RUTH LESS

The blind came up,
a rocky, waterfally
moist,
plant-ridden installation
revealed itself as
the metal folds
rose.
It made me sick,
everything around me
made me sick:
the minimalist furnishing;
the blaring non-stop eighties
music;
the mournful ornamentation;
the crappy coffee;
Ruth

Private classes
at the school
had cost her 25 euros
an hour,
and I got 15.
I underhandedly persuaded
her to leave the school
and do the classes
with me at her home
for 20 euros:
everybody happy,
except the school:
and fuck them

The first thing
she did was barter
me down to 17.50 euros,
I feebly submitted.
I figured I was still getting more
than the going rate.

Off we rocked,
twelve months
or so
of one-to-one
English between a master
poet and
a bourgeois piece of shit,
and I'm being nice here

Give her her due,
she always paid up promptly,
money-notes stacked up on
the table,
the way I like it.
Once she didn't lay the cash out
pre-class,
I innocently pointed out
the fact,
she nearly bit my head off

In fact the whole experience
was somewhat akin to
being savagely ravaged by some
evil, culturally pig-ignorant,
money infested ogre.
An angry, unhappy and
deeply bitter ogre

Yes, yes,
can you believe it?
In the privacy of
her own home
she had to
attempt to concentrate,
despite barely getting any sleep the
night before, as some bohemian twat
twaddled on about
the inane intricacies
of the English language

Early on we had breached the
question of race,
she had made it fairly clear
that she thought Moroccans,
and in a random
descending order,
all other non-European races
were despicable, idle scum.
I had offered an alternative perspective,
she had dismissed
my perspective saying
'You don't understand Spain';
well neither did she

She was tired, so tired
and life was so, so fucking hard;
in fact, it was unbearable:
she couldn't sleep;
she had a horrible headache;
she had to take the kids to school
(a knob school just down the road);
pick them up;
supervise their homework;
occasionally cook;
occasionally work in her husband's company
in some indefinable role
which never became clear;
well the list of unendurable tasks
went on and on and on

It was an astonishing
display of self-centredness.
The stupid (well not so stupid) cow
lived a life relative to the rest of us
of absolute comfort.
Her awareness of this fact
and her empathy with the human race
were close to zero

The husband sauntered in and out,
at eleven o'clock in the morning
fresh from a game of tennis;
a poor, sweet South American
(not Moroccan) girl
ironed, cleaned and cooked away;
the swimming pool in the garden
awaited the
warm rays of summer;
Ruth explained to me she bought all
her clothes in Milan,
nowhere else could compare,
and London, London as far as fashion
was concerned was
an absolute joke;

To be honest
the worst thing of all
was me.
I sat there listening
to this trite litany of egotistic,
masochistic codswollop,
and did nothing,
absolutely nothing
but obsequiously sympathise.

Throughout the lesson
the radio blasted
out
the ungodliest, most distracting
wall of musical shite
imaginable
and I said nothing.
No, not a tweet, not a trill
emerged
from Selfish's puny beak

Am I weak,
stupid senseless?
I wasn't that broke
that I couldn't have ditched
her and searched for
some other source of income.
Why, why did I put up with
this inexcusably vapid entity?
'Cos she was vaguely good-looking?
From a sort of fatalistic fascination?
Laziness?

Oh god, Every second felt like
a thousand, moaning,
irritable, unsatisfied years.
Every minute felt like a tortured,
parched trek across
an unremitting desert with
a death hound from hell.
Every hour felt like
a painful, sour-faced,
tedious eternity of
grudges, disagreeability
and cantankerousness

In the end,
it sort of petered out
as these things do.
Her dad got ill,
my confident allure
lost its tarnish.
Yes, we parted ways
none the wiser
for the experience,
but probably both quite
relieved we would never have to see
the other
ever again in
our lives