climate change has entered the chat

weather be serious / weather goddess you definitely got to set that mf on fire / they are testing for widespread weather modification / Kier Stormer, first of his name, prime minister of weather / In France, people are frying eggs and bacon on window sills / this global weather weaponization / are you the small minority enjoying this weather / i’ll politely decline any lingerie request; i simply don’t wear anything in this weather / proof that Switzerland has the best weather presenters / are they using weather weapons / you all still think weather manipulation is just a crazy conspiracy / welcoming you all to the World of Weather Manipulation & Warfare / I can’t do this / climate change has entered the chat / this is how they control the weather / are we just gonna ignore the fact this weather is bad for bed wetters / red lights over Venzuela & red lights over New York - they’ll call it “weather” / the Rothschilds have just began to lose control of the weather / on my way to meet my babe cos i no fit survive this weather alone / it’s making me snappish and listless / this is some death valley bs / what in the new world order weather is happening / climate change has entered the chat

I was talking with my friend Graeme recently and he mentioned that everyone—genuinely EVERYONE— seems to need to have the obligatory chat about the weather and how they are coping with it, before a conversation can move on to anything else. He suggested I write an amalgamation poem from those conversations. But I didn’t think the chats I’ve had about the weather were interesting enough (aside from the terrifying one about climate collapse) — it rarely gets so hot and heavy with strangers / acquaintances on the daily, however that poem might go something like this:

hot enough for you / hot enough for you / hot enough for you

—which commands its own power, I guess.

Anyway, I decided to take to X (formerly twitter) and put in the word ‘weather’ (since the word ‘hot’ produced some X-rated results). I then took the fragments and threw them together. A little choice, a little chance…

The exercise is a great way of generating new material, taking from a cross-section of social media discourse. It reads as a mix of jokes, memes, complaint, observation, hyperbole, and conspiracy content all mashed together, and importantly pushes you out of your own ruts of language. Why is it mine? Because I chose it. I choose which fragments to appropriate, how to curate them, how they sit alongside one another, and how the poem is formatted on the page.

This technique I use for found text poetry classes was inspired by Tom Jenks’s An Anatomy of Melancholy, a social media re-write of Robert Burton’s work The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621). You can find more about that and Tom’s other work here.1

I also used a similar technique for my pamphlet “I’m Very Interested in Falling in Love with You” published by Run Amok Press a few years ago. Similar, in that I curated a couple of pages for each word taken from the title, if that makes sense.

(Cover image by the director and cinematographer Leo Leigh)

It’s kind of fun, and I curated the whole pamphlet in a few hours, leaving the seriousness of my research behind for a bit. Here are a couple of pages:

I digress, but the weather poem exercise reminded me of the heat in this poem Like a Heatwave Burning by John Stammers (published in Poetry Society) because I like it for the way it expresses how physically oppressive heat is, but it also becomes the medium through which heartbreak is experienced but also I applaud this line

‘I got out my character
and began the tasks of a lifetime.’

which seems like such an inventive way of saying ‘I sorted my life out’

Enjoy!

It was the hottest summer on record;
we flew into rages at the drop of a pin.
The heat made cacti of us all.

I woke up hot crazy at one in the morning.
The day’s sun had heated up the sky so heavy
it felt like being ironed.

We sat on the curbside like hot bananas
and Jane read me the Miranda
of our future lives together:

there would be no future lives together.
I’d never heard the nightjay squawk
so damnably shrilly in the
still, still stilly.

My eyeballs made sinuous rills.
I sloughed on my sandals and loped
onto a streetcar named expire.

Tyres welded cars to the road.
I got out my character
and began the tasks of a lifetime.

Pine trees collapsed in a dead swoon
all over the place. Believe you me,
honeydew features, it was hot.