Love in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Olivia Macassey

Author:Olivia Macassey [Macassey, Olivia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: poetry, New Zealand
Publisher: Titus Books
Published: 2020-06-01T21:42:34+00:00

[ veil V ]

Seven brides for seven brothers,

seven veils for seven victims,

people who think there is a system to hate,

and paid the tv licence because it was

a licence to complain,

a licence to kill goldfish

and wait and wait and wait,

they discover the beat poets when they’re not seventeen, not in guatemala now

dr ro- pata, not wanting fries with their meal…

I have not seen the best minds of my generation starving, hysterical, and certainly not naked

even without their clothes: I have seen nothing of the sort!

This girl has finished reading War and Peace: don’t read it, she says, it’s bloody boring. Lighting another cigarette. Grinning as her mother frowns.

- You shouldn’t smoke, honey. Not at seventeen.

All the stories are too minute for this girl’s mother now.

How so and so was seduced by moonlight.

By Billie Holiday or by fish and chips and a special way of saying “dahling”. Just so many small despairs; no human condition, no universal half truth.

So she settles for

outdated thrillers about the cold war, and drinks

her coldening coffee, and eyes the ashtray.

- I think I might be a fascist, remarks the girl, but she’s already thinking about whether to fuck her ball partner and what her best friend will think if she does.

Her mother chokes on her coffee.

- What did you just say?

- Do you think I should have sex with Jason?

Her mother has put her novel aside.

- All the socialists are dead, she mutters, but no one hears her,

in this glittering wet city,

crawling with bedraggled princes

who bite on the edge of a crumbling moon

rescue snails, and stumble home.

I’m still wishing for you

when it begins to rain, light

oozes over the sky,

and all the sound in the world vanishes

for this second of rapture

easy to forget to be quiet and alert in the alleyway

( but I must or

someday my prince will come)

at four a.m watching the archaic

pleasantries of leftover television slowly drift

into silence,

the cold coffee, the best minds, the ash…

where was I ?

Ah. This moment of rapture

and biting my lip for the twentieth time tonight.

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