Sex Appeal: A Found Poem

I was thinking about the confused mash-up of media, sensation, product and role in JG Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition. The impact of the snippets we take in without context; that we stitch together ourselves behind the scenes to create strange, private narratives.

The assault of information and imagery has increased immensely since that book was written in the late 1960s. Many times a day social media gives us an abundance of raw sentiments, adverts and articles, and we process them all in parallel to real-world stimuli, hungers and emotions. To take it all in we skim-read, we focus on what draws the eye or persuades the dopamine receptors. What kind of stream of consciousness does that create?

Sex Appeal is a found poem I put together from 23 fragments of consecutive tweets on my feed. It was a fun exploration of the messages I am feeding myself each day.

Sex Appeal

Master of the dark arts
Has sex appeal
Blandness is stimulating
Colonels, surgeons and honest men
These guys have the complete package

You knew where you were heading
A full cellular reconstruction
Has it even been a year?

Talks in Mexico about peyote
Doing enough to increase engagement
If you have no filth, some will be provided

These are hard times
Real world symbols
Now fully sold out

Much less happy and more sad
People are against indoctrination these days
The most glorious
You can’t get that back

Give me death
Based on personal experience
Kidney delivered by drone
God have mercy
For love.