TV Blues
Life is hard with twenty shows to watch.
You can’t keep up when things get rough.
Forever on your guard, a writer might botch
favourite characters, write them weak instead of tough,
or ruin a scene that’s meant to be tender
between two characters that truly love each other
and make it violent because selling out the gender
is more important than love between brother and sister.
An actor could turn out a massive dick
and ruin everything with racism newfound,
forced hiatus from network politic,
or worse yet, cancelled pre-finale, all confounded!
Life is hard when your twenty shows have hit a wall;
it’s even harder with nothing left once you’ve watched them all.
Zeitgeist 2014
As much as I would like to write like that,
with but one sentence across a whole page
acting as a whole poem with silent sage
brief wisdom, I am not one for caveats
about drizzling hurricanes and mismatched
destinies or darkened minds trapped in rage
at the sweetest of things in this world’s age.
All these are the most sorry written acts.
I would much prefer to write of women
in love, and all things that for once go well.
Life today is lived through onyx lenses,
and so dreaming of fairytales hidden
in plain sight is not realism’s death-knell
but bravery, in optimistic defenses.
Life
Life is the longest thing I’ll ever do,
and it’s still too short to listen to you,
with your misogynistic, piece of shit
ignorant chat-ups; you don’t have a clue.
Don’t talk to me you stupid, sexist fuck;
I can’t help think that you’re a massive schmuck.
You demand underage girls flash their tits
and hound them on the street to suck your cock.
You’re not funny with your anti-gay talk
or your rape jokes behind us while we walk.
Take that fedora elsewhere; fuck right off
with that “chivalry;” I can’t help but baulk.
Life is the longest thing I’ll ever do,
and it’s still too short to listen to you.
Audrey El-Osta is a Melbourne based writer studying Linguistics and Psychology at Monash University. A collector of cookbooks, listener of audiobooks and reader of poetry, she lives with four cats and three humans that don’t quite measure up. Her work explores themes of femininity, sexuality and womanhood, mental illness, comedy and linguistic identity.
