Hallucinated Realities 2: Voyage to Nowhere - Andrew Barham

One more Hallucinated Reality
On the road to somewhere
Away from here
As the kliks flick past –
Hope 64 km
Hope 56 km
Hope 42 km –

Around Chilliwack
The mountains start closing in …

Hope
at last …
Where we enter the Fraser Canyon
Hell's Gate
To the Interior
The first leg of the voyage
Behind me;

Gone
The endless stripmall
Of the Fraser Valley:
Car dealerships
Selling massive pick up trucks
And four-wheel drives
Giant Warehouse stores:
The Brick
IKEA
The Great Canadian Superstore
Cash and Carry
Office Depot
And worst-of-all Walmart
(K Mart and Canadian Tire
Once seemingly so vast
Now as dwarfed looking
As the local General Stores
They superceded not so long ago);

The modern suburban dweller –
Homo dysfunctionus –
Can no longer survive without
The accumulating relicts
Of last minute's essential fads
On his Voyage to Nowhere:

Everything is so vast these days!
The sheer scale of consumerism …

Inside the vaunting caverns of commercial enterprise
The choices seemingly endless
Every kind of ethnic cuisine catered to
Except mine …

"Where can I find the Brown Sauce?"
???
"Err …
"You do have Bovril?"
???
"Marmite! You must have Marmite!"


I haven't seen
Cinnamon Grahams
For decades …

"I need a replacement widget
"For the doodad
"I bought here
"A year ago?"

I'm sorry, sir.
We no longer carry that item
However,
I can sell you one
Just like it,
If you wish!

It has
A battery
Of new features
I hadn't realised
I'd wanted:

It can now do everything
I never wanted it to!

But the one I've got
And which does what I want
Is only a year old
And I've looked after it so well.
It only needs a new widget …

Outside my Mum's Coop
People throw away
The most amazing things;
You could open a business
Selling second-hand vacuum cleaners
Whose bags needed replacing,
Some of them
Less than a year old.

Our landfills are full
And the provincial government
Has forbidden us
To take our trash
Across the border

"We want to see
"A made in BC
"Solution."

We will exhaust the Earths' resources
Stripping the planet bare
To keep up with our Joneses

Humanity
A virus
Infecting the lovely Gaia –

Where are her antibodies?

Andrew Barham


Notes for non-Canadians and anyone unfamiliar with the argot of heroin addiction

1. Klik is Canadian slang for kilometre. 1 klik = 1 km.

2. Joneses has two reference points: Keeping up with the Joneses is a North American expression referring to those who tend to base their purchasing decisions upon what their neighbours already have. It was a common expression in North America from the 60s to at least the 80s. The baby boomers, who used to deride older generations for being guilty of this sin, have themselves become the worst offenders. A Jones is also old Vancouver Junkie slang for a heroin habit. It was a common expression in the 60s and 70s amongst the heroin addicts of Granville and Hastings Streets, as in "I've got a Jones". It likely derives from the 19th Century North American expression "yen" referring to an addict's craving for Opium, as in "I've got a yen; where can I score?". Of interest to those unfamiliar with the delights of opiate addiction, opiates cause constipation; hence their medicinal use to control diarrhoea. Opiate addicts of the 19th Century used to refer to the rather large and difficult bowel movements they had from time to time, as, "giving birth to a yenshee baby." In the early 19th Century, the British brought the benefits of opium addiction to China, and the Chinese repaid the compliment by bringing it to Britain's colonies on the West Coast of North America. Thus, Vancouver and Victoria became the twin centres for Opium distribution in North America.

3. This is part of a series of "Hallucinated Reality" poems in which the title is actually imbedded within the poem. Thus, these poems are titled, but the title does not appear at the top, but somewhere within the poem in bold text