Hello Reader,
Got emotional suppression?
How do individuals, and communities too, become normal after things like an abuse or the loss of a town factory? I don’t know; I can only grasp parts of the truth.
To me it’s normal to be uptight and to insulate one’s emotions, for however long it takes to process healing inside… and of course to also change circumstances outside…
I can imagine someone processing things at one level while playing with his grownup toys and gifts. In my family when I was a boy any Christmas gifts with store-bought gift wrapping would be from the Legion or father’s workplace. Relatives used newspaper. In today’s War of the Worlds poem, I imagine all the fancy electronic toys have been rendered inert by a Martian magnetic pulse, and the economy shattered, worse than when Sherman marched through Georgia.
All my future poems to be posted here, of heroic survivors, will be from my last manuscript section, called After the Martians.
Uptight Man
In a boy’s mechano set
screws and nuts extend steel plates and girders.
After every Gameboy got pulsed out,
the kids enjoyed their flat black mechano engine.
Hook it in and wind it tight
to have a mechano moving truck.
Just swivel the black lever,
release the hidden spring—whir-r-r-r-r.
Maybe I grieve for lost dogs, and birdsong,
and Mother Nature, so bent over her walking stick.
She’s not the upright girl in the smooth green dress
she used to be.
I grieve for gentle Uncle Jack.
Maybe I miss my mum and dad,
and childhood,
and I don’t even know what I’m so sad about,
but I know I’ve lost something.
In my grief I am a mechano man,
wound up tight, unable to whirrr.
I still walk and talk like a man,
tough like the other guys,
to hide my flat spring heart.
Beneath the open ribs of a church,
with sagging stained-glass windows,
I tightly curve over my prayer book,
in a silent congregation of strangers.
Can a single blade of grass, poke through a wasteland?
Will a warm church of fellowship, ever form here?
I swivel my jaw, “Amen.”
A tear falls to the page.
Splat!
Everyone can hear it.
Sean Crawford
Calgary
March
2020
Two Footnotes:
A book I regret not buying:
In a London library, I found a collection of pre-television children’s games, many more than I ever played. It was being discarded for a (dollar) pound but I had too many books at home, or so I thought at the time. Too bad, for I could have taken it from the shelf anytime the world was getting me down, the nerd reader’s way of having a playground in my mind. You know, like in the 1972 hit song. (link)
A question posed by our principal which no child in my elementary school class could answer:
Where does nylon come from?
SIDEBAR ON TOYS
In place of big leggo, we had small red blocks like bricks that snapped together along the tops. The blocks came with a cardboard green roof you could cut to shape.
The counters in the monopoly set were carved round wooden abstracts; the most “real” was a “milk bottle,” the houses and hotels were wooden too. In the affluent 1960’s there came along plastic toys, including a plastic cannon that did everything, including having a flip up grenade launcher. (like a fancy vacuum with attachments) That was the “Mighty Moe,” hence the song kids still sing today:
Jingle bells,
Christmas smells,
Santa Claus is dead,
Someone took a Mighty Moe
and shot him in the head.
Plastic swept in during the 1950’s, and was still rolling along at the time of The Graduate. But the age of cheap plastic only lasted a few decades. Now toy soldiers are tiny, cheap and squished, and you just cannot collect figures in the cereal boxes anymore, not since the Arabs raised the price of oil.
…Economic Interlude…
—Oh, if only the U.S. economists, capitalists and the public had WAITED, knowing from Pareto’s law that cartels don’t last more than a few years—I suspect the former two did know, as it would be business school 101, but didn’t tell the public—
Instead of waiting, capitalists invested in big oil wells, the Arab cartel predictably broke up, and then the Americans needed to keep the price of oil HIGH so big capitalists could get their investment back—I suspect Americans then purposely inflated their money supply, without telling the U.S. public about the “mysterious new inflation,” to help with their balance of payments to the Arabs…
(Of course, this all makes me sound like a conspiracy nut, I mean, surely someone else would have noticed while inflation was screwing with us. And raised the public’s ire. So you are welcome to check into my suspicions yourself)
My favorite essay to leisurely “sneak up rather than throw truth in your face like a wet dishrag” is called Conspiracies and Inflation, mostly about inflation, not climate-gate, archived November 2013. https://essaysbysean.blogspot.com/2013/11/conspiracies-and-inflation.html
…End of Economic Interlude…
The pre-sweetened cereals never had the toys because those junk cereals could already count on kids to want them. I collected sports figures, Robin Hood’s merry men, the jungle book animals, Eskimos and even “computers wearing tennis shoes.” Never any wee dinosaurs or soldiers in the cereal, though. Those I had to buy as tiny critters in a store-bought package. But hurray—Now that I’m an adult, I can buy big dinos!
(For a while I had a big Dino with a leg hooked over my flat screen to help me see if I had the wrong picture size)
Many of the toys of the sixties were silly novelties, sold through silly TV commercials showing pretty people smiling too hard for real life, made for affluent families with too much money on their hands. For example, a collection of beetles that would flip through the air, using the principle of squeezing soap, if you hit them with the plastic bat. The target was a big frog.
Bop, bop,
bop the beetle;
hit, hit,
hit it right.
When you hit the frog,
It’s mouth,
Shuts tight.
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