LOCUSTS
nothing is sexy
im building a body
im copying it out from wikipedia
im giving it a liver & a nice disorder
im giving it ice skates im gonna slice thru
the bad timeline of modernity into new terrors
the rent prices climb they cut into
your prescription speed budget the rent prices are
implicated in deaths
i get another woman’s cold like a bad present
i take your paracetamol
i leave payments late for the crisis effect
it doesn’t have to be like this!! ode to lizzy
she reads naomi klein makes pasta &
lives with her sister
but i came here to do bad things
& i have no crisis but a cruel me project
everybody is ugly all dogs are boys & all
cats are girls
human bodies are something else dogs & cats don’t
stand at the protest murmuring platitudes like
crush patriarchy free wifi boycott
do you want to go
for a drink after
yes i do. god i do want to go for a drink after
god is indifferent
to small sins and large ones god only minds about
the middlebrow stuff that’s why your art has to be
hella good or
hella punk
you don’t want that big guy on your back no way
that’s actually inconsistent w my religion we are
that is my people
croats & presbyterians gum-digging dallies
from northland doing hail mary in the subtropic sweat & their kids
at home fervent & bloodshot
thinking about hell & the elect
those 12 guys or something sitting up there
going sorry kid but you’re a
bad egg you’re all bad eggs
sort of like a committee sort of like an editorial board
art is fine i guess i just i wanna get that parma money
make it down to st kilda
have lunch with a rich person talk about events
we’ll be dead for
talk about how many boys how many girls
i want to boil alive in my belly
while we skate downhill about the portents of weather
how the skin of my stomach will spoil white cracks
in the land because
in a breakdown of the global order access to coconut oil
will go fairly early dont u think ha ha heather
if you can look me in the eyes and say i don’t care
you’re a danger to yourself i have built bad eyes
god is there at st kilda too god sips ice water
there are new terrors new terrors but no new
happiness
SWEATERCORE
my professor said don’t self-mythologise
i was fresh & tender & under the influence of gravitas
so yea guess I’m a mystery to myself …….the myth
the legend
he said stuff for example find instead the words
for the individual moral adventure
write about the death of your friend or your father
but use a metaphor
a nice one
like you’re knitting a sweater or you’re looking
at a bird
or you are taking a walk in the town
of your birth
repressed life returns
as a crow in a city park it returns !!
a reverse mortgage on your heart !!
as a portrait of the artist in a coma in a bib
with an epitaph
“she let poets lie to her” in a cemetery
in a carpark
give her one of those bells you toll from a
deep grave
listen for sounds at the surface such as im not done
with you fuckers this isn’t over
til my body turns to chalk til I’ve fucked the entire
graduate course
restorative justice is for cunts pathetic fallacies
are pathetic it returns !!
in the non-storm on a regular night
hunting blood
you are not a part of the metaphor & if you are
you are smooth like a stone
the professor admires your restraint the sly arc of your
neck
you are incidental in the dry air of the room
the well-lit room but then
i bust in the door covered in dirt
on a dragging mission
& it’s not feminist & it’s not cool & it’s not postconceptual
& it’s not cathartic
& i get nothing out of it honestly except
public embarrassment
the kind of art where if somebody else did it i’d be like
that’s some shit art right there why don’t you get a wordpress
& password protect it
this isn’t the 80s you should probably be a little
less obvious
you should probably do something so abstract that it might be
about alternative emancipatory politics
or it might be about like the ideological space
vacated by alternative emancipatory politics or
it might be about the death of your father or it might
be about getting lied to and thrown over for a 21
year old dancer
but nobody would be able to tell because of the
high art obfuscating function you press a button & it
scrambles the sentences til they mean anything &
all things being equal that’s everything here’s a fucking
arts grant
Ursula Robinson Shaw (Wellington, NZ / Melbourne, Australia) is writer from Wellington, New Zealand, currently hiding in Melbourne, Australia.
