Going Down With The Ship - poetry by shaun patrick green.: May 2013

Thursday, May 30, 2013

Vanity, Thy Name Is 'Facebook'

Would we call looking into the mirror

A form of communication? Probably not.

A mirror only reflects us as we are seen

Whereas Facebook reflects us

How we want to be seen by others:

Cool, perfect, hip, thin, fashionable -

Not a mirror at all, unless the Witch

From Snow White has gone global

With production of her particular model.

Who is the fairest of them all?

On the web, each and every one of us.

This is the lie at the heart of social media.

We are not communicating with each other

But with idealised selves, indeed,

We are not even talking,

Judged as we are by our number of "friends"

Rather, we are "spectating" - life reduced

To reality TV for those with attention spans

Measured in bits, bytes and nanoseconds.

Why 'tell' when you can 'show'?

Because if what you are showing is not real

Then you are neither showing nor telling,

Merely filling space with more static junk

To one day rain down on our heads like all

The dead satellites and spaceman food,

Frozen piss drops and orbiting turds

The detritus of decades of trying

To finally have a conversation.

A Brief History Of The Nazi Space Program

True it is probably not polite

When dating a Jewess to confess

A certain affection for Wagner

Nazi architecture and those sexy uniforms

"What did the Nazi's ever give us?"

She was wearing her grandmothers

Auschwitz ID number as a tattoo

On her forearm while her knuckles

Turned white around her freshly poured pint

How does a non-Jew answer this question?

"I'll tell you what they gave us..."

Apparently I was relieved of the burden

"They made horror into an aesthetic -

They took away our capacity to feel!"

That IS a war crime if ever there was one!"

I could have argued with that

Because it was wrong on so many levels

But I chose a different tack

"What about the Nazi Space Program?"

She looked at me, stoney faced

"Well, if it wasn't for Wernher von Braun

And his work on rocket propulsion which

Yes, produced the V2 rockets which bombed

London and took many many lives, well

We would never have made it to the moon

Let alone the outer planets, no satellites

No cell phones, no GPS, no bank transactions

No breaking news, no weather report."

Her face didn't change.

"You're fucking retarded," she said

At least I got you off my back, I thought.

There's a wheel.

There's a wheel turning inside his head

Grinding the naked bones of the dead

Turning ceaselessly through the night

Continuing on beyond breaking daylight

Always in perpetual circular motion

Like the movement of waves upon the ocean

Planets rolling around the churning sun

Or the nuclear orbit of tiny electrons

The wheel inside his head keeps spinning

His mask-like face continues grinning

While the sound is like a kind of hell

The rasping crunch of that rolling wheel

It is pure machine, devoid of conscience

Rolling tirelessly over everything precious

His faith in humanity, his will to live

His ability to love, to feel, to give

He tried to stop it with drugs and booze

Lubricated it instead and ensured he'd lose

More than the wheel would take on its own

His wife, his kids, his job, his home

Now he runs in the hope he can out pace it

Rather than the horror of having to face it

For the wheel never stops and is always there

Behind his haunted eyes, under his thinning hair

Thursday, May 16, 2013

Cyclone Revelation.

In this bent light,

Trees at right angles,

Things seem clearer,

And the wind,

Tearing off rooves,

Brings a freshness

To this reasoning;

Waves crashing over

Foreshore barriers

Make a kind of sense,

In the solid way

Sandcastles never did;

And this screaming

In the dense air

Is not tin on tarmac

But a siren song,

Calling us into

A sheltered truth,

Beneath a beaten roof,

Where we find

What makes us human

Keeps us safe

In the eye of the storm.

adaptation.

friday afternoon and the house is still

but for the scuttling of cockroaches

they are wary and hard to kill

perfectly adapted to survive an apocalypse

unlike us who shall burn to ash

or keel over or kill each other

despite what the psychologists tell us

we don't have the survival instinct

because in our hearts we know

life is a game for not yet dead

cockroaches on the other hand

have no such limitation of mind

being robots with their skeletons

on the outside - no room

for higher brain function

imagine that: a cockroach who could reason -

"hold on, is that a thong I see raised in anger?

now just think about what you are doing, sunshine,

yeah, alright, you with me? cos I don't want

to have to say this twice, yeah, know what I mean?

true, I am a cockroach and your first thought is:

KILL! KILL! but what are you actually killing?

have you ever stopped to ask yourself this question?

when the bomb does go off and you are all toast

it will be up to me to continue this

shitty venture called life, well, when I say 'me',

I mean my kind because frankly, sunshine,

you are here for a good time, not a long time,

whereas we cockroaches, I mean, just look at us -

long haul, know what I'm saying? not pretty

but that's just adaptation, know what I'm saying?"

even less pretty once the thong comes down

and the remains are shoveled into a bin

nothing worse than a talkative cockroach

this world is not theirs to win

succulent and true

she peers over her cacti

with a lovers eye

nothing there but holding water

unlike her prickly daughter

whose father starves them both

with his untimely wrath

restraining order not withstanding

molesting their daughter on the landing

he took a hammer to the green house

said it was unnatural

to love plants more than people

in the shards she found

the strength to love

put her daughter back together

best she could and left the rest

to shelter and desert air

a home for the lost

behind the dunes, the sand

the grass, something he couldn't see

thought he heard her call

might have been a gull

she frothing in the surf

more free than he

a year younger only

more boy than girl

a better swimmer, runner,

more popular than he could ever be

still that sound

in the back of his head

face full of grit

got to bury it, bury it

people out there to be saved

their bodies tossed by waves

and she nowhere to be seen

where could she be?

he strikes out with long strokes

finding the calm patch

where he saw her last

waves impersonal in their regularity

as if the whole ocean were a glyph

a sign for the dying

a home for the lost

The Weighing Years.

People tell him he doesn't look his age

He quips: beer is a wonderful preservative

Knowing the latest bands and downloading

Music and movies and owning an iPod

Are "all like really cool..."

But sometimes, just sometimes

He catches himself in the mirror

And thinks: Jesus Fucking Christ -

I'm wearing Kmart flannelette shirts

Slippers and a dressing gown

Just like my long dead grandpa

Who was never cool and didn't pretend

Have I slipped out of an ironic hipness

And into a droll self-referentialism?

Am I becoming the sort of person

Who at parties and family gatherings

Would always bore me to tears?

What happened to my sense of style,

My flat abdomen, my good vision?

Is this what it means to get old -

Parts of us falling away as if we had

Some sort of temporal leprosy?

If so, then Time is a war crime

And should be tried in the Hague

Sentenced to Eternity with itself

And none of this using death as a proxy

Ultimately it is all part

Of some irrefutable process

Which none of us truly understands

We just get older, folding in on ourselves

Another night in front of the fire

With enough alcohol to assuage regret

To be young is to avoid remembering

To be old is to be unable to forget

fast track to hell

that he came from a small town was something

he trained his mind to forget so completely

he had everyone convinced he was from the city

in which he chose to live and work bi-weekly

he made decisions which may have been wrong

looking back now he thinks even more so

but he put his money down and backed his instincts

only to watch the bills pile up and he on the go slow

debt spiraling out of control like a stunt pilot in a flap

he tried to control the bleeding, plug the gaps

where had his business plan gone so wrong?

someone dared tell him in his darkest days that

he had over-estimated the intelligence of the consumer

and Henry Ford's famous mantra came to mind

so he decided to treat his customers like idiots:

ignoring their suggestions, calling them blind,

as if their ideas didn't matter and only he knew

what they truly, ultimately wanted - which was,

truly, ultimately what he was prepared to sell them

so like a shadow he fell between the desire

and the economic imperative of providing goods

at reasonable prices while still trying to make a profit

it was like being Jesus and the Devil at the same time

except that he was just a salesman with nothing to sell

a bitter, small town nobody on the fast track to hell.

Next Stop Tokyo.

Age this instant

Hold it for me

Simply a click away

To scan if I had time

But there you go

I don’t have time

To know how you feel

Hear you crying

But don't have the words

Got to move on

Next stop Tokyo

And you are expendable

Like lotus leaves

Or spring snow

Which will melt

Your tears like diamonds

Clinking in the glass

I hear them as I walk

Down rain drenched streets

Away from you

Their brittle crackle

The bitter laughter

Of my departure

Thursday, May 2, 2013

Bad Things Come

He always knew this would happen

It was worse when he was drunk

Living in constant panic

Something bad always waiting

Hidden behind corners, in shadow

The unseen, damage, the unknowable

Waking to the stale piss smell

Of another morning thinking

"My god, what happened last night?"

The visceral gut-wrenching truth

Hitting him over coffee: He didn't know

That was when he got the fear

It started in the base of his spine

Slowly making him paraplegic

So that anyone might break in

And thrash him like a rag doll

But there were worse things out there

Yellow teeth filed to needle points

Finger nails shaped like talons

The fat blind ginger-haired boy

Body parts in his laundry bag

The badness crowded him in

Like a kids birthday party at McDonalds

And the clowns, Oh the clowns

Everywhere leering laughing clowns

like human totems to terror

That was why he quit the drink

Went cold turkey, shivering, hallucinating

Looked horror in its black shiny mouth

Now things were meant to be better

But the past had stuck to him

Like shit to a pure wool blanket

Good things come to those who wait

Bad things come to those who try to escape