September 2024
Bio Note: I am an eco-ethicist and animal artivist who aspires to be "kind to all beings". As well as being the creator of the Veegan Planet comic series and the inventor of the dubious concept known as #livingmodelling, I have been published numerous times in Quadrant and by the Animal Justice Party (Qld). I failed at tertiary level on several occasions and have been involuntarily hospitalised in mental institutions on 17 occasions. @antibreeder1m, my social media actively promotes causes to mitigate the imminent destruction of the world.
the rose
pressed against an imperfect breast,
its petals fluttering against it like a paltry set of lips
that mutter silent truths, fraught by the wind,
flagging against, curling to decay but still moist,
the woman's juiced nostalgia wrung from her voice,
oh she will keep this rose, tho it be tattered quite,
tho you can see its fade of drunkenness,
and then a problem with the thorns that prick your thumbs,
drawing a drop of blood because blood is life—
no, blood is mettle and grit and hate and lust,
the red is for velvetine exuding, plucked for death
of someone much too elegant, who scolded you
when alive; and so you're glad they lie smug in a chest,
and your tiny sneeze is more a snigger, your face
scrunched like the rose, and how the bees
that hovercrafted must have felt
among these silky surfaces, blanketed and lost,
teetering on its breezy undulations,
its parched beautiful existence, its sufferance.
as we olden
as we olden, we imagine
which of our internal pipes
will burst next;
a punctured heart or lung,
the brittleness of bones,
a loss of sense, or lying exhausted,
motionless, all sexed;
accumulating clutters of so many
briefly beheld, new shiny objects:
evidence of our travails, travels,
exploits, and the sea of time's effects;
but we ourselves are vessels filled by love,
alive, and neither cursed nor vexed—
yet when we die, we die quite dead,
at once silent, eternally perplexed.
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