2023-04-02

NaPoWriMo 2023 - 2 - Fresh orange



Fresh orange


I - Orange is an emergency services
colour, and here in the soft drinks aisle
of twenty-four hour Tescos

and three a.m., that 'incident' feeling
is happening again,
the faint subliminal questions:

Was that a flicker
of strobing blue?
  Do
I hear distant

walky talky distorty voices
saying "Lima tango"
--because
they're always going dancing

in South America, I don't know why--
"Lima Tango <crackle>
the <squelch> <squeal> respondingover"
?


II - And orange
is an electric Kool-Aid thing
distorting our perceptions

with not-so-subtle misdirections
here, where we're still in Tescos
and the really early morning,

and nothing is true
beneath these too fluorescent lights,
beyond the windows night

fills the car park and light
of a different quality floods from
overhead and neither of these lighting regimes

is wholly real.  Neither illuminates.
Reach out one finger and touch
a bottle of Robinsons no apostrophe double concentrate--

it has no temperature
it has no shadow
you clearly can't believe

reports from the outlying regions


III - and legions of people
have striven, without the intent
of building this precise experience.

They've designed the unreal light
for an unreal store, the murmur of the air-con,
the muted swish of automatic doors,

the weirdly dampened non-echoing
of staff restocking, bleeping and stacking,
their footsteps directionless

on synthetic floor and you...
you are still staring at seven thousand
near-identical brands of orange squash, have


IV -  no saffron-clad Tibetan monks at hand
to guide you with Zen aphorisms and show
how in fact you'll never ever know

the real from the unreal
the being from the imagining
and how

there's always a observer effect,
the viewer is not separate
from the film and the only way

to know the world is to live it
as part of the motley cavalcade,
who--like the most primitive sea creatures--

allow the ocean of experience
to wash right through their bodies
not separate from minds.

Just let your hand find any old bottle,
brave the bleep-synthetic-voice-how-many-bags,
and leave.  There is still time, outside,

V - you should be out in it.





2023-04-01

NaPoWriMo 2023 - 1 - once we're cyborgs

once we're cyborgs



once we're cyborgs

I am standing outside my house, 

unable to release the door handle!

Just put me through to tech support...


once we're cyborgs

twenty thousand Japanese girls

wearing the same left arm

as their idol


once we're cyborgs

the preface to fucking requiring

some tech-savvy, negotiation:

if I configure myself like this...?


once we're cyborgs

as many forms for people

as there are ideas of people

the whale, the tree, the somebody-new-four-times-a-day


once we're cyborgs

beeping

something's always quietly beeping 

and you never know if it's you


once we're cyborgs

I don't know...

flexes arm at fitting room mirror

...is it a bit too "Bond villain"?



once we're cyborgs

virus scanners

and ad-blockers:

life and death


once we're cyborgs

Darling, 

your father crashed at the supermarket again

can you go in your truck and pick him up? 




2022-03-16

Do you have the ticket / we all are always never going home

I have two poems We all are always never going home and Girl with degenerate matter earring in Corporeal, and another in their sibling publication En*gendered, so I recorded this performance of one from each...






Nonbinary bus image from:
libragender on tumblr

Featuring bus and bus station sound clips from:
Julien Matthey, abrahemp, and Ubehag on Freesound