An Ode to my Gary Barlow Mug. (A Poem).
I hate this object more than I hate my life itself.
my life did a rotten turn or two for me and landed me here
in temporary accommodation, a scratch above homelessness,
with this mug for my tea; this charity shop bought piece
of chintz; not mass-manufactured, bespoke; but it says: ‘I (heart)
Gary Barlow’ on the side and something about the
intimacy of the thing horrifies me. I am no fan of, nor do I
hate, Gary Barlow himself; that’s not the point.
The point is that I’ve come into possession of this mug
that speaks to nothing of myself, that was presumably
manufactured for a birthday or Christmas, bought and
made online for some Gary Barlow fan out there;
a thing to be laughed at once, then forgotten; a
vaguely tawdry bit of trash shipped out of China,
made as a mundanity, to fill a stocking, to point to a
person’s peculiarities, and to be a mild joke for the festive
season. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t want to
buy another one. I haven’t the money. Can I paint
over the mug and make it my own? Perhaps. But then I
don’t know. It was made to be something intimate;
I imagine a husband buying it for his wife, and even her
hating it so much it ended up in the charity shop. Mostly, I
hate the lazy design. I hate the fact that it looks like crap.
I hate the fact that it looks cheap, and I hate the fact that
it is cheap. I also hate the fact that I have no money
and that mugs are not expensive in any case. I hate being
forced, at every sip of tea, to look into someone else’s life
when really I just want to relax. I hate the thing staring
back at me to remind me of a singer I neither like nor
dislike. It’s a shard of a memory, something built for an
immediate comedic end, a transient sort of life for a
product; an emotive flash in the pan; something that
was intended to be forgotten; like me, perhaps; for
which containing tea was only ever an ancillary
benefit of the thing, some still useful bit of trash here
to amplify the inveterate cries of my own lapsed ego. A stale
and pasty jibe, and me, here, looking into the bottom of
the thing at the last sip of tea, seeing the foul bottom of it,
the tea stains covering the thing, wondering where life went.
