Jonathan Chan

to be extraordinarily, truly, very

content in this climate demands

the relentless churning of a

compressor against the bending

heat of browned grass. one needs

only to wiggle a finger to summon

an electric vehicle, a coconut shake,

a perfectly sealed cardboard box

replete with stitched polyester,

snack packets with a large enough

air pocket for crispness, shirts woven

fast with the vitality of fingers that

bled and blistered. when the mynahs

aggregate, we call that an unkindness.

someone suggests shooting otters

with rubber bullets. “protect the koi!”

frittered away from the farm, the

warehouse, the factory, eyes are

prone to wander. an old banquet

photograph. a sneaker is sliced in

two. how did they turn the rice

blue? why did the arrows

suddenly twist down? a digital

wallet encodes “climbing profits”.

a monkey spells crank politics.

hard money masquerades as

hard. trading in your fiat. we

really love to see it. contagion

and accumulation make for an

epoch that shifts quiet then

shifts loud. all for a fistful of

invisible dollars. do you

remember what the jammy air

tastes like?

On ‘hyperconsumption’

Inspired by Daryl Lim’s poem ‘Expression of Contentment’ from his collection Anything But Human (2021), I was compelled to write a poem about the entwining of greed and consumption that has come to pattern contemporary life. Daryl’s collection styles itself as writing from wreckage, from the ache of the trash heap, from the absurdities that have come to constitute our era. My poem echoes and responds to his writing, working through the machinery that hums in order to sustain material comfort, especially as temperatures rise amidst the climate crisis, as super apps and digital services conspire to create ease and convenience, and as there remain spasms in how people think about their lives as part of or in contradistinction to the natural world. I thought about memes and distractions, the convulsions of the attention economy, and the desperation and greed that have driven so many to bet on unreliable cryptocurrencies. These intersecting forces that shape our current epoch form what historian Adam Tooze has called a ‘polycrisis’, with each crisis demanding serious thought and intention as we wend our way through the key questions that modernity, neoliberalism, and late capitalism continue to pose.

Art titled 'Wasteman' by Fleur Yearsley (@fleuryearsely on social media and fleuryearsley.com)