonde hair, a spray-on tan;
who show me, when the lights are low,
how far a lurid lady will go
to please a fellow passing by,
or through, or near –
who takes his pleasure from an upturned rear.
I’m finished,
too jaded,
drained,
too tired
for all the attention that’s desired
by Stacey, staring playfully,
her fingers skimmed on moistened lips
above her – frankly – boss-eyed tits
whose nipples point to outer space,
her right hand stops, it says its grace
and delves towards the hairless line.
(Underwear optional, most of the time.)
Their lusty looks, their gentle touch,
their winsome, threesome mutual clutch
has lost the hold it had on me
when we first met at twenty three.
At my libido-faded age
I can’t believe that on the page
they’ve not matured a single day
as on they go,
the same old scene,
in the well-thumbed pages of a magazine.
So.
“Liberty’s deed!
Help me break these fetters!”
As I manfully feed
all my porn to the shredder.
Its greedy jaws, ripping,
are ready to please
as I stuff the stash in,
all the glamorous sin,
smash-mashed, a tangle of sleaze.
“Five sheets or less” is embossed on the top,
but five sheets of what is unclear.
Pages of memory: easy to shred,
it munches through
whalebones of corsets with cheer.
The leather, all cracked,
the rubber, all perished,
mechanically stripped,
echoes uncherished,
no more to utter their imagined sigh.
Confetti – no woman, no cry.
The result is no longer a part of me,
this angel’s hair pasta, this dark history.
These tendrils of flesh-tones,
this halved, halftone dust.
It ceases to haunt me –
the ghost of young lust.
GUYS, YOUR WANING LIBIDO is comin’ ta getcha! Like a monster scuttling back into the forest. Like a pin being put back into a hand-grenade. Like being unchained from a lunatic. (This last one is so rich with truth that, first minted by Sophocles, it’s been verbally coined afresh by Plato, George Melly, Kingsley Amis, Kenneth Williams and David Niven.) My poem’s a commentary on getting a little older and one’s hidden ugliness, the soiled hinterland. I have no idea if my experience is commonplace or maybe I am unusually… let’s say “special”.
I like to think I’m one of the “good men”, with any “disappointing” (disgraceful, not-like-me-at-all) behaviour conveniently filed as a “human failing” so that I can cancel out responsibility because it’s in the hands of anthropology now. Nevertheless, I try to be truthful but not cruel, set a good example, call out hypocrisy… to the point that a friend once told me, a little tipsily, “You’re a bit like a street pastor” and I’m not sure she was joking.
A restorative to this self-serving nonsense is the harrowing horror-show of the Gisèle Pelicot story, which has blown away the stage-fog that men like to have around their activities and morals. No matter how upstanding the citizen, how sympathetic to suffering, how central to a functioning society, it’s unquestionable that when any man gets to be alone with a woman (or a weaker man, or a child), there’s a strong chance that unwatched, unjudged by others, their filters will evaporate. They will shrug and drop into the primordial ooze, where lie many of their friends.
Of course I genuinely expect I would kick against this, stand up, continue to be The Good Man. But I have no idea how much of it would be acting. There were plenty of Good Ordinary Germans who lock-stepped with the Nazis. Right now plenty of Noble IDF Grunts are calculating acceptable-loss-totals amongst Gazan schoolchildren. And if the apocalyptic tone of many on the left in US politics carries any weight, plenty of American schoolteachers, shopkeepers and other lumpenproletariat are very soon going to make private decisions on their level of compliance with evil. I can pretend that I would – to paraphrase Clive James – “stand like Zorro, silhouetted by lightning at the window, sword in hand”. But without the real dilemma, I can never know. We scare easy, and they know it.
Anyway, depressing… deep breath! For a lighter touch, there’s a very optional extra stanza. I left it out of the main poem because it’s such a daft bit of try-hard comedy. But I wrote it, you may as well see it, even though it pricks the balloon of what is quite confessional. Read on if you like a titter. I’m off to wash my hands.
And do I miss Candy,
Mae-Wong and Nanette?
Well, for lone afternoons,
don’t worry, I’m set.
I’ve a laptop computer,
my one-button mouse,
and God bless the broadband
that’s all through the house.
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Photomontage by me, using figures from The Barba Rockets Patrol, designed by Rockin’ Jelly Bean. Left to right: TOPAZ, GARNET and SAPPHIRE. Their long-lost box artwork boasted “more poses than you could ever imagine”, but that was in the ’90s, they’re a little arthritic now.
I usually don't like rhyming poetry but I really enjoyed this piece. The little bit afterwards you didn't include WAS funny and I thought the tone of the whole thing was playful enough that you could've gotten away with it.