Michael Batchelor's Blog, page 22

Friendship

I smile
I ask questions
I laugh
I make jokes
I say all the right things

And yet
The connections don’t
Break the skin

Sometimes the leap
From friendly
To friendship
Is too far

Mother

When I came out
You got sad
I banged my head at night
You sent Dad

You got divorced
When I was seven
Dad got me weekends
It was heaven

The weekdays were long
The fridge empty
The yelling, though
Was aplenty

Then came Steve
With the vice-grip handshake
And the cemetery flowers
That looked fake

One day you had a black eye
You said it was the easel
I believed you then
An easy sell

The easel came over one night
I lay in dread
Hearing the sound
Of a rocking bedhead

I ran into the bathroom
Cried on the floor
You finally appeared
Nude and sore

The next time he came
I said him or me
You chose him
So I had to flee

I went with Dad
In the small hours
And Steve brought you
Those cemetery flowers

Time has passed
I’m now a man
You haven’t changed
But Steve ran

Yet despite all this
I forgive you
Because now I realise
You were a victim, too

Wisdom

The world is billions
Of years old
And yet there’s people
Who’ve only lived part of a lifetime
Not even a blink
Of the universe’s eye
And yet they’ve figured it all out
It’s incredible

Entrepreneur

When I was about 10
I set up a store
Out the front of my house
I dragged out the living room table
And found a bunch of crap
Lying around the house
That I didn’t want
I didn’t put prices on them
Didn’t advertise
And we lived in a cul-de-sac

Nobody came
And now I realise
Mum was teaching me a lesson
About disappointment
Whether she realised it or not

Church

Why do you need four walls
And a cross on top
To have a service
Why can’t you have it
At the park
Or the beach
Among nature
With God
Why does it need to be
Commercialised
Is it a need to make it
Official
Does the building reinforce
The belief

Just asking for a friend

Certainty

Everyone’s so convinced
That god exists
Or he doesn’t
And yet no one
Has a fucking clue
So it would be refreshing
To hear someone say
‘I have no idea’

Lunchtime Lesson

I transferred schools
Halfway through year 8
I didn’t know anyone
So the teacher paired me with a boy
Who I followed to his friends

The talk was fine
Until it turned to pornography
They’d watched it, loved it
I hadn’t
As such, I was gay

And every lunchtime onwards
I’d get called it all:
Homo
Faggot
Gay boy
Poofter

I wasn’t gay
But I felt for them
And I still do

Make-Believe

How do people
Go about their day
As if everything makes sense
I find myself
At least once a week
Looking around and thinking:
Everything is so strange
Yet beautiful
I don’t know whether to
Cry
Or scream

Waking Up

I woke up
At 27
When thinking about death
Stopped me from sleeping
But in the late hours
I found clarity
Nothing’s that serious
When it’s all temporary

Outsourced Cruelty

We all walk around
Feeling high and mighty
Yet we outsource our cruelty
Every time we
Eat meat
Buy slave-made clothes
Chuck away garbage
Heading for the sea

I don’t have a solution
And I’m a hypocrite
I just felt like
Massaging my conscience