Carnaval in Brazil - an Ipanema bloco

The road beside the beach is heaving today. The giant bloco truck crawls like some snail dinosaur anxious not to crush the pullulating crowd lapping against it. Behind surge tribal devotees shuffling their feet and swaying their hips in ritual worship. The band and singer throned like priests atop the truck intone the over-amplified samba hymns but fail to tempt the elder congregation from the beach. The younger folk, though, push their smooth brown bodies past a thousand possible partners. There's every sort of garish fancy dress that Chinese plastics factories can imagine - girls in fru-fru skirts, with glittered cheeks and rainbow wigs, guys in fru-fru skirts flaunting their muscles steroid big, superhero costumes, masks, bow ties, feathered head-dresses and devil's horns, nurses, togas, Aztec gods, Hawaian skirts, girls in bridal white, in hope perhaps. The route is lined with mini-business men ( hopeful entrepreneurs from the favelas ? ) selling snacks of all sorts and, from polystyrene cases some the size of coffins, iced beers bought from local supermarkets, carried here on shoulders, towed on trolleys or pushed on carts. Their efforts certainly merit profit if only they don't over-supply. Now comes the brightest fancy dress of all : the council cleaner's hi-viz orange overall intent on sweeping up the drink detritus bottles, cans and plastic cups and close behind the servant rubbish truck. Without the need for any entrance fee and fancy dress not a necessity, this is a music festival for free. But what is celebrated here is not in fact the music, but rather,  time with friends for getting drunk as part of the biggest booze-up ever in pisstory.

If you need to worship something,
you don't have to invent God
or bow down to royalty
with intellect of gastropod.

Don't revere some crass dictator,
footballer or movie star;
they'll all fail sooner or later,
human beings that they are.

Marvel at what's most amazing -
life in all its different forms;
contemplate with awe, stargazing,
majesty past human norms.

Pray that human population
won't obliterate the Earh,
won't destroy with our pollution
other life of equal worth.

But, no need for rite or temple,
mysteries of the unknown;
please forget the supernatural:
nature's super on its own.

True vanity ignores the mirror,
brushes aside all compliments;
secure in feeling superior
humble to all appearance.

There ain't much fun in being old;
there's little future to unfold;
I hate the winter, wet and cold;
the same old jokes have all been told;
there's no young woman I can hold.

But still I'm stabled, watered, fed;
my bank account is never red;
and though I've been too long unwed,
things could be worse, for when all's said,
it's slightly better than being dead.

Ipanema

While I lie on the beach in the evening sun,
vultures and frigate birds circle the moon.

After an evening of rum and soda

I reached the metro before it closed,

wobbled home to the hostel sofa,

flopped myself down and almost dozed

but then I noticed two strange leaves

on one of the courtyard's potted trees

vibrating in the night-time breeze

(like something seen but never heard)

imitating a humming bird !

It seems to me quite sensible to assume
that european future americans
displayed much more than average initiative
to leave their homelands, sail across the sea
and start a new life. Their descendants would
surely inherit some of that quality in their genes
and that 'get up and go' might then explain
the drive of present day white americans.
So it also seems quite plausible to presume
that african americans should someways
surpass their pale skinned current compatriots.
Perhaps their ancestors showed less initiative
in letting themselves be captured and sold as slaves.
But those that survived the involuntary voyage
across the sea surely had more than average
physical and mental strength which surely would
have survived in the genes of their descendants.
Perhaps it's a pity those genetic qualities
may have been diluted by the murder
of recalcitrant slaves and the sexual
predation of some white slave owners.


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