Tom Blake

Love in the Anthropocene

I am sitting in a bathtub full of Hama beads

I am walking very slowly towards a sunset
that obviously isn’t a real sunset
but the cover of a vaporwave album

I am drinking black coffee
that is actually black, not brown

Someone’s teeth and toenails are in the saucepan 

We planned to go to the exhibition
of Mona Lisa fan art
but the cost was prohibitive, your word 

We are whiter than Moomins’ milk
and encrusted with ginger biscuit crumbs
from our little sloop of a bed 

You wanted me to call this poem
Love in the Anthropocene

I wanted to call it
The Alien Dreams of Ripley in Alien 3

Your anecdotal legs around
my metaphorical waist
like a season finale

All we have is what we have for dinner

I sleep the sleep of a troubled Barbie doll 

I am all eyeballs and milkshakes
like someone who has never seen the grass
leaping out of a Cessna
over the South Downs

Me always wanting to be inside your
shop
and you trying to sell me a limited edition tote 

I have forgotten about the concept of memory
like a crab trying to pinch itself

Under my coat I carry a
fossilised Chromebook

All for to shoot at a merrie little doe 

This work has become a mild punishment
like calling yourself sweetcheeks
twice a day for a month
or recording yourself sleeping
then skipping through the boring bits

A good poem teaches the cat to fetch

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Tom Blake (he/him) is an author, poet and freelance music journalist living in the UK. He has had short stories published by 404Ink and Mono. His debut poetry pamphlet, Ƨ, was published in 2023 by Red Ceilings Press and his poems have appeared in various magazines including Anthropocene, The Frogmore Papers, Obsessed with Pipework and Smith’s Knoll. His novel about the Parisian artist Maurice Utrillo earned him an MA with Distinction from Middlesex University's Novel Writing programme and he writes regularly for KLOF Magazine.