Skip to main content

Everyday shame

 

Everyday shame

(for Toni Morrison)


Everyday shame

At different stages in my life

Disgusting earworms have entered my being

At secondary school it was the racist & homophobic taunts

They got stuck in me like ocean plastic getting caught in fishes’ bellies

They’ve never completely left

Despite my love of common humanity

Despite my love of people designated as “Other”

Despite the fact that "diverse" families have adopted me

 

These earworms died down there for a while

But were chronically refreshed during my years in South London

Where the culture was balanced on a knife's edge


These slurs against those deemed “different”

Have had a marketing makeover

& it's more subtle now

You don't hear those old slurs as often

But I hear them under people's breaths

& I see them in their eyes



Recently I was speaking with an Indigenous elder

It was as if he was entering my soul

He heard those taunts unspoken

& I heard him hearing them

My anxiety

My complex 

My scars of witness

I don’t know what he made of it

But I but I know what I made of it

 

We get contaminated by the evil in the world

& it lives in our inner being

All we can do is own up to it

In the hope that one day

It will be passed out of us.

 

 

Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2023.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

“I didn’t know!”

  “I didn’t know!”   Don’t get me wrong In a Two Party preferred system  I have no choice but to give preferences to Labor The Coalition are scum But Jacinta Allen, Victorian Premier Claimed in a Truth Telling Commission that she never knew about massacres Of Indigenous people in the state She’d never looked up The history of her country The history of the state she leads She’s Premier! She leads a department that ‘manages Indigenous affairs’ We are currently in the process of negotiating a Treaty What did she think happened to all the Aboriginal people?! They went up to live up the Magic Faraway Tree? “No one told me!” No one ever told me either I fuckin researched It was really easy Took 10 minutes There’s this new thing called the Internet & you search stuff up Like History A subject no longer taught in many schools past year 7 I deduced a lot from observing the place & how allergic we are of looking at ourselves ...

In a very unorthodox way

  In a very unorthodox way # (For Max Sometimes) In a very unorthodox way, I’m an Irish Catholic. Of course, in terms of Belfast politics that MEANS something. & while that maybe true – in Australia, for different reasons, as Fr Bob Maguire put it – when Mary first saw Jesus walking out of the tomb on day 3 of his death, she exclaimed “JESUS!!!” – the first time his name was used as a swear word. In that way of an irreverent joke, REVERENTIAL & ORTHODOX are not my way to the Sacred/Love*. For me – I’m not really into Theology – as Max Sometimes quoting me, quoting my mate Richard, quoting Bob Marley, quoting Rasta elders, said today “who feels it knows it.” & I believe that if I am to write my Mass/Symphony of Hope/Love, I must include at least one blasphemous hymn, else the vision depicted be simplistic, like George Handel’s Messiah. The Hope/Love represented or perhaps alluded to (if you prefer) must include genuine despair, dejection, transgression else it...

Though it made me a poet

Though it made me a poet   This is a superior microwave to the last if  everything has to be a competition I guess it does! In the Kafkaesque vortex Where one is trying merely to ask a question Instead one is sold something I’m monastic or have acute anxiety Anxiety is pretty cute Like a decapitated bleeding brain Covered in snails turned carnivore By the wrack & ruin of a child’s innocence The fist in the sister’s face The knife in the wall Did I imagine the latter, dream it or see it? Who threw it? Must have been the bowie Still life goes on So I went to school the next morning & got my mouth taped up For being a chatterbox Such is the life of a privileged 5 year old It made me a poet     Published & Copyright Malachi Doyle 2025.