Multiplastic

“Your art is the antidote to someone else’s pain.” [1] But how can that be so When it’s all I can do to strain Dull words through the filters in my mind Hoping to find A few that fit? They only fit me, though And never really well enough Just poorly glued labels That peel off my thoughts And litter the page with pretentious banalities But then I wonder Did Dylan Thomas feel like a fraud When he named the night sky “Bible black” And my heart forgot how to beat? Maybe he did. Or, Walt Whitman, when he declaimed in his glory “I am large.   I contain multitudes”? And I knew at that moment I was large.   I contained multitudes That could sound through my barbaric yawp And then there were times, when . . . Leonora Carrington painted my dreams on a newly primed canvas When Bach and Bauhaus collaborated on my soundtrack, with John-Lee Hooker and Florence Welch providing the vocals When Harold Pinter wrote what runs daily through my head into a play, bef...

When I hear about your brand identity I reach for the mouldy fruit Ready to hurl it into your bland Artificially intelligent influencer face When you call me a consumer A content creator’s pre-approved product Built from algorithmic equations and synergy I can feel that tomato in my hand I want to push the envelope hard Down the pro-active incentivized throats Of your boring brand ambassadors And choke off their pre-processed blue-sky thoughts I don’t want to think outside Pandora’s box I want to smash it and expose its contents to the rain Your art, your fears, your poems, your dreams The real, complex, vulnerable, fucked-up you I am not a statistic, or a demographic I am not a human resource and neither are you But I am considering going armed With a basket of mouldy fruit   April 2025