Rage

The hospital
He thinks the enforcement of precise visiting hours are a way to prepare you for how strict death and illness are. There are no arguments once time's up.

Even if his mother had the energy, he can't bring himself to have the conversations he longs for. He takes out his resentment on the cars outside, respecting the hospital itself - vandalism is his hobby, his way of keeping calm. He looks for fancy vehicles, scratching the paintwork with a screw. He's broken other people's things all his life, but in the hospital it's stopped soothing him. He's still devastated afterwards.

Vandalism
It started with a broken window at eight years old. He'd walk pass the dress shop, wondering what would happen if he threw a brick at it. One night he sneaked out of the house and did it. Nothing happened. No-one tracked him down. He realised he wouldn't be caught: places claim they have CCTV and they really don't. He soon moved on from windows to flooding public toilets by stuffing toilet paper in plugholes and leaving the taps on. Thirty-some years later, he's still breaking things. He regrets not having records of everything to show off when he's caught.

KILL LIES ALL
July 1964, Yoko Ono performs Cut Piece, inviting the audience to take up scissors to cut away pieces of her dress. Eventually someone tries to strip her. And in 1974, performance artist Marina Abramović dies while performing her work Rhythm 0. The audience was invited to do "what they wanted" with 72 items on a table. Some of the items were pleasant: a rose, feather, perfume, grapes. There were also weapons - scalpel, nails, a gun with a single bullet. The killer claimed that it was art, although his legal team persuaded him to change his guilty plea to manslaughter.

Conversations
That morning, he'd put a colleague's number on Gumtree, offering Oasis tickets at a low price. They'd have to switch their phone off for a few days. In the afternoon, he's by his mother's bedside, nothing more to do but hold her hand and time her breaths. At half two, she wakes and says something that might be 'vandalism'. That's all she says that visiting session - no other words, only silence. He wonders if he should talk to her about it anyway, because the nurses say she will always be listening. Instead, he plans something appalling to soothe himself.

Background

This piece is a play with form, something I did a lot during my MA. The piece is written as four drabbles (100 word stories).

Something I learned from my Masters is that a poem doesn’t need to be a puzzle box, with a neat explanation. Something similar is happening here, where I've deliberately made things opaque, even from myself. I would never have done this if I was writing this for for submission. But this substack, for better or worse, is me working without an editor.

That third section is an intensional mess, and an authorial intrusion in a piece about empty rage. The idea of Abramovic dying in that awful performance of Rhythm 0 is a problem in itself, an act of vandalism. Titling the section 'KILL LIES ALL' adds more tension - these words were scrawled by Tony Shafrazi across the painting Guernica - part of a protest against MOMA reneging on the offer to print anti-Vietnam poster And Babies. That's a whole knot of protest, rage, and vandalism that is hard to untie. Tony Shafrazi went on to be an art dealer. He had Donald Trump as a client, and endorsed him as president in 2020. May none of us live long enough to outlive our own principles.

Recommendations

My best friend and house-mate Rosy Carrick has finished her second book of poetry, I LOVE. I’ve not read it yet, but I love the bits I’ve heard so far. It’s exciting to have watched this come together through the snippets I’ve seen and the discussions at the dinner table.

There are going to be several launch events but tickets are now available for the Brighton launch on October 10th. It’s going to be an all-out ‘immersive theatrical event’ at the Rose Hill pub, featuring (and I quote from the event page):

• Slow Dancing!

• Tattoo Parlour!

• STD testing!

• Aphrodisiac apothecary!

• Missed Connections!

• Love Tarot!

• Love Advice Booth!

• Sexy projections!

• Magic Fish Love Test!

• Barry White!

• Seven Minutes in Heaven!

• Suck and Blow!

• DIY Sex Positions of The Fortnight!

• Polaroid Kiss Cam!

• And more!!!

And that love tarot? That’s me! I will be reading people’s romantic fortunes. As to exactly what that entails… I can’t wait to find out! Hope to see some of you there.