Have you ever had your flatmate walk in while you masturbate? It’s that, except your flatmate is an eternal omnipotent being who’s probably not real, but that hasn’t stopped him from loitering ethereally in the corner. Another reluctant voyeur, disgusted in your every pubescent impulse, who instead of shutting the door and leaving you to your shame just kind of stands there and maintains eye contact in all his omniscient splendour.
But that won’t stop you. Because its 2001, the perfect storm – unrelenting hormones and dial-up Internet. The only computer sits in the lounge, adorned with your parents handwritten tax return and a picture of your recently deceased grandmother.
So you planned the heist of your father’s magazines, so meticulous it would make Danny Ocean proud, you didn’t even need the assistance of a wisecracking Brad Pitt or the plot device masquerading as Julia Roberts.[1] You have a 20-minute window before dad’s home from doing generic dad stuff. Lets face it; you’ve come to far not to.
But now its 2019
and God doesn’t watch you anymore
God closed his eyes the moment you delivered a sermon
that could only be heard from the inside of someone else’s skin.
God can’t hear you anymore
You are Moses, preaching the 10 Commandments
from a mountain of leather and sweat.
God won’t speak to you anymore
They write psalms on the back of your head
buried in childhood pillows.
God doesn’t want you anymore
Your mouth performs pagan rituals on borrowed mattresses.
The discoloured sheets, your own Shroud of Turin.
God doesn’t need you anymore
You have all the guilt you’ll ever need.
God can’t find you anymore
If Jesus were around in 2019 would he eat ass like the rest of us?
If he was you’d let him watch.
You’d show him the repressed, middle-class, hetero-normativity
that perv always wanted for you.
He’d watch you: slip off your Barkers suit, your wrinkled shirt, your playful socks,
slide lazily into bed, distracted by the housing crisis.
Put on some Coldplay
‘Lights will guiiiiide you home’
Light a hummus scented candle
‘And igniiiiiite your soul’
Stare deeply into her eyes, safe in the systemic income disparity
‘And I will try’
Think of the All Blacks/cum uncontrollably
‘To fix you.’
[1] In Ocean’s 12 Tess Ocean, the character played by Julia Roberts, disguises herself as Julia Roberts for the purpose of the heist, only to be later found out by the antagonist as an imposter and not the real Julia Roberts. This still keeps me awake most nights.
Jordan Hamel is a New Zealand-based poet and public servant. He grew up in the South on a diet of Catholicism and masculine emotional repression. He is the 2018 New Zealand Poetry Slam Champion and has performed at festivals across Aotearoa. He also has work published or forthcoming by University of Queensland Press (Australia), Speculative Books (United Kingdom), Blackmail Press (New Zealand) and elsewhere. Find him on Twitter @JordanHamel_
Gem Blackthorn is QMT's Sex Columnist, and the author/curator of Lust Thrust Thursdays. Send her your submissions and questions at sexsexsex [at] queenmobs.com Image: Oceans Twelve, Warner Bros. Pictures, 2004