Toby Fitch

 [ARTIST STATEMENT]Gifted Michael Farrell's poem 'War Doesn't Happen' to respond to, I was struck/stroked/stricken by the line, "Cultivate a new fate". Knowing that in a Farrell poem the title is often the spore that spurs it on to things unplanned, I chose to adhere to such a plan in mine. But of course I swerved, punned, and came unstuck as I unplanned my way through a loose line-by-line transformation (is the speaker in mine the one addressed in Farrell's, or the many faces brought to his poem's bed?). I've augmented and inverted ideas in the original while attemptationing an othered poem of my own (hoopfully). I'm allsore cultivating a knew foot, prosodically sparking, in witch itch lion flowers on inter the nixt.

"Cultivate a New Foot"
after Michael Farrell's 'War Doesn't Happen'

 

Toby Fitch is the author of Rawshock (which won the Grace Leven Prize 2012) and Jerilderies (Vagabond 2014). He lives in Sydney and has a new book of poems forthcoming called Bloomin' Notions.

 

okay i'll face the revolving door & pop
out the other side of you an orca
walks into the room
separated from the water we used
to swim through tragic

ally, feel free to shoot me an email
or drone on above those abandoned things we liked
but no longer tack
back together, my exes
always get cross when i don't

core the family journey
smells like a long day caked i'm in
tendering to be softer
as a friend you became yum & seventeen again tho
inhospitable in the dear head

phones i bought so flog me
since you've floored me already drunk n smiling naked
but don't liken me to Heidegger
too ashamed of what i google late at night
life seeming more real as we bear

the phoney present right-now tweets
of who came out the queerest
incredibly the gossiping planet will still
be there on the weekend
no madder how many selves weaken the collective

bargaining agreement
to only be hurt by words burrowed
like fruit we ate from our beds, cultivating anew
future lots of nothing
hop on or tomorrow will've happened