Nothing to complain about

Nothing to complain about

I am thinking maybe I need a swift kick in the nuts
so I’ll have something to complain about, something
to write about, something to get the juices flowing
the kind of thing that poets need for motivation,
but I’ve got nothing, nothing to complain about.
I’m just a plain old middle class guy approaching
retirement age, with a loving wife and three great kids
who still call once in a while to say hello and tell me
what they’re doing in the parts of their world
where what matters is their health, wealth and happiness
and the joy is in the struggle to become what
they perceive is an achievable goal, whether
it’s another college degree, a dog who sits up
on his hind legs and begs for another milk bone,
a couple of quid for a dinner out on Friday night
and groceries in the frig, enough in the bank
to cover the fitness club fee for the next month or two.
I am thinking maybe life has been too good to me
and I don’t deserve this happiness I feel fluttering
in my belly, and wonder what happened to the panic
I felt yesterday and the day before when I walked about
looking over my shoulder, fearful of being hit
by an out of control automotible or stray bullet
that would put an end to my being able to walk
without a cane, or crutches, an accident that would
put me in a wheelchair, or worse, in a bed
where I would be unable to talk or see or move, like
that guy in the closet in the best anti-war movie
ever made, who finally got someone to understand
that what he really wanted, having made contact
with the outside world, was to die. I’m thinking
that my world is too full of the good things in life,
peanut butter and jelly on English muffins,
poppy seed bagels on Sunday morning with the Times,
decent bottles of wine, hand-me-downs from generations
of Foldeses who managed to salvage something
of their pasts and pass the relics along to my generation
so I could pass them along to the next and possibly
the next after that. I am thinking maybe there is
something in my job, perhaps the lack of freedom,
that I should be resisting, fighting, but I work for myself
and pretty much call the shots, so then why
does it feel like the fight has gone out of me
and why do I grow listless as I recall and enumerate
the countless hapless people I have seen in places
I’ve traveled, people with bodies so bent they cannot
stand up and consequently move around like apes, asses in the air,
hands calloused, worn and leatherlike, men and women
sleeping in their own waste while I walk by and try
not to smell what they have long forgotten they smell like
and wonder what dreams they had and have, unadorned,
drunken, drugged, hungering for another world forever
now beyind their reach, men without legs in ragged robes
in alleyways in Cairo, bodies propped against plaster walls
selling good will for what coin falls their way
while a few feet away a butcher hangs a goat’s head
on a hook above the chopping block where flies suck
the dried blood and I hope this is not where the hotel buys its meat.
I am sick, but not so sick that I am dying, I am tired,
but not so tired I cannot sleep. In another world
I would be looked upon as a king, but in a land of kings
such as this, I am just an average guy, normal, and perhaps it is this
that bothers me, that I have nothing, nothing to complain about
and this sets me apart from those for whom poetry
is not an afterthought, but a reality come calling,
something to struggle with when there is nothing,
a way to explore and explain the habits we call
yesterday, today and tomorrow