John Tripp Award for Spoken Poetry

2009 John Tripp Award - Runner-up and Audience Prize Winner
Liam Johnson

 

The Weight

what good is the web of no flies
the net without fish?
but my friends aren't fish & flies, they're
stray hungry cats lookin thrown thru a carwash,
big hair and thinner than Robert Zimmerman,
& also Irish red setters,
tongues lolling with love
& coats like fibres of Allah,
or yeah chimps like me pickin fleas
out their dungarees,
sailing thru the trees,
but I'm eating my bananas alone!
throw a dog a bone -
'cause I hang out with the CELLS and the GENOME
the drinking age privates of the happy resistance, non-existent,
Isis goofballs whose tirade of love could tear the slates from roofs of grey Llananon,
demolish the smirking sphinx of astrological glaring down riddles
and constellate the coldest stars!

Siamese headcases,
headspaces small,
but filled like pound thirty baps with the splendour of it all!
forehead to the ground in the darkest of parks
culpeos and wolves at the edges of anserine hedges
slowly sliding off the swing and to my knees the
cigarette burn emblazoned on my wrist,
I've got what's worth most, the GIST!
the soaring comedy of it!
the mismatched emerald and sapphire eyes!
christ, the chippie job is a ton of cement,
can't withstand the weight,
demands can wait,
the man is HATE -
the innocent bosses from New York to Milan are hate
like building the dam and Saddam are hate!

my only sister is called Kate.

and I don't know her!
lost to the tides of the world -
our War of the Worlds tape before CDs is gone from me,
the Blade Runner poster is supposed to be closer
but it's gone away followed by Alton Beanie coasters,
even living room floor picnic of samosas!

O we, fucking Ozymandiases,
perpetuated in M&S, in pizza hut, in marooned mind shops,
in corrosive universities and the school of hard knocks,
we the churned out bombs of MTV
smoking joints of crackling gunpowder -
yelling about everything we can be,
yelling loud as a gun, LOUDER,
O captive proletariat's screams of frustration let out in vandal punches!
knocking each other's lights out and fights break out and
the hydrogen hootenanny a Hindenburg disaster,
it's TRUE! if I only I could grow a potato!
and who in God's name is Plato!
but I'm stuck detached and always thinking for god's sake
so here is my book of poems,
let me draw liam for those who don't know him:
his head is a deadweight
cinder block full of steam
his body is a dinnerjacket
ripped at the seams,
and his heart in reality is
a perfect carnation!
but his mouth is tuned in to
a Mexican station.

& I'm totally woeful and sad and pathetic,
& the world bums me out because I always let it -

we don't get it!
we just paint our faces, and tie our party laces
in tiny encampments waging a guerilla war
fighting the Pazuzu reality of it all with molotov jelly baby cocktails.
'cause we missed the boat for the revolutions, didn't we?
I saw it in filmroll film TV, and I saw it on video
almost kissing life into the soulless sad sac internet -

where the infinite messageboard threads weave a tapestry
depicting a string of emotionless digits,
and colossuses of cleared up clandestine truth
just sound like clamouring eejits.

and besides I feel the shower of love is flowing wetly off my skin,
leaving me naked and drying in the sun like clothes hung out to dry:

pegged up stuck on a piece of string
like a marionette tied to an angel's wing
trynna get a straight answer from Gepetto

who sagely sings
"summer loving happened so fast!"
but the speed was that of a teenage car crash,
foot tapping on the tiles I need some prayer beads,
leaning mutely on the garden fence an altar's what I need,
but what God would listen no what God would mend?
what divinity what essence could bring me back from round the bend?
what use any sign it could send?
what use any synchronicity
such a sign could portend?

NOTHING, 'cause this locomotive is not stopping, it's STOPPED
and welded by rust to the tracks, more futile than the dry
droughted brain the artist racks for a vision worth putting to
paper or to print, an age of wholesome Aztecs ordered to STINT,
like a mob of bozo punks come upon by orthodox cops
in the backstreets of menial Merseyside -
like the Archangel Gabriel filling out a form,
the springtime goat kids queuing for grass!
Hosanna abolished from the dictionary!
Hallelujah archaic and misquoted forever!
& this match will burn in my bronchi while
kids play with water pistols outside, I saw them,
and all my facets cried!
'cause it was mist like a highland mirage,
a Scottish séance in the dewy thistles -
a cold rain miracle of Macbeth in Bethlehem -
like a vibe of plaintive hippies
with police arresting them.

and I can't hold up placards,
or aerosol the prison cars,
or march on wendigo washington,
because I've thrown all my shoes in the sea
and now my feet are cold.

God -
rustling, deciduous God
I can't take your business trips.
splash me in freezing water of your sons
and your daughters;
else my focus slips.