neo-conceptualisation 

by kal mehta

Here is something entirely unoriginal. It is the weight of my loneliness and the repulsiveness of my lack of productivity, packed into cliches about running the rat race and feeling like no one truly understands you. I bring you pain in a stream of identical American mall punks from the 2010s, a raccoon-eyed tragicomedy in eternal play. Here are piles of self-help books; white covers, cheerful blonde women in button-up shirts and veneer-white grins. The subversion becomes a trope: here are reams of terrible tear-stained poetry written in a million teenage bathrooms, and here is depression incarnate in an overplayed top 40s song. If you listen closely, I can give you the collective hum of a thousand razors, breakup buzzcuts, paper shredders. You have heard this before. Season after season: same rhyme, same reason. I cut and paste the words of the world and hand them to you in raw-edged magazine collages, sticky-fingered and full of baseless pride. 

You have seen this before. Would you be impressed that I quoted Duffy? Would you be, still, if I reminded you that a parrot could repeat Der Holle Rache in seconds and the majority of us rot here, silent, weak primate vocal cords buzzing empty? An opera singer reprises Mozart, who quoted Bach who adapted Vivaldi, and we crawl through time like so many worms, adding specks of dust to a vapid monolith. Here is something I made: here is someone who did it too, but better. Do you care? Here is my heart weighed out in Arial 11 on an untitled Google document. Scale it to a Tolkien novel and lose it amongst the pages; I can bring you a hundred more that are the same. Put down the book and eat them like pomegranate seeds; identical, ruby red, minuscule between your fingers. Hello, consumer. I bring you ideas so base they are finger food. 

Here is me, the sum of my parts in a box of flesh and ink. Here are my proportions; you may compare them to the population average. Do you know about the distortion that is hating yourself; do I need to tell you? The masses cry it constantly and my words are like so many flavorless echoes. Tired? Tired, tired, tired. Here is something sad and tired. It is me, a supplier. Do you think you could hire me? I can give you the weight on both our shoulders, pressed into old words that my throat tires of repeating. You can convince yourself that the repetition soothes you. Tip me in paper for our troubles, and save me the trouble of lying here, searching desperately between my ribs for a selling point I can pick like a splinter out of the bone. 

Save yourself the calf-burning exertion of the hunt. You will never read books different enough, watch shows strange enough, feast on ideas obscure enough: save yourself the misery of being interesting. Here is a mirror; here is you. Here is your face, trite and beautiful, your ample body sated on repetition. Do you remember what it feels like to devour something new? I bring you the concept of an impossible quarry; you may as well pursue it from beneath your bed-linens than on foot, because originality dissipated into dust a century or so ago. Even in telling you this I repeat, repeat, repeat. Can you hear me? I say who I am and I stutter, tongue weighed down by citations. And you have nothing to say to me: recycled praise smells like burnt plastic and goes down even bitterer. Here is the air we share; it is dusty and dry, so dense with reproduction that our eyes water. Can you breathe? When I speak the references that my words are made of choke me. 

Here is something stock and platitudinal. An article served with a side of pretension and stuffed with spiced dramatic litany; here is your plate, be welcome to the table. I have nothing else to give you. Here is a helping of my soft and shopworn mind, here you are, eating content. Here is the last of what I have. 

Will you pay me?