THREE POEMS by BEN RIDDLE
Oh Boy, Here I Go Killing Again
Drone strikes strafe the suburban
streets of Kandahar,
I don’t know who turned on
friendly fire, but the fires came and rained
down imperial apocalypse,
an urban cleansing,
a street by street
annexing of
kids and mothers.
I forgot the HUD inverts;
left becomes right, right; left,
up is down, that hospital
makes either bombs,
or families.
We are replicating the asphyxiation of Dresden,
asking for the same kind of
forgiveness.
It is for the greater good, I tell myself;
I, a drone, a bureaucrat.
Shelved Ideas
Every night,
I decide to change my entire life.
I’ve wondered if it might be the moonlight
filtering through my window as I
tinker tanker with clocks,
the tiny mechanics of time
pieces strung up like flayed men or
the working class;
I take them apart like
the Australian unions; police the
remains like
my blue-gloved hands will find
evidence of the treachery
of time.
We stay up late
because it’s the only time we have
to ourselves like
it is the only gap we get between
racing speed traps and 9am
to work and back,
like it is the only time we have
to be ourselves and dance
covered in paint
in your studio, or naked beneath
the moon. The laundry is
done or undone,
we procrastinate sleep because
living like this is dreaming;
is all we have when
people are done taking from us.
I am tired taking sick leave
to feel like myself.
If everyone is sick, then it has to be
something in the water, in
the ecosystem;
if everyone in the system is sick,
maybe we are breathing in too many flecks
of rust like
the machine is old and needs to be
replaced, or maybe we are breathing in
too much oil, and
we do not realise we are choking on it;
or maybe the whole system is
on fire and
there is no longer enough oxygen
so maybe we can’t breathe,
maybe this is our last
gasp of consciousness as we fade
hallucinating illusions like the differences
between us, or
that anyone in government gives a fuck
about our homes, our water,
our fucking air.
Late at night,
I think it’s a little easier to breathe
while we lie
with someone we love and pretend
that tomorrow is going to be different, or
better, or
we say things like “it’s going to be okay,”
because we want it to be, or
we want the person,
the people we love to believe
for a little while;
in anything.
Every night,
I decide to change my entire life.
In the morning,
I choose to do nothing.
Streetcorner Sermon
Someone had graffitied Matthew 6:5-8
on the wall across from the church where
they teach you how to hate;
a tired anointment of black ink
on grey wall, somehow
a holier font
than the spring inside the church.
In Rome, they would soak
fabric in piss to
bleach it white and angelic.
Perhaps the priesthood still baptises
itself with human filth.
And when you pray, do not be like the hypocrites
who pray to be seen on streetcorners.
The most interesting thing about Ben Riddle is that he is building a little library of all the poetry he can get his hands on. The voices of poets go still too soon.