Love is the New Hate

Sean M Whelan
(Hit & Miss) $12.95 PB

My friend is reading Sean's poem, 'A Dick of Her Own', and she thinks it's hilarious; 'this is really my kind of thing', she says.

I guess I like it too. It's curiously romantic:

One gin soaked evening while you were sitting together on a couch in a gay bar watching gay porn on a big gay screen, you told her this. 'I know you're not my girlfriend but one time I'd like to kiss you just to see what it tastes like.' And she said, 'Well I guess the taste would depend on what I've been eating, or what brand of lipstick I'm wearing at the time. Or,' and she held up her finger for the final point, 'it might also depend on which boy I kissed last.' And hearing that felt like a midget punching you in the heart, so you dropped the subject and you both stared back at the big gay dicks in the big gay porn.

My friend likes that poem and I think she would like to be that girl. I'm not sure if I'd rather be the amorous pretender, the midget, or one of the guys on screen.

Love is the new hate. White is the new black. Let's leave our insecurities at the door. Let's be close, let's watch gay porn together in a spirit of undefined companionship. There are ten poems in the book, poems that are dedicated (I think) to love instead of hate, freedom instead of possession, confusion and frustration in preference to toeing the line. Are they poems? If they are poems, the lines are very long. They are half-way between poems and very short stories. Sometimes they are just a series of points:

The moon landing was faked.

You keep my scarf by your bed knowing my scent is caught there.

Humans once slept standing up.

David Letterman is a robot.

The poems are intimate and absurd, surrealist in a postmodern kinda way. They don't explain or barrack for anything, which can be alternately disappointing or thought-provoking. But there is almost always an edge of wit:

Every evening at dusk she climbs onto the roof. She tells her housemates that she's meditating. But she secretly reads the day's news events to the evening sky. So that God can learn from his mistakes.

Sean is a master of the killer one-liner - a capacity that may have been honed in the fearsome dog-eat-dog bloodbath of Melbourne spoken word. The flip-side to this, as it turns out, is often a lack of structure. If we are to believe the poems, perhaps this chaos is apt: Sean has little idea how to structure his poems, just as he has little idea how to structure his life. So maybe it's a willful characteristic: who needs structure? FUCK structure. Maybe.

Read Total Cardboard's interview with Sean Whelan

Review by John Mansfield