ghosts of today:

An alien model stares out at me from a bus stop billboard that houses the homes of spiders and bears the spray painted marks of teenage inebriation.

An apathetic youth uses a calculator to determine whether I am of age to give myself lung cancer.

The alley beside my house is a-clutter with the [frantic/apathetic/furtive] disposal synonymous with bins night.

Along the street windows are eradicated for teenage delinquency; cigarettes flutter through careless, ageless acts of littering.

Glaring signs preempt and prohibit every move we hover on the brink of, until we are left to lament and resent the very nature of our existence, and to be content is a concept only to be found in and exploited by infomercials.

Our say in who we are disappears, forfeited to commercials that dictate every facet of the ideal ideology; and the notion of happiness [ephemeral] is only fulfilled by the arrival of the latest department store clearance sale, self-actualisation only realised by committing to the latest tabloid witch-burning.

Perhaps we have become casualties of life's car crash; the fatalities of internal and external suppression, and exist only in tomorrow as ghosts of today.

By Zoo.

3rd of June, 2008

I once knew a girl with polaroid eyes,
But good film was dear and hard to find;
So she kept them shut,
Her face closed up

But sometimes something caught those eyes,
And she'd capture it before we realised.

We'd all crowd round,
Crouch down

Watch the colours play and manifest;
The way she held it an inch from her chest,
Just like an exterior heart beat,
Unnoticed if you eyed her head to feet.

She always walked fast, in vintage's left over charm,
Her face surpassed by hair like a fire alarm.

She inhaled 60's pop as oxygen,
Her lips expelled a keepsake hallucinogen.

But her intoxicating presence, once we left,
Sidestepped, leaving us blue and bereft.

By Zoo

2nd of June, 2008

You've an antiquated novella clenched in your hands,
Its cracked spine refuses to reveal the title;
Perhaps it wearies of the judgement it receives.

I imagine maybe Homer or Kafka,
It has the proud look of a battered classic -
Well thumbed, well read, well loved.

Your patchwork coat acts the protective quilt:
Its silver zipper glares a warning to the passersby,
Who bypass you, with their binocular eyes.

I covertly watch your eyes and lips,
Synchronised in a movement with the verse,
And I fantasise about the captured work.

Back turned you exhale - a breath of smoke.
But when you turn, I'm caught by surprise:
I see between your fingers a cigarette burns;
They deliver it to your lips,

Which nondescriptly inhale the nicotine.

The cloud was not, as I thought,
A product of winter means,
Introduced to the warmth your dimpled cheeks release.

By Zoo