Definition of Man

I am terror, peril, and spectre, all at once.

Man is the dust and dust is the flesh,

This commandment that has

Waxed itself in the minds of men

Has fossilised into the monsters of today.

The albularyo runs her calloused hands through

My back, millennia sleeping in her wrinkles,

I ask her how old she is and she says that

“I saw the first man spring from the bamboo”

And my lungs full of phlegm and pollution

Cough up a childlike chuckle.

I find myself standing in my bedroom,

Armed with nothing but bum bag and asthma puffer,

Full of unspoken fury yet losing all challenge and desire,

I am imprisoned in my reflection,

My mirror is my mausoleum,

My voice reduced to a gasp in the wilderness,

Ectoplasm oozing from the screen,

Bodies reduced to light,

Finding myself refracted into a million pixels

And distributed across all public consciousness.

There are too many of my kind, I reproduce infinitely:

Invading public space,

Videos, posts, comment sections,

Taking jobs, real estate, seats at public transport,

I am a danger to society, my history is your criminal record,

I am terror, peril, and spectre, all at once.

It’s why people can’t stand to look at me,

I am golden like the sun,

It’s why people can’t stand to look at me,

I am a bright kid,

It’s why people can’t stand to look at me,

I am unpronounceable,

It’s why people can’t stand to look at me,

I am invisible and incorporeal, I float through ceilings,

It’s why people can’t stand to look at me.

I am Western Sydney’s Leslie Cheung,

I am a blusher, I quiver at a man’s touch,

I am a flamboyant boy, I bat my long eyelashes,

I am a fashionable gay, an androgynous king,

I am a man of the screen, emotionally vulnerable,

I am a household name, a queer of many roles,

I am a debutant, I will wear my red high heels,

I am a superstar, I will have an asteroid named after me,

I am artifice, I have a colonial name,

I am submissive, I long to fly from high-end hotels;

I am Australia’s Yukio Mishima,

I am a brawler, I explode at a man’s touch,

I am a withdrawn man, I keep my shoulders wide,

I am a modest digger, working-class and proud of it,

I am a man of the sword, emotionally unavailable,

I am a nobody, yet I am every passing pedestrian,

I am a veteran, I will wear my khaki jhodpurs,

I am a radical, I will have a militia built around me,

I am artifice, I have a pen name,

I am dominant, I long to die in battles of my own choosing;

Man is the ghost and ghost is the man.

Man is a product formulated in entrepreneurial suburbia,

Man is a gift preserved in ziplock bags,

Man is a rare earth mineral extracted by nonwhite child miners,

Man is a network of copper-wire capillaries,

Man is a unit of imagined digital currency,

Man is a light-emitting diode, flickering in their manufactured billions,

Man is a prisoner of the screen,

Man is the pixel and pixel is the flesh.

From his royal court, Handyong buries his hands in his face.

“All the monsters have been slain.

How can men prove themselves to be men now?”

And wept wordlessly into obscurity.

We are orphans of no great nation, no great narrative,

Baptised in oil spills, fed with the eucharist of roadkill,

Confessionals are claustrophobic, families are unaffordable,

Every bum and sinner is mourning the passing of an era,

Man is the monster and monster is the man.

No, it all must be wrong.

A man proves himself

Not by action, great deeds

Or martyrdom.

Man becomes man

When man is free

To become nothing,

Nothing at all.

Let my coffin of bamboo burn to dust.

My body waits for no ghost.