Grandmamma

Often, when he is looking at a photo of his grandmamma, I like to intrude on his thoughts. He’ll flick through the album – that massive hat on the beach! that lounge, and that old mutt of theirs! – then remember the eucalyptus smell of her handkerchief. And me, I’ll say to him: fist, fist! I bet she loved being full of fist.

He’ll try and join in with these kind of jokes, for a while. He’ll remember being six years old, and accidentally walking into the bathroom when she was naked there. “You dirty, dirty boy! You pervert! I told you I was in here! Get out!” Like the dog that barks, he was much more scared than she was. He’d just been wandering around the house randomly, dreaming about some cartoon before the almighty shock. Haha, he’ll say now, fat old shouting woman nude, and me a child! Haha!

But then I whisper in his ear this:

You may reach sixty, if you’re lucky. Then the world may not be too different, too worse, if you’re lucky. And children may still only be inwardly evil, like you are, if you’re lucky. And if you’re lucky, you’ll be stumbling around the alien abode of your son or daughter, their alien son or daughter milling about with innocent looks.

And like grandmamma, you’ll be trying to disguise the fatness and ugliness and stupidity of yourself, with talcum powder and personal affects and lofty attitude. And like you with the photograph album, the grandchildren will try to be affectionate, but secretly and deep-down, they’ll at best just be bored with or flabbergasted at you.

And then, soon after, when your body is dust, your words whispered away, echoing about no ears no more, they will vaguely try to conjure your memory; fail, and say: ahh, the old bastard can get fisted. And so:

Fists of the future enter him from all angles, the human I am attached to. They shut up the cheap conjurer that is his memory, shout down the easy rhymester who acts as the poet of his feelings. And all positions, except for fist, are left vacant.