Installations
Installation: A form of art, which involves the creation of an enveloping aesthetic or sensory experience in a particular environment, often inviting active engagement or immersion by the spectator.
what the boys are doing in Chaturbate
might surprise their mothers
their range of intimacies bar-coded
for a global market checkout
– nonchalant exhibitionists
#cock flash #flexbiceps #nippleplay #assflash
these boys need your dollars and your adoration
and might decide to talk to you
just keep on tipping
if you like what you see
– a globalisation
of the hard-on although it doesn’t rate
so high in the Economic Complexity Index
– solitary boys
DIY
withholding their ejaculations
to boost the Competitive Market
Equilibrium Risk Load
– is this what Adam Smith had in mind
by Gross Domestic Product and
will it save us from Recession?
– how many million viewers
does it take?
you #beautynthebeast #selfsuckbro #peterbeater
#vanillaguerilla #hunghulk #megahorse
you stand outside
yourself attentive to the lens
watching yourselves watched
this double mirror of Narcissus
traps you in these screens, these cells
of meditation, like monks devoted to
small prayers and genuflections
bodies on display willing to be
pierced with the arrows of our eyes’ desires
but dear boys, better
this articulation of your limbs, these installations,
than you carve despair and loneliness
upon your blue-veined wrists
or slip a noose around your necks
in locked garages while the family shops at Safeway
The Songs the Wind Sings
(after Jeremiah 6:16)
You hear them on train tracks
those voices of departure,
the songs of farewell
those rattling door melodies
leaking from abandoned houses
where dog-days transform
into wolf-nights
The wind makes use of
what it will to warn us,
to tell us where the good way is,
so we can walk in it
BIO
John Bartlett’s poetry has been published in a number of Australian and overseas journals. In June 2019 Melbourne Poets Union published his Chapbook The Arms of Men and Ginninderra Press has just published Songs of the Godforsaken and Awake at 3am. He is the Winner of the 2020 Ada Cambridge Poetry Prize.
