She Sans Spark
What was he to her
but darkness?
Opaque nothingness.
It was as if the mirror
reflection of his eyes had been removed
with nothing left behind but the
jet black felt backing.
Yes, light traveled in,
but never outward.
Indeed, if you stood before him,
you felt as if you were being absorbed.
There on the far side of his eye sockets,
mighty stars had collapsed to black holes;
his dense gravity sucking in
all reflective surfaces to the point
you’d find every bit of sparkle,
every glistening surface…
everything you’d ever found radiant about yourself…
dwindle away.

Indeed,
everything that passed before his eyes
grew dull, dingy, lifeless.
And this was who she was now…
This was who she’d become.

So why did she remain?
If she was truly nothing,
why was she not shed?
why was she not cast off?
why was she not discarded?
Perhaps there,
deep within her,
a small spark still remained.
Some aspect of
inner incandescence
he had failed to locate, absorb and obliterate.
Perhaps that singular spark
was the one remaining thing he granted her,
for without it,
how could he define himself?
To be dark one must be relative
to that which is light,
and he would grant her that tiny existence
if only to prove his own.

And what if she herself should choose to
snuff out that final spark?
What if, by her own hand,
all light
ceased to be?

Ah, but there are alternatives.
Instead, what if she simply chose to turn away?
To look anywhere else but at him?
To turn into the wind;
open all vents to the soul.
Embrace the wind and blow out the old cinders.
Bring that spark to a glowing ember.
stoke the hearth of a diminished heart;
incite the flame raging at her core.
Reclaim the torch,
irradiate outward and
burn away the darkness.

Becoming a beacon of self import,
she would move through the night,
a shower of sparks trailing behind her;
a wake of illumination, and she
feeling the impending glow of supreme supernova,
whilst darkness remains nothing but
a long forgotten shadow.

©05 Jack Hubbell

Sure Security (England)
When young
it seemed
as if he
was at the center of a world
which would forever go on
revolving about him.
Wherever he looked
the light was shining brightly
and mortality was always
far, far away.
As he grew older
and proceeded through his years,
the world swelled in its vastness.
Soon he was on the edge,
far from the center.
A center which would always seem to be
somewhere else.

For him, now,
there was only darkness.
For him
the light would never return…
there would be nothing to penetrate
all the blackness
which had become of his life.
His
would be life on the peripheral.
His
would be houses on the horizon.
His
would be a day of continuous dusk.
No matter how brightly the sun shone,
his world
would be an obsidian world.

He sat in front of a large luminescent rectangle
and a thousand phosphorescent dots
lay reflected in his eyes.
This was how the light reached him now;
transmitted from the center
via a tinsel coated hanger.

It would seem this week
the center was located somewhere in Texas,
US of A.
This was a place
where "real" people
had "real" problems.
Oh, nothing like paying gas bills;
nothing like coping…
nothing like
the dole.
"They"
were fighting assassins
and corporate takeovers.
"They"
were about oil rights
and the fall fashions.
There was never a fear of being made
redundant.
No,
our cathode hero makes others redundant.
The dialogue this episode:
"Shut that factory down!"
and the hero
fades
to a Caribbean isle.


He,
in his darkened room,
watches this.
He holds a pint of ale up
and watches the light
from the rectangle
distort amidst the glass, fluid and silt.
He (a mere aberration in the script)
has been written off.
His esteem;
his manhood;
his feeling of worth;
his life in the script…
his life as a tragic character the author
never thought worthy of development.

"Reality!",
he wants to bellow;
"Not a fictional multitude.
Reality is one
over two thousand,
and two thousand 'ones'
out of work!"

He looks up
to catch the flickering,
diverted glance of his wife as
she pretends to look past him.
Her eyes focus
on the darkness beyond the window.
His,
from a shielded angle,
upon her.
He perceives a softness in her eyes
and a faint smile forming across her lips.
Something twists inside him,
for he doesn't know
if he can stand the thought
of what she might be thinking.
He knows,
one day,
he will strike her again;
for the smile
and not the lack of it.

Here,
in the shadows,
lie casualties

For now,
the coolness of the glass against his forehead.
For now,
the psuedo-introspection of the light
as seen through a strong glass of ale.

Yes,
there's sure security
here
in this dark
and forgotten
industrial town.

©86 JDH

Babaloo
Desi was in prime before your time.
By ‘before your time’,
I mean exactly that.
Before your time.
This time in which you are meant to shine.
Your prime time.
And just what is it you’ve achieved compared to Desi?

Desi?
Desi could sing the words “Babaloo”,
beat a conga drum in accompaniment,
and convey a wild abandon that…
well… made women giddy.
Made ‘em
pa-show-nut!

See…
He had that big ol’ conga drum attached to a harness
and it would be just in front of his hips…
you know… right there.
And he would beat on his drum.
Wale on that sucker.
Flail his conga and yell
“babaloo!”
And women?...
Well women found this entertaining.
Go figure.

Of course this was a time before electric guitars.
Long before Hard Rock and
young men making fools of themselves playing
‘air guitar’.
Was there ever a time when young men played
‘air conga’?
Like… you know…
Hands at their crotch,
beating the hell outta some
imaginary object.
Say if I, at this moment,
did an homage to Desi
and commenced a little ‘air conga’ action,
would you get it?
I mean… would…
Would you be impressed?

Lucy was.
Not with me that is.
No. I wasn’t even born yet.
Didn’t have a conga to beat as it were.
No. Lucy saw Desi beat his conga once
whilst babalooing
and she…
she fell in love.

Lucy got herself a TV show
and put Desi on it.
Now bear in mind that Desi was a Cuban
but this was back before it was decreed that
we hate Cubans for being Cuban.
Still…
He had that brown skin.
Then again,
he had that huge conga and
knew how to use it and
ahem… was passionate about it, so…
So we as a nation let Lucy’s husband
be her TV husband as well.

And Desi?
Desi was in prime time.
Prime time TV.
Six odd years of it.
Unfortunately,
he went from being the man to being
Lucy’s husband.
“Who’s that?”
“Who’s that?! Why, that’s Lucy’s husband!”
Desi was living in a man’s man’s man’s world
but it wouldn’t be
no sorta prime time
without the loving of a particular woman.

Ah yes.
But there at the end of the Fifties,
Desi’s uncontained babalooing
got the better of him.
Lucy gave her hot conga man the boot.
Lo, but in Desi’s lifetime,
he saw his existence shift from
nothingness to prime time
and back to nothingness again.

Well no.
That’s not necessarily true.
For some fifty odd years, Desi
has been singing “babaloo” in reruns.
And me?
Ah, that “babaloo.”

Why,
now I pay homage to Desi almost every night.
Yes, in honor of Desi,
I whip my conga out
and beat forth a ferocious rhythm.
Unfortunately my
prime time doesn’t last too long.
Just like poor ol’ Desi,
it comes and it goes.
A quick
orgasmic spasm in this
babalooey spew of eternity.

©05 Jack Hubbell

Cooties
This much was certain.
She had cooties,
and because of it,
no one would sit next to her.

Now if you asked them what cooties were,
well…
that was sorta hard to define, but…
they weren’t stupid.
They knew that if
you had cooties it was bad
and by golly, Sherry
had allot of cooties.

Oh yea… and she was mentally retarded too.
I figure it’s fairly important
to let that be known.

I suppose that, for them,
cooties kind of came hand in hand with
mental retardation.
I’m not exactly sure
how they came by such logic,
but I think this
would be a good place to
define the word ‘stupid’.
It might just be instructive.

Was it stupid for me to not know that
mental retardation and cooties went together,
or adversely,
stupid for some
to make that connection
a little too easily?

Was Sherry a girl of special needs?
Well yes, of course.
And here we should define
“special needs”.

Other than Sherry,
there were the special needs of
everyone else on that bus.
They needed the other;
the outsider;
the lesser;
the substandard.

The most ultimate of that
which they were not.
And what with the presence of Sherry,
it was pretty easy to score high on the
bell curve of intellect.

And so… okay.
Maybe I can understand the
need for Sherry’s existence in this
ever expanding universe;
on this spinning Earth;
on this one particular traveling bus.
People want to be seen as smart
and how can you ascertain
level of intelligence
without some lower benchmark to base it on?

So if I put you on the spot…
If just now I asked you to
define mental retardation, could you
do that for me?


Substandard intelligence
relative to what?
Did Sherry possess that which was
substandard compared to say…
the family dog?
Was Sherry smarter than
the smartest dog that ever existed?
Well yes. That’s obvious.
And yet Sherry could not and would
never be able to do calculus;
never understand complex astrophysics;
never comprehend quantum mechanics.
But then… What the fuck?
Neither can I.
So Sherry and I have this in common, and
though both of us know how to tie shoelaces,
we will never master higher math, so...
I guess graded on the bell curve,
the both of us fall into
the lesser class of mental retardation.

Having said that,
I didn’t always have
cooties.
Not yet anyway.

But of course there was that one day,
so many years ago,
when I climbed onto the bus,
made my way down the aisle,
and of all those empty seats,
took the one
next to Sherry.



And from the back of the bus
there came an imediate chant:
“Jack’s got cooties!
Jack’s got cooties!”

Yes. Perhaps I did, but
let’s just call it what it was.
An inoculation.

You see,
it could be that cooties
are very much like a virus
and once you’re exposed to them,
you’re inoculated from further infection.
A lifetime inoculation
not against being retarded, but rather,
against that which existed
at the back of the bus.

Something of which even I of
limited mental capacity,
could easily define not as that of
superior intelligence,
but rather that which fell
under the simple nomenclature of
“absolute idiots”.

©06 Jack Hubbell