“The Anonymous Collection”

Girl so pretty she cut her face off
Based on a true story of a 70s London punk rocker.

People saw this girl they never knew
And believed the fable of venus ever true
She sat upon a table of heathens from every view
And prayed Aphrodite would birth her anew

But then they chased and she went into hiding

She stared at her face and spent every night crying
They glared at her waist and would fight trying
To be there in her bed next to her lying
But when she spoke her words were flying
No one ever took note of her tales, so inspiring

She never liked the look of rope
Or the simple thought of death by choke
The rest is a medical footnote
But ill tell you with this page i wrote
After this spell youll burn sage for hope
She turned her vain into dope
Then grabbed a kitchen knife
She always had dreamed of switching lives
So she skinned herself alive
And thinned away her velvet thighs
She sinned her cheeks away that night
She lost a helmet that once was prized
She joined the freaks who dance disguised

She stared at her face and spent every night crying
She feared it all a waste so she started lying
“I was seared and blazed by a fire left unguarded”
“Then they wrote off my face as dearly departed”

They glared at her waist and would fight trying
To be there in her bed next to her lying
But when she spoke her words were flying
No one ever took note of her tales, so inspiring.

can u smell home

can u smell it
sterile perfume
medicinal candles
can u smell it
through duck egg blue
and cream corridors
dreams and flying concords
can u smell it
through padded walls
and sitting crowds
kauri ever tall
and spitting aloud
can you smell it
through the crowds
and buckets of vomit
soft pastel towels
and a chance to be honest
can u smell home
can u smell it?

MEDIA102

Rain on my cig
And fire in the forest
i step on twigs
and admire pain in the chorus
left to me
the worlds dry and porous
the next movie
is absurd lies of horace

the intricacy of an adjunct
coffee and drips in me
i havent had lunch
novelty and change
entropy decays
the film is the audience
recursive applause begins

a thread is yours for the taking,
then unravels the making
complexities shaking
reality blinks and flinches
walter murch and lynch
the altar of church is screening
choose pixels of meaning
deleuze and a mirror
lose your mind to paint a picture

Somnambulist

Put the double c in ecco
2 grams calcium and i let go
Mumbling w my ket nose
Pray and a shaking nun knows
Das cabinet des
Somnambulist
past manifested stress
Im happy rinse my hands with lint
A manic prince’s castle
Windows stained and shadows dim
unpacking bands and parcels

3d printed embreo

an ismus of lust
in this i trust
a thin kiss and touch
bargain with dust
have you seen her garden?
made of aloe and stardom

parabolas explode,
then collapses; the whole

Purple light & movement across shadows
Her still life and a 3d printed embreo.
into cement i am swallowed,
this life was always borrowed,
kiss me tomorrow

hyperclouds

The ceiling disguises another door
The feeling hides in a bag with more
Peeling thighs, you fag, you whore
Stealing nights, the moon it soars
I want more and more
The ceilings just another door

key bumps in a dark room
trust in the cartoon
star dust and a part moon
one day must be my last soon

i do more ketamine
to make my open eyes dream
its always as it never seems
light refracts thru a tethered beam
at night in bed the ceiling dreams
in fact im ahead of where the weathers been

the page is running out
my pen prays and writes aloud

By Dylan

“Lumps”

I’m in front of the bathroom mirror, hunched over and on my tiptoes, holding my testicles up with one hand and checking them for lumps. 
Face up on the basin – which now has strands of pubic hair on it – is a wikihow-style tutorial for ‘How to check yourself for testicular cancer.’ It emphasizes that I should be searching diligently for lumps. 
I’d woken up a few hours ago with this dull achy pain, but brushed it off as having masturbated too hard to the idea of hooking up with my ex, after I apologised for breaking up with her and she asked me “What do you want?”- but I couldn’t think about what I wanted, and I still can’t, so I said sorry for apologising then logged off and then jacked off into the toilet bowl, and the late-night grossness of the whole thing meant I deserved my nuts hurting — if that was what had caused it.
Then it kept hurting way past waking up, a pain deep within the scrotum, drilled entirely into the left side. Google told me that it might be testicular cancer. 
It comes back to me, a thought in syn with pain, as I’m probing the top of my nut where it connects to the tube with my thumb, that I have bell-clapper deformity in just that testicle, my doctor, while taking off gloves covered in warm ultrasound jelly, said this made me prone to intermittent torsion: I have to be conservative with exercise, I’m not allowed on trampolines, I tell girls this means I can’t top them, I tell girls that if I have trouble getting it up, bell-clapper deformity is why; I have the worst left testicle in the world. 
 
It can’t be torsion, though. Even if it had just been a blip of it, it would have hurt in a looney-toons YEEEOOOOUUCH! inducing kind of way, or like when Jerry hits Tom on the tail with a mallet, or like how I imagine SpongeBob felt in the Season 6 episode ‘The Splinter’. 
 
 
I pause my probing and bring up a google AI overview for ‘y do left nut hurts causes no torsion’ and I’m going down it, like a checklist. I’m getting comfortable letting technology handle these sorts of things for me. My clothes, food, music, and soon three-week long delivered wars with women under the ‘creatives’ tag on Tinder, conveyor-belt fed to me from an algorithm. But it can’t tell me for sure why my nuts hurt. 

I wonder if it’s my new dispo… I wonder if the heavy metals in the thing have sunk way down past my lungs and into my stomach and then perforated like sour-apple shrapnel into my nutsack. I wonder if smoking can cause all the other types of cancer, like testicular cancer, or if it can only cause malignancy in my throat and lungs.   

I cradle them both and almost hum a lullaby through grit teeth as another wave of pain rockabyes through my scrotum. That’s what google AI overview calls it, a scrotum. 

Gently roll over your Scrotum or, 

Check the Scrotum for signs of discoloration or redness or, 

Scrotum may contain a hernia or, 

Part of your Scrotum may have visible lumps.

By Joe

Love me down to the bone 

Love me down to the bone 

caress my skin, until its raw 

rid me of this sinful flesh. 

Kiss my mouth, that’s said too much 

or not enough, when words are due. 

Perhaps that sweet brush of skin 

will fix my broken tongue.  

Hold my head in your hands 

Tangle your fingers through my brain 

fix the bits of me that can’t seem to change 

Your touch, might finally do it. 

4 Titles 

  • An exercise in improvised poetry, alongside Taika, Alex.  

We were strangers, once.  

And now it seems, once more.  

“You want to do what?” I’d responded,  

Pretending not to hear 

unable to believe 

Unwilling to let this end.  

A master of his fate, he can’t help but 

cut and run. 

Pretending not to care 

always looking to leave 

refusing to let his heart mend. 

I’ve got a ticket to oblivion,  

I’m just looking for the station, 

scouring grimy bars, and muddy streets, 

searching in crystal cold waves, tall green trees.  

The train is soon to depart. 

Sausage pasta season 

It’s sausage pasta season again 

A feeling in the air, 

the dark nights whisper it to me.  

The dampness hugging my ankles, wet trouser cuffs, warns me of what is to come: 

Of days spent in gloom, nights spent in the lounge 

huddling the speaker, looking for scraps of warmth in a song. 

The playlists begin to shuffle, slowly change my frame of mind. 

My head is foggy, my windows in the morning.  

My throat is scratching again; the frost has made me its home. 

This all, and more. cured. 

all cured, by an Alex cooked bowl 

of sausage pasta. 

By Amira

Future 

Think of your future 

That sentence that every teenager knows 

The question that lingers like the heatwaves that seem to last longer and longer every year 

Where do you see yourself in the future? 

Kids, 

Answer that important question, 

Think about it while you stare out the window 

At the low lying land  

Imagine your future 

Where the ocean swallows everything up 

Just like the landlords 

And corporations will swallow your pockets 

Leaving hollowed growls 

Like displaced polar bears  

Making themselves at home  

Just kidding 

There is no home 

Not for them 

Not for you 

Not for anyone. 

Think about it, 

As you eat your dinner of overpriced vegetables and plastic ridden fish 

Eyes glued to the six o clock news 

Like a courtroom eyeing a death sentence 

Will you too in the future, 

Sit here watching the same horrors 

The same stories of death and genocide  

And will they too call it a war 

And turn a blind eye 

While more and more children are stripped of a future 

Think about it, 

While you scroll past headlines every five seconds 

Gen Z lazy and won’t work multiple hours for minimum wage 

Gen Z Turning Down Jobs because they can’t afford to pay for the commute* 

(Then go check the bus prices now that the government stopped subsidizing public transport in favour of throwing more pollutants into our lives) 

While you read another article about the ‘politics’ of human rights 

Another queer child 

Another person of colour 

Another woman 

Murdered 

Future stolen 

By those who failed to protect them 

When they needed them most 

Think about it while you realise 

That you have no control 

You will spend the rest of your life 

Scrolling past reports about how your generation is lazy and entitled  

Eating what is left of our dying earth 

Witnessing unspeakable acts 

Swallowed up 

Hollowed out 

The doomsday clock ticking faster and faster 

Hoping things will change 

But they never do.  

CNN news: Why doesn’t Gen Z care about their future? 

*https://nypost.com/2024/11/04/lifestyle/broke-gen-zs-forfeit-jobs-over-commuting-costs-attire-report/ 

Parasites 

 We leech off you 

Feast on your brains 

Suckling on knowledge 

Yearning for the feel of the paper between our teeth  

Let us taste it 

Yes we 

The parasites 

The ones that suck away your ‘hard earned’ money 

How dare we feed  

How dare we keep our mouths full 

When yours are wide open 

Waiting to be stuffed to the brim 

With bullshit 

You can’t handle  

The squelching of vermin  

beneath you 

You turn away 

Pick us off one by one 

Like we’re something to get rid of 

And not something that you keep alive 

When the parasites turn against you 

Will you pretend it was you who raised them?