John Muckle

BAD FEELINGS
 
 
I get these bad feelings sometimes
making me do things I regret
later, not because I didn’t mean
to hurt anyone, but
because giving vent to your bad feelings
makes people feel badly towards you
or worse than they did, when
they were only blindly pursuing their ‘opinion’, their
‘interest’, just as you were only
telling them how you felt about what you took
to be their bad behaviour in
not having enough good feelings to share with you
in that spirit you had been led to believe
was the norm of human behaviour.
And once you have shared your bad feelings
there’s no getting out of it, or there might not be,
unless you are prepared to blame
another, and let’s face it, most of us
are. Where do all the bad feelings come from?
You think you’ve explained it, but obviously you haven’t
let alone justified
what can only be regarded as a disaster
if ascribed to human nature rather than to social factors
like that tendency to forget everything
taught to you at Churches school.
                                                     But it doesn’t matter
what is said, the bad feelings keep coming        
cyclically, unless you avoid contact with the others
who provoked them, although not on purpose
just by being themselves, unendearingly
as you are yourself, so they said, and you are
come what may locked up in this mirrored cell
until you close your eyes, rock
back against the wall that will support you
in your precious attempt to come to grips with the outside
and its play of forces, its irregularities
configuring themselves into those bright patterns
you used to admire, no hard feelings
but no real choice except to wait it out
until the blood stops flowing
until the people you don’t like leave you alone
until you find the courage to leave them to it
your arranged marriage to common clay
unconsummated, scraped off the back of an old shovel
as you die a virgin by your own dubious accounts.
 
There’s always the following day
a minute later, when the tears break and a cup of tea
offers its healing vapours
and the person on the other end of the mug
isn’t one either, after all she was only
telling how it is for her, those buttons you pushed
are a real thing, a real thing, and we have to take
cognisance of those, we have to,
not that we’ll die or anything, although we will
knowing it was all surge and rebut
of obstacles placed in our way for good enough reasons
to satisfy those who placed them
and we blamed them for it, blamed the wrong peoples
as ever, and now we know why it was so.
 

Copyright © John Muckle 2016

---

John Muckle’s books include The Cresta Run, Cyclomotors, Firewriting and Other Poems, London Brakes, My Pale Tulip, and a critical study: Little White Bull: British Fiction in the Fifties and Sixties (Shearsman 2014).  In the 1980s he edited the Paladin Poetry Series, including The New British Poetry 1968-88 (eds Allnutt, D'Aguiar, Edwards, Mottram). He lives and works in London.