by Michael Farrell.
‘I live in the ghetto’, certain guys I know sing, and I hear the word
‘ghetto’ as an unstable metaphor. How else? Tag me if you have any
feedback. Critique is always care, ideally. Care for the song, care for
those of Wonder, in this case. But also about the resolute trope of not
Being shut down. My name is Geppetto, I live in a nineteenth-century
novel, but my name may be heard in the echo of Pixar’s screams.
I once carved a box of matches big enough to make a house from,
but they set fire to themselves, and burned down the peaches.
The meaning of America, businessmen tell me, is father figure and son
figure getting on together. Maybe it is, maybe so. But big brother
gets on with no one. Do you have a big brother, one that watches you
on TV? That wants to stop oppression forever, just as soon as
They assume total power? A plastic bag slips down a mountainside.
I’m not English: they see plastic in the sea. I don’t know much about
ghetto language, but appreciate it, the novels that go into it, just to make
a matchstick. Every time I want to make a comment, though, or touch
Your shoulder, my pencil turns into a finger that, wherever it goes
bleeds ink. Perhaps pastoral’s a sibling of the ghetto, turning
every conversation back to the weather. Weather as an unstable centre
that keeps us above the ground that we pretend to settle on, and value.
