ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Shane Ryan is an art student from Boston, Massachusetts with a love for both visual and verbal languages. He spends his time either writing or pursuing realism with a ballpoint pen.
Catatonic, drooling, a park-bench idiot,
I reach a cheap state of Samadhi,
I don’t drink: I prefer to trip, not to stagger.
Finally I rise, an ambulatory toddler,
A flâneur on a drugged meander,
I raise my nose to the finest effusion,
I patronize a halal truck,
If only to test the new interface,
How peculiar the ingestion of meat,
How sorry the animal bred into agonizing fructivity,
How cruel the hunter,
The anthropocentrist convinced of a manifest destiny,
Charmed by the furtherment of the human project,
The brutal expression of supremacy.
I must finish my gyro or waste the wasting of the lamb,
Draw to its limit the needlessness of the death-clap, the lights-out moment.
I continue my stroll, pass a condom on the ground,
Recall the night before,
How strange the coupling,
How beautiful the manhood of David.
I hear Morrissey’s tragic baritone,
I should vaunt his image.
I look at a window display, at a mannequin who wears my face,
And my features disassemble,
And the stories that complicate the doubled gaze are lost,
And I wear the mannequin’s face.
How novel the architecture around me,
Deconstructed, reconstructed, by turns,
I pause, remain still but for a slight sway,
Nameless subjects of a sea I part pass me,
Every moment becomes liquid and funnels into this one,
The swish of cars, the babble of the collective,
Establish space and place my personhood precisely.
But the sublime moment elapses,
The comedown comes, and I redose,
Once, twice, indefinitely.
Shotgun fired from white without,
Stars broadcast, holes in the mantel,
Contained the fire, in the skull that
Sheltered the information
And gave it shade.