After The Starship Jesus Went Down

Long ago we farewelled our Catholic school friends,

And alighted the Starship Jesus,

Down the end of our suburban back yards,

And conversed with our Marvel friends for awhile,

Thinking how we could realise the unbelievable,

Or was it the other way around?

Too young to know,

Our salvation became how we handled a cricket bat. 

And we’d find strange and unusual things on the street,

Rushing our minds with imaginative zeal,

We’d tell each other what we saw

For we all contemplated the word ‘meaning’.

Secretly mocking a Brother, who taught us of it,

We knew his look and what it meant,

He never got to us.

He got a member of our school boy gang.

We saw him once when school life was over.

He had that blank stare, seeing nothing ahead.

We couldn’t see what he saw.

It was much later in one of our reunions,

Over light beers and pastry pies,

We thought about him and his suicide.

What he saw was where he wanted to go.

Sometimes we wanted to go there too.

As men it’s easier to tell others what to do.

In commerce, in sport, in religion, in war.

Machos empowering themselves in a tight scrum.

Those aloof clothed in suspicions.

A fine line is walked between two great desires.

That of individuality and that of belonging.

A line that has never been a straight one.

The walking which brings fragrances and carbuncles.

A purpose made for when life is what one makes of it.

And we have made a sort of life out of many troubles,

Our health and the end game of relationships,

Our wives who once received us, are now gone,

We, who had loved couldn’t remain together,

It was the Family Court which decides our medicine.

Over the beers we mates confide and discuss,

In superfluous conversations, for little can be done.

We are landscapes after floods have taken their course.

Once spoken, our bewailing words might leave us freer,

Like prayers do for one talking to oneself,

Our friend who suicided spoke, but not enough.

We were later told this by his psychologist.

Told in confidence before the rest of the world heard.

She wasn’t sure if he had run out of money,

Or that he had nothing left to say.

God believers might pray for hope to the bitter end.

And to abandon a fantasy father takes great courage.

Jumping the Starship Jesus is easier when young.

Testosterone’s prophecies are more urgent and real.

The man of Jesus who abandons his libido is entirely mad.

The one who got our friend, turned madness into evil.

There is no such thing as divinely inspired justice.

Those who righteously judge have abandoned themselves.

Sins to be paid for are mistakes to be learnt from.

The beer garden’s jacaranda trees seem to embrace us,

When we meet together and quietly talk.

And under cones of external noise, we test our intimacy.

Our friendships formed because that’s what kids did.

Friendships happen and then they become an empire.

In this happenstance intimacy can likewise be learnt.

We still offer our experience, valued at about fifty cents.

Our takers are our children and some of their friends.

What we know is doomed to be irrelevant,

Unless connections somehow contain the genes

Which might safely bind us humans all,

There being as many ideas as there are personalities,

The clash of two being enough to provoke a war.

There was once a war above our country’s shoulder.

Banners of moratorium blew, which we didn’t understand.

Powerless we air guitar rocked to Rocky Mountain Way.

As waylaid kids it felt kind of natural.

Schools Out and Children of the Revolution too.

The glam of rock and the metal of roll.

We took that, and our questioning evolved into punk.

The attitude taken easily and not left so easily now.

How we need a booster for our mediocre lives!

Lived in an age foreign to the Black Death.

We were all Jeffrey when we washed our hands clean.

Pimple puss shot out like ejaculation when squeezed.

At the pub we lift glasses as smooth as our heads,

And clink them to the lucky times we’ve had.

Us as friends in arms, defying that rotten order.

Defying paternalism dressed in head-to-toe frocks.

Men that they were and lesser than our fathers.

Holy fathers who speak of divine things before the altar.

Divine was the pavlova after the chicken roast.

The pleasure of eating was like the pleasure of sin.

We stole guilt from God, and we felt free.

Ordinary kids growing up learning how to be men,

Who got nothing when travelling on the Starship Jesus,

Steered by men who were prisoners in their skulls.

They told us we were bad and the world was rotten,

And only they knew the way to truth and redemption,

And the truth was at the end of the roadway of sin,

And we followed them out of church and into playgrounds.

We had fights, played handball and lied out there.

We played with our genitals to see what they were for.

Girls were different to us but we didn’t know how.

We never found out because we were too shy.

It was the Devil who owned the school playgrounds,

The back streets and our suburb’s dark entries,

The sports grounds and the local waterways,

The swimming pools and the milk bars,

The railway stations and the street byways,

And the fun we had for as long as we could.