It’s true, you don’t tend to see many complications of poetry entirely dedicated to heating and cooling. But so far as I’m concerned, my anthology was inspired by the seasons, just as were many great works of art. I’m just going for a bit of a narrower scope…and if people can’t see that, then I ain’t got no time for them.
People couldn’t even sit still for ONE of my poems when I read them out tonight, and I chose one with only twelve stanzas to start them off ‘Lula, My Toorak Air Conditioning Friend of Summertime’. If I do say so myself, it’s an utterly heartbreaking achievement in the written word that depicts a forbidden summer romance between a girl who fixes air conditioning units for a living and a guy who grew up in an ultra-green family who think that electricity in general is killing the planet. Air con is particularly bad, obviously, because they believe all that cool air was harvested from non-consenting ice cubes and it’s thus complicit in global warming. And to everyone proofreading this saying that sort of person does not exist, well…it’s a metaphor! And that means it doesn’t need to either exist or make sense! What you need to understand is that this romance is forbidden, and is thus the best kind of romance.
I particularly like stanza seven, which is talking about their hot and cooling love while using the language of the air conditioning unit. It’s thematically-appropriate, you see, and that means that it doesn’t really matter what I write because it fits the theme. Most people who aren’t writers can’t understand why “your love is like a remote control, lowering the temperature of my heart and frustrating the people around me like when you do that in an office and people complain” is a meaningful phrase. Or how “Our passion is like air conditioning service in Beaumaris, arriving on time and getting the job done under fair work conditions” actually speaks of great tragedy because many types of love are NOT fair or equal.
It’s commentary. On life. And air con.
-Ronan