The referee – by Alex Sutcliffe
ISLAND | ONLINE ONLY
Like everyone, I began my career
in the back of my mother’s car
in tears.
Under-10s soccer is a recession-proof industry,
needs referees, newly hormonal.
There are rules of form and harmony
even wet and kicking kids must observe—or else
induce others to observe.
It’s just a game, my mother consoled,
for children.
Though it’s a clear mid-winter day.
You will not leave the car.
When a customer’s demands split their bags or tear
my public face from private feeling (leave half
of me dissociating in the staff room),
or when a client declines the quote I’ve submitted
to the collective memory (where all it can ask,
ripped from its context, is
How much are you willing to pay?)
I remember my mother
to you,
who cannot wash the unspeakable stench from your hair
or file the calluses from your hands with the rest
of the day’s proceedings or observe the rules
you’re paid so little to enforce and nothing
to remember. These, my mother’s words:
It’s just a game, I console,
for children.
It’s hard to leave the car
but easy to imagine
the complainants and managers
(what remains of the public)
are children. Their voices the voices
of their parents, screaming frustration
from the sidelines.
Blow your whistle. No one’s listening.
Taking responsibility for someone else’s failure,
copping flack for that intractable fear—
these are recession-proof industries,
which is why you’re wet and kicking on your way to deliver
this week’s lecture on the legacy
of the avant-garde, and faced with that complaint, ripped
from its context, all you can answer is that the youths
in your charge (for at least the next hour or two)
are not interested, are scarcely younger than you,
and you do not know the rules.
And so I quote my mother.
Her words dissociate from her body, leave the warm
car seat. (We call the dissociation of words
from the mother’s body collective memory.)
It’s just a game,
for children
need games
to learn
the goals can shift, the rules
go unobserved, ignored. Imagine
a classically trained sculptor shattered
to learn Duchamp won’t even piss
on her work. Imagine the workers
in the porcelain factories. Imagine
their parents, screaming frustration
from the sidelines though they do not know
what’s been turned upside-down, because
they do not know. Because they have work
in the morning. Art history’s a recession
-proof industry because the art historian
only teaches us the rules of form and harmony
will go unobserved, ignored, will tear
like soft plastic faces, will disappoint,
and takes the abuse. Anyway, I say,
opening the rear door, lifting you from your seat,
you need some pocket money.
Now here you are, some twenty young people
before you, and none of them paying
attention. One of them lobs a lazy idea
overhead. When it lands
at the forward’s feet,
there’s no one between her
and the goal.
No one except you. ▼
Image: Kampus Production - Pexels
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