Tim Frank

Somewhere on the Internet

Did you know, you say,

There’s a Gala apple

circling the sun, warped by solar flares

eating itself with yellow teeth

dripping juices like blood after a kill

Did you know, you say,

There’s a politician in red China

who can’t stop blowing his nose

in the shower, on his bike, over candlelit dinners.

The nation watches

as the news reports his daily

flow

sparking hunger strikes in shantytowns, and a housewife revolution.

It won’t be long until everyone bows down to a new sterile god

Did you know, you say,

Smartphones leave thought-patterns on your cheek

like footprints on frozen lakes

or tyre streaks on dusty parking lots outside lonesome supermarkets

Did you know, you say

there’s a psychic TV evangelist from Germany, seven foot tall, who blasted an aquarium full of piranhas and sharks with a pump action shotgun,

then fell asleep in her getaway vehicle.

You’re crazy, I say, I mean is any of this true in any way at all?

Yes, yes, you say. Google it, it’s all online!

Sacred Sales

You laid your sales gun beneath a guillotine and sold a disco full of false teeth to your grandma. She rocked a leather jacket, joined a biker gang and fled to the hills, where nothing has a price.

You said a Big Mac can cure tumours but you’re on the spectrum yourself and there’s blood on your hands—licking TV screens, spiking your tongue with pompous military manoeuvres.

Everyone is watching as you abuse your beverage, seduce a fry, thrash on stage with a salty mosh pit. The crowd chant false names—they think you’re famous.

You say you’d go green if your friends weren’t knee-deep in anorexics but, the fact is, there’s more money in Moog synthesisers and grazed knees. My solidarity is your baby-talk. You shout down posters and ride dogs into billboards—anything to link your message to the treachery of psychosis.

There’s a wedding ceremony—attritional by nature—with white whales on video and Buzz Aldrin by the altar, selling frozen yogurt and flat white coffees.

You hand out samples to the bride and groom with beating hearts, hoping to sell them the ocean floor lined with fruit loops and philanthropic threats. You even sell geometry to drunks in temples where tired pole dancers strip. Maybe it’s the shaft of light from the inner sanctum that makes you see dollar signs.

You’re shameless. You sold God a burger, slipped Jesus a flyer and bet on the saints to roll out the apocalypse.

You’re a sociopathic salesman with a mirror and a brick in a suitcase. You’re just another dealer in uniform, gorging on your own product, getting high on your own supply.

Interpol

There’s a secret sprawling fortress located in rural Europe, known by forgotten scholars as Interpol. It has radio antennas reaching out from its bruised eyes, oozing pus and rust.
It consumes minds with the grace of a professional golf swing and eats its young with saffron and cardamom seeds. It spouts the philosophy of Leon Trotsky and is a master of the dark arts— moving through prosthetic streets, pretending to be what it’s not.
Interpol wants a world blinded by the sun, to wreck artists and soldiers in the ghastly heat. It follows street dwellers with mad tattoos and actors lost in the web of their flailing limbs.
Sometimes, however, it beckons weeping mothers and hugs them with its fists. Sometimes it escorts drunken football fans safely home as they trip and howl in town squares. And when couples sigh in each other’s arms, whispering like distant trains, Interpol dreams of autumn leaves stacked neatly into ten-foot berms.
Interpol wants you to know it’s not afraid to feel.
And yet it is constantly gorging, strangling, and brawling with its sloppy teeth and tongue. It peers into the night’s eye, expands along the coast and sinks into the sea. It rolls across the ocean floor, tumbles through waves, sweeping onto the shore, infecting bathers on the beach and beyond.
But then sleeping enemies finally take a stand after years of suppressed rage. They swarm the streets, stab protest signs into manicured lawns, and unpick themselves from its poisonous grip.
Confronted by furious minds, Interpol slumps into the guts of grief—bleeding, humbled. It’s used to having its own way like a schoolboy bully, but it doesn’t take long for Interpol to fall into a state of ruin, crumbling into soft cement. Almost overnight, its time has passed.
But Interpol will be missed by some, it will be, after all the earth is scorched and decaying like nuclear remains, in need of constant scrutiny and midnight vigils, no matter how savage.