A Penny for the Old Guy

This poem is a parody of T. S. Eliot’s The Hollow Men, which expresses the pessimism in post-WWI Europe. I have recast it to reflect the pessimism of the burnt-out monger. ‘A penny for the Old Guy’ is Eliot’s epigraph to the poem, which is based on an old custom in England, now dying out: on 5th November, a ‘Guy’ – an effigy of Guy Fawkes, is wheeled round in a barrow by kids calling: ‘A penny for the old Guy!' (I think it’s gone up to a pound these days!). The Guy is later burned on a bonfire, commemorating the execution of Guy Fawkes for trying to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder in 1605. These days, of course, it should be the other way round – we should burn the effigies of our current set of corrupt politicians, and make Guy Fawkes Prime Minister – he could hardly do worse even though he is a just a stuffed dummy!


‘A satang for the old farang’

I

We are the hollow men
The stuffed men
Headpiece filled with jasmine, alas!
Sitting in Gulliver’s in Soi 5
We whisper together
Of the old times
When the girls had good attitude
And barfines were 200 baht.

Those we once knew
In the long-forgotten west
Remember us, if at all, not as lost
Bohemian souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II
Samsara
The cause of human suffering
Is the desire in the body
And the illusion in the mind.

We have desired
Too much, too many
One woman is a world
Many women are meaningless
And become less than one
Yet we still seek the one in the many
We are the hollow men
The stuffed men.

III

This is Thailand
To us, a dead land
Here the Buddha images
Are raised – but we don’t understand
Here they speak Thai
But we don’t understand
Here the girls call us hansum
But we don’t understand.

Is it like this
In death’s other kingdom
Pattaya?

Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Tell lies for baht.

IV

In this last of meeting places
In Soi 5
We avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the Sukhumvit river.

Girls look at us with hungry glances
Which we mistake for desire
It is only hunger for money
Desire for money
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

We’re hollow men, come from afar
To meet in this Sukhumvit bar
And share our tales of who and when
And how we did it in Phnom Penh
Bangkok, Laos or Myanmar.

Each girl is like a battle scar
To boast of, but we don’t get far
Before the boast is topped – but then
We’re hollow men.

We like to think that we’re the star
Of an exotic or bizarre
Film like The Quiet American
Or Conrad tale retold again
We’re not – I’ll tell you what we are
We’re hollow men.

VI

Here we go round the gogo bars
Gogo bars, gogo bars
Here we go round the gogo bars
At one o’clock in the morning.

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Falls the Shadow
The Shadow of Suffering.

To enter into a state
Where there is no desire
And no suffering
One must follow
The Noble Eightfold Path.

But we are the hollow men
The stuffed men.

We see only illusion
Our thought is confused
Our speech is slurred
Our behaviour is selfish
We have no livelihood
Make no effort
Don’t understand mindfulness
And can’t concentrate.

This is the way that mongering ends
This is the way that mongering ends
This is the way that mongering ends
Not with boom-boom but a whimper.


© Bangkok Byron, 2009. All rights reserved by the author.