A companion piece to last week's 'Offshooting':
Scarcely tilting at windmills,
but when my mates downed
Coke, I sipped Fanta or Leed.
Banana Splits oiled
my gums with gloop,
not icy Choc Wedges.
Such choices pepper
my life, the most popular
so eschewable.
Neither Holden nor Ford;
my first car, a front-
wheel drive Morris 1100.
Football? Cricket?
I settled for volleyball.
School team even.
Until jeans got under
my defences. Couldn't wait
to get legs out of Amcos,
into Levi's or Wranglers
or Lees. The big three.
Western gear garnered me.
Not sure why. Perhaps
the unpretensiousness
of screen cowboys appealed.
The way they arrived
at their own codes and stuck
by them, under starry skies.
Today's soup of commercial TV,
Radio with ads, talkback,
how can this attract?
At stopwork meetings,
never voted for the resolution.
Supported forlorn amendments.
Floating with the current
provides false momentum.
I value my tributariness.
But how much difference
are we talking about?
How wide my preferential arc?
Am I just another trimmer
of tall poppies? Espousing
an illusion of superior taste,
my nuanced selections
riding proud over roughshod
popular addictions?
Trouble is the mainstream
tends to obliterate
independence of thought.
Consent so easily
manufactured nowadays
that objectors seem stolid,
predictable, naysayers. But
what passes for positive
so often protects privilege.
Polls would have us believe
harsh asylum seeker
policies keep us all safe.
Why can't we forget the taste
of fear? Back ourselves in?
The gushing middle deserve
to be regarded with wariness.
Who loads those bouquets
at Sydney's Martin Place,
by roadside death spots?
Why was remote Diana mourned
as a breeze-blown candle
when Boko Haram snuffs
out lives by the hundred?
Mass outpourings of grief,
apparent hunger for rampant
public mourning rituals must
spring from somewhere.
Or do such displays
only reveal the vacuum
at the heart of the centre?
bw
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