I should tell you how ridiculous I am sometimes. I should tell you how most of my best ideas and insights come from me being ridiculous. I should tell you how much I love writing found poems, that there’s a particular kind of lightning I feel pinging around inside me as I excavate the poem hiding in someone else’s text. I should tell you that I laughed nervously to myself when I decided to use Michael Fassbender’s interviews as the basis for a series of found love poems. I should tell you that I could make up the woman’s side of the conversation from my own hunger but I needed someone else to ghostwrite a lover. I should tell you that shame and hunger would appear in these poems even if those films didn’t exist. I should tell you that I never understood what I have in common with Wonder Woman until these poems. I should tell you that poems are fiction and true too.
“The Penultimate Proposal”
(from Found: A Love Story)
So, you’re in this prison on moral grounds?
Shall I show you something that’s really
going to make you laugh? We are prisoners
of a coming-of-age situation: bodies
deadpan, naked except for hunger.
Hero or monster, you must understand
hunger is a notorious maze, my heart just another
prize-winning protest-of-one.
Is your silence how it feels just before
tender violence breaks out?
(Poem found in “Michael Fassbender on playing Bobby Sands in Hunger” by Sheryl Garratt, Telegraph, 10/18/08)
