Our telephone is in the hallway
sits high on the wall like a hawk.
It can kill our weekend with its ear-splitting cry.
We wait by the door in coats
bags at our ankles
we know we’re being watched.
The only lights outside are those that don’t move.
I feel the air pull back before it begins
and my brother reach for my hand.
The ninja turtles are the greatest heroes of our generation.
Heart to heart, this isn’t nostalgia but stone-cold revelation.
Brother, in this time of polar shelfs eroding and coroners
combing the streets for dead girls’ bodies, I suggest all our heroes
rise in the future from the sewers of our torrid cities, renaissance
renewed from the filth of the underground and the litter of empty
pizza boxes, diapers, coke cans, hip hop and corrupt language;
COWABUNGA! At 12, I hoped Donatello would show up and take me
from the placid suburbs of Melbourne to the streets of New York
where a shared sense of casual hatred and social abandonment
permeated. Don’t think this poem is a riff on the allegory of minority
as mutant. I have no desire to look back in time and give a meaning
which otherwise doesn’t exist. What I’m talking about is a spell
you can set when you are 13 and 3 months old to call on superheroes.
It’s the one I used to summon Raphael when a kid stole my swimming
goggles at the local pool, his webbed feet catching on wet stone.
Another time my guinea pig Oscar went into epileptic shock
and Leo raced him in time to the vet. And I summoned them all
when my dad was in hospital, his heart having stopped working.
The beep beep beep of the nurse-call reminds me of the spell.
And when the turtles came they beat and fixed his chest
BEAT BEAT BEAT BEAT. I’m running with them now
with nunchucks and swords whirling our way through the city.
Can you see us Brother? We are soaring through the streets grinning.
Cutting down our enemies in our path. Never lowering our gaze.
Poseidon wanted me for a time.
And I was a fool.
He only ever loved himself.
Jealous Athena made me into a gorgon with a head of snakes.
Funny I had always seen myself that way anyway.
Now no one can look at me without turning to stone.
All the stones of grief, my gorgeous snakes
are not the venomous part of me.
My hopelessness is.
My lack of touch is basilisk.
You think I don’t see your shield, Perseus?
I look into it on purpose just to behold my monster face
that isn’t mine but that love made.
Mine was so tender, a poem.
You cut off my willing head
(no wonder you can’t think anymore).
But from my hopeless heart a winged horse springs.
Where she paws earth, water bursts and muses drink.
But the first thing that comes into my mind without my head
(my heart did all my thinking anyway)
when the stars touched down as hooves
was love again, akin to dread .
A caked face crumbles
with aimless cruelty. Eyes
stare from charcoal sockets,
damply disguising how he
came to be. Then a voice
curls at the corners,
billows out like a speech
balloon. Flames are
preferable to money, death
more desirable than status.
We hear the ever-changing
history of his scars,
how deformity
defiles a character.
Beneath a lick of the lips,
yellow teeth bleed
from the inside. Gummy
stigmata of a psychopath.
To be an agent of chaos,
one must sustain the
democracy of random
destruction. Empathy is for
another type of fool, and he
makes us all ridiculous,
satirises virtue in a facial twitch,
the perverse tricks.
He laughs, but is he happy?
Waddling down hospital
steps, havoc biting his
heels. He just does things – the
actions void of volition – while
you remain a reluctant witness
to this macabre magic.
If you’re not careful, he’ll
cut a new smile for you,
carve it clean from your jowls
so you can beam hate,
so you can work the wound
of your mouth
bright as a gunshot.
It’s an injustice, be a girlfriend.
Tomorrow is the last eight years,
I’ve had to reduce every single girl.
I’ll be annihilated and love to rot in my
revenge against all these years of you.
I’m the true alpha male.
so I can’t wait to enter the sorority house
at all of my power I waited a god
exacting my power I crime I will give that
to come to other men for it just for it.
and I waited a crime of blood and pleasure.
All those popular kids, never even kissed a god
compared to this. Girls, it’s not fair.
You will finally see in slaughtering
all for it in loneliness, I take to love,
it’s only fair. Yes, I’ve been forced
to other men instead of retribution,
I will be a long time I am, be animals,
Well, in truth, more than me and rightfully so
I will be animals, I’ve been attracted to rot
in loneliness, Elliot Rodger here. [laughs]
You will make you. I hit puberty, depraved
species. I waited a crime of blood and pleasure.
You will have never get over. I’m the true
alpha male. I’ll be annihilated and pleasure
while they throw themselves at these years,
You will have never get over. I will punish you.
Poem created from the transcript of Elliot Rodger’s video ‘Retribution’. Rodger uploaded the video
to YouTube on May 23 2014, the day before he murdered six people and seriously injured 13 others
in Isla Vista, California. He ended by turning the gun on himself. His actions made him somewhat of a hero
to lonely men in the self-styled ‘incel’ (‘involuntarily celibate’) community. Transcript sourced from
the LA Times, May 24 2014. The text was then manipulated using the heroku glass leaves text
manipulation app (in particular, the ‘create Markov chain’ manipulation, which works a little like predictive text).
Most paintings portray you
as a placid woman bearing a salver,
as if you were offering cupcakes,
rather than the two breasts
that were sheared from your body.
If there is anguish, it’s half-hearted.
If there is blood, it’s a thimbleful.
Such feeble depictions of brutal revenge.
Some say you were then rolled
over broken pottery and scorching coals.
Another version sent you to the stake.
But does the method really matter?
It’s enough to learn you were tortured for saying, “No”.
They held you down for him and raped you for him.
They tied your wrists for him and cut off your breasts for him.
They stoked the tinder for him and burned you for him.
All the while he kept his gaze on the small fire that you made.
there where I watch for you
& worry
that even your twig of spring
cannot galvanize me
but see how I seek you still
the crumbling whispers of dry earth
heaving,
the stunning suicides
of cherry petals
and all the flat moments, too
the carnival
right after
that final somersault
and the same dead-eyed
hours between town A and town B
if I find you can you tell me, will you know exactly
what to do this time?
can you safely say
forever
in the kind of voice
that even our tombstones
will strain to hear?
generalisation
Ripley’s first failure was one
of generalisation: that one alien’s
elemental viciousness could be ascribed to all.
gambler’s fallacy
that the late acid savagery of
subsequent samples was similarly brutal
proved nothing. Repeatedly.
divine fallacy
the Giger-counter leap at intuition:
designed brutality, made monstrosities,
but evolution is its own hidden actor.
two wrongs make a right
after the Nostromo was scoured
and the crew had been killed by the alien, in turn
Ripley punched it into space. Wrong follows wrong.
slippery slope
but Earth must be saved: fragile teardrop,
one alien loosed there, like cognitive bias
becomes the seed of doom. Certainty from assumption.
appeal to emotion
smudged waif stalked by demon
and my favourite of the movies. Ripley rasping
get away from her, you bitch. My gut flips.
appeal to motive
psychopathic automaton, then self-sacrificing
robot helper, androgynous and anodyne companion,
homunculus hubris. Each robot different – all suspect.
false analogy
sleek futurism and vicious intent,
‘strong’ women battling impossible odds, but
Alien is not Terminator, Sigourney not Linda.
appeal to morals
in direct proportion to their moral infamy,
bit parts snatched into crawl spaces, darkness.
Death comes last to crims with golden hearts and innocents.
post hoc ergo propter hoc
was it in the misty unfolding of an egg, a cause
for all the disasters that ensue, that suffocating hand
or hidden machinations, the static SOS disturbing their sleep?
argumentum ad hominem
every time, she is Cassandra prophesying
but the three-movie deal was so good she made a fourth.
sometimes from the mouth of madness, sanity speaks.
Lotus is a brand of sports car convertible. The lotus plant blooms daily, retracts to the mud at night,
flowering clean the following day. The lotus is associated with purity and rebirth.
A Lotus of lawyers
A caesarian of lawyers
A lullaby of lawyers
A little let-off of lawyers
A pram of lawyers
The walk free of lawyers
A slippery-slide of lawyers
A see-saw of lawyers
A princess lawyer
A cowboy lawyer
A lasso of lawyers
A loophole of lawyers
A law school of lawyers
A school yard Fight! Fight! Fight! of lawyers
The principal lawyer…
A graduation of lawyers!
A spin-the-bottle of lawyers…
A first kiss of lawyers (dare)
The prima facie of lawyers
A poker facie of lawyers
A courting of lawyers
A screwing of lawyers
The white whine of lawyers
A lazy Susan of lawyers
A live lobster of lawyers
A lockdown of lawyers
A lobotomy of lawyers
A living will of lawyers
A plot of lawyers
A graveyard of lawyers
A lie of lawyers
A Lotus of lawyers
I like to think that the faint
click-clack of the needles
is a sound passed through generations,
passed along with the cries of labour,
the silent frustrated scream,
the harmonious soprano laughter.
An audible backdrop, a constant hum
amid the ongoing cacophony of history.
It was there – that clacking –
along with the sound of the guillotine’s drop,
as women watched organised horror
without dropping a stitch.
Not so much a demonstration
of cruelty
but of a hard-won art,
the need to form perfect stitches
in any condition.
In the present day, I am not
driven by cold to hook fingers,
gnarled and work-worn
around the needles, coming away
from the grasp with hands
bent in perpetual claws.
Were my stitches to be unspooled,
no secret codes would emerge,
knotted with grim determination
into the wool, knitted
back into place.
But the soundtrack remains,
as does the cacophony.
We still bear witness
and continue.
They call us monsters,
which is to say,
they fear
the hands that remain steady
in the face of violence,
the sharp pull of the wool,
the thrust of the needle,
the gentle, unerring
clack.
Your face is a blur,
you are out of the picture
I am in my mother’s arms,
my twin brother in her other
the slumped red tomato
is defeated, bleeding seeds
like my mother’s tears,
as it slides down the front
of her pink flowered
dressing gown,
and I whisper,
touching her face
(did it hurt?)
through her tears she says no
the plate didn’t hit me
it lies unbroken on the carpet
slimed with the traces
of your uneaten dinner
I lay my cheek against her chest
and do not forget do not forget do not forget.
Francisco de Goya, Saturno Devorando a Uno de Sus Niños, 1819-1823,
Museo del Prado, Madrid.
I’m dining with Goya in Quinta del Sordo, a villa
by the Manzanares he bought from a deaf man.
He has no reason to change its name. Evening’s
gloom invades the room. The pinturas Negras
loom from fitful shadows cast by frugal flames
from a pair of candles. We eat fabada assailed
by visual screams – wretchedness, hopelessness,
loneliness, old age and death ungraced by puny
promises of salvation’s solace. Angels of mercy
do not ply Goya’s glowering firmaments. From
my chair I stare at two peasants clubbing each
other to pulp in a bog. If Goya glances up he’ll
watch an ugly mad-eyed old Titan, who fears his
children will usurp his powers, rip the head from
his naked child with his teeth. I know the moral
of the myth: age is devouring youth until, one day,
a child evades the savage maw, grows to maturity
and returns boiling for retribution. I shout at Goya,
‘Francisco, is this to be our fate?’ (He won’t reply
if I use titles or formalities.) I bellow my question
four or five times. Finally, he raises his left hand
palm exposed. His right grips a spoon dripping
fabada. ‘You think I paint what I don’t believe?’
he says. ‘Which barrio of hell do you spring from?’
Inspired by visual artist Patricia Piccinini’s ‘The Comforter’, 2010.
after putting on a sweatshirt
I left on the floor last night, I felt something
feathery tickle the back of my neck
so wiped it with my hand and saw, crawling
on my hand, a not-very-big black spider.
“EeeeeyaAHHH!!!” I screamed,
flapping my wrist and flinging the spider
to the carpet. “Motherfuckshit,”
I spluttered. (I had the heebie-jeebies.)
Keeping it in my sight
I grabbed an anthology of contemporary poetry
and dropped it on top of it, pressing down
like a paramedic on a chest.
“Sayonara,” I said. But when I lifted
the book up, the spider wasn’t dead.
It looked like a booger, tinged with blood.
Its broken legs gave little kicks.
Would you believe me if I said I glimpsed
myself in that moment, a crippled widower
suffering before death?
I placed the book back over it
and pressed down, harder.
I breathe inside your body like a lung.
You are aware I’m also breathing out.
You close your eyes and try to bite our tongue.
You needn’t worry – I can always shout
across your silences, attempts at peace,
I amplify the chatter into noise.
You start to ground yourself to make me cease
but I possess the darkness in your voice.
I flood your brain and body with high guilt,
a stimulus, response, it must be true;
through tears you realise I am what you built
and I exist only because of you.
the werewolf
Once a month,
I howl at a full moon,
mad with misty light.
Lonely and masterless,
I am my own dog.
Frankenstein’s monster
I did not ask for this:
an assembly of reprehensible parts,
a thunderbolt, and an agony
of life no one wants
me to live.
the forgotten prisoner of Castel-Maré
Memory is a dungeon
where my bones remain
chained to walls. My last word
fell from my mouth
with my tongue.
Dracula
Childless, I am savage
sire to an inverted family
of undead ancestors,
related solely by blood
and a taste for more.
the hunchback of Notre Dame
If beauty is fleeting,
I know why. The lash
and the will to whip
a broad back bloody
has left me one eye.
the mummy
Duty drives even the dead
from shroud to stairs
to serve whoever commands.
Breathless, I limp, ragged
through empty centuries.
Dr. Jekyll
I cannot remember
half of what I’ve done.
With blood on my shoes,
I wonder where to hide
the rest of who I am.
the phantom of the opera
Symphonies and sewers
are my fate. A mask
and darkness is all
I need to forget
I ever had a face.
the creature from the black lagoon
Alone, in a dim, green world,
I knew nothing. Now, I’ve seen
her, and only now, do I see
my home is merely mud, weeds,
and still, dark water.
Axe wraps brass wire
around his knuckles
then vanishes into the woods.
He picks a fight with anyone
who comes too close, makes
kindling from his opponents.
Bark shavings, rough and
diseased, cover his body
as splinters, as a second skin.
He laughs at this new pain:
this sharp to the gut,
this bruise-less breaking.
He bleeds sap, he bleeds
metal, he bleeds
all too human.
So he fights. He punches
the trees, the stumps in frustration;
he forces the splinters deeper.
So he buries his head
in the ground, rests his cheek
against the parents of his body.
Axe murders
every desire
that he’s ever had,
then wraps brass wire
around his guts,
and vanishes into the wood.
the crows were crowding under the tree
not riding wind waves waffling branches
not jabbing groundhogs nor hazing blue jays
just pecking the earth, knock, knock
asking forgiveness to enter the fold
promising good behavior
offering to return shiny gems
to underground dragons’ grasps
seeking eternal sun and guiltless nights
of myths that feed dreams
for amelioration ablution absolution
to blanch their thieving livers long enough
to firework water sprites’ grottos
to fog machine air sylphs and quetzals
to bulldoze dwarves out of house and home
to piss salamanders’ tempers to wrinkled alligator skin
then sneak back up the wormholes
to chuckle the summer away at their cleverness
and the underworld’s hope
of crows changing their spots
The blank surface wakes to a slow roil of lips and flanks
as the carp rise from suspension.
From bridge-height it’s a blistering that suddenly stretches whale-wide
and moves with one brain, many mouthed.
I have seen koi meander skewbald in dimpled pools
in light French rain,
and purse coyly at a scatter of crumbs on the algal meadow
of an Indian step well.
Now I am taught that they are unbeautiful,
feral and mud-breathed.
Yet as the warmth hits, they are lit, ecstatic, metallic,
squirming for purchase in a silt-yellow column of light.
For my girlfriend, English is her third language
and I imagine it getting the bronze medal, standing
next to Mandarin with the silver and Vietnamese
with the gold and Finnish not even being able
to compete as she doesn’t speak a word of it.
And for the anniversary of our first date she made me
an apron that said KILL THE COOK and I explained
the difference between KILL and KISS and she asked me
how long it takes someone to make an entire apron,
not just buying an apron and writing on it, but making
a whole apron, and she told me nothing was misspelled
on the gift that I bought her because I purchased
the spelling and I said that she didn’t misspell KISS
but rather turned it into another word and she took
the apron back on a day when I went to buy vermicelli
and grape juice and when I asked what she did with it
she told me that she kissed the apron and that I could
kill the apron good-bye and later when I tried to kiss her
she pulled away and said that she wanted to keep her lips,
that she did not want them to end up like the American dead,
how we put relatives in the ground and then keep them there
forever, that even our cemeteries are a prison system.
A couple of Thanksgivings later, we volunteered at a homeless
shelter, the one where she had donated the apron
and when she found it was no longer there, she got teary.
I asked why she was sad and she told me that she wasn’t sad,
that she never wanted to see me cry and that I would never
see her cry. I asked why she would say such a thing
and she just went back to cooking like our life depended on it.
I I I per for like I I I pace cross but I I I past by pro I I I till in cum I I I at less on I I I plus pre off I I I I I I round of out I I I mid come from I I I spite to worth I I I down as since I I I up through bar I I I qua save with I I I
