Eyeball, Slice, Moon
Shari Kocher (University of Melbourne, Australia)
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Do not slice me across the eye the way you slice the moon from the sky
and sever the cheese in body parts for your erotic consumption.
You do not have the right. Do not pretend you cannot see the deathly
company you keep, do not say to weep is weak for where are your eyes
but hidden in the blind disguise you claim you cannot see
your part in the whole damned profitable enterprise.
Do not think you are entitled to pull the wool to cut the bull
to make me into a thing. You are not entitled. You have no right. Right,
right and moving further right by stealth and wealth in the moonless
night. I tell you I am not yours. I tell you and I tell you again
I am not yours to have and to hold, I am not yours to break
and to mould, I am not yours full-stop. Like the old song, I sing it again:
you do not own me. And what’s more you do not own Her or Her
or She or She. You do not like this? You vilify? You call me harpy
witch, hysteric, whore? Feminist! How you yawn, such a bore.
She, me, all of the We you do not see, we are ourselves and not the moon
though she is ours and not to spoon or eat or take or rape
with pens or knives or flags or tanks, to roll on, lie on, penetrate!
Go to hell! Take yourself to some cliff and jump off it since it’s death
you’re after, why not take your own feet out to the blue blue sea to see
what you can see there, and if the bear lives over the mountain, go find
the bear who lives over the mountain and under the sea: search for the
bear in yourself. Don’t search me.
And do not cut. And do not slice.
You think the edge is where the culture is: you’re wrong. Tear
is your flair, your bipolar snare, heaven and hell in Un Chien Andalou
skip to the Lou my darling and flush yourself down it.
Hopefully drown it. Drown in your own butchered flood of blood
washed out to sea
with slick and slide and tide and scum and all your dreams of
dismembered heads and bums and eroticised ants and holes
in the pants (your dream in the woods, not mine!) so go find a landmine
and fill it! Hear yourself scream and fillet your own chest rank
with the bullets of dreaming, skip to the Lou my darling
with a dead donkey on your shoulders and bell ropes tolling key notes
on old baby grands, all your parts cut and sliced like priests on a pulley
skip to the moon, and diced like onion with shoes on a rope and dancing
eyes on the table! No more meat and no more hanging! Don’t make
the fish swim backwards and the horse eat hay and the cow make milk
and call this Woman, call this Woman ready for slaughter.
She is not yours! She is not even your daughter! You have forsaken
the right to claim her as your daughter. She is herself and not
a phallic extension of you.
She is Durga and not your hell she is not your heaven either she is
Isis Astarte Diana Hecatate Demeter Kali Inana
She is not yours! Back off with your reeking sacks of fear and loathing
or you will find one hundred arms with holy weapons trained on you
and keening in one thousand tongues a song more powerful
than screaming! Now place the moon gently back in the sky
and go back to your caves to learn to live
or else to die.
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Shari Kocher has lived in many places, including Dublin, and now resides between the Yarra Valley and Melbourne where she is undertaking a Masters in Creative Writing at Melbourne University. Her work has been published in various journals including Blue Dog, Famous Reporter and Overland, and in 2002 she was the winner of the UNE Literary Award (Open Poetry Section) for her sequence poem ‘Unborn Child’. She is currently working on her first poetry collection.
