I'm Inventing, Mostly

Hello, guys, gals, and non-binary pals! I am back this week with some stupid poetry. I hope you are all holding up okay this most spookiest week of the year. Yep, the ghoulies are out, I am being told. The goblins and demons, too, per my sources, and even the the big bad devil himself is out roaming and demanding my candy. What in the hell has this world come to.

One thing we thankfully don't have to worry too much about, around my neck of the woods at least, is the dastardly were-rabbit, and for that, I am very grateful. If you are not familiar with this creature, he came to being in the 2005 Academy-Award-winning film, Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of The Were-Rabbit. A film that follows our favorite British, clay, dog-and-dipshit duo of inventors. I'd say entrepreneurs even--the movie, like most of the W&G shorts before it, finds the pair looking to turn their passion for invention into cheese money. Why not just invent a machine that turns anything you want into cheese and also somehow addresses every other financial need any person might otherwise have in addition to not-enough-cheese? I don't know!! I've been asking this for years!

(SPOILERS for a 20 year-old children's movie ahead)

But anyway, in this one, Wallace and Gromit must save the town's plant harvest from pesky rabbits before the revered Miss Tottenham's annual vegetable competition becomes doomed. Our clay heroes capture the bunnies and invent the Mind-Manipulation-O-Matic, a machine that brainwashes them into disliking vegetables. Hunter and estranged boyfriend of Tottenham, Victor Quartermayne would rather start blasting all the bunnies with his gun. This is mostly to everyone's dismay, until the mysterious were-rabbit strikes, and keeps on eating them veggies. The townspeople, in fear of the beast and in pursuit of eating some big dang carrots, agree to let The Bastard Victor, as I call him, shoot the were-rabbit with a golden bullet.

The problem? Wallace is actually the gosh darned were-rabbit!! What da! Wallace can't bet blasted with a gun! One run-in with an American film studio and they got him dodging bullets? Damn. SMDH.

I won't recount the whole plot of the movie, but I could. Probably from memory. I have watched it 6 times this year, twice within the past month. It is arguably my favorite movie of all time. I really think the folks over at Aardman know what they are doing when they make all these little guys (and gals and non-binary pals). It is everything that is magic about Chicken Run. It similarly uses pretty on the nose, yet clever subtext. I could stare at every set piece for hours--the movie is filled with lush garden set pieces and I want to eat the big clay carrots even if they are not real food. I even got Hutch tattooed on my arm earlier this year.

I saw this movie for the first time when I was ten years old, alone in a fully empty theater. It was the first movie I ever went to solo, a practice I still deeply love, and came at a time in my life where I was figuring out agency and sense of self and all that good, horrifying stuff. Maybe da real monsters ain't da big bunnies, maybe da real monsters are within us. Is probably what I was thinking. Now of days, I still think about the movie in terms of agency, in terms of carving your own self. A were-anything narrative is inherently always going to be this narrative of becoming and unbecoming, of invention and destruction, of wrath and mercy. And when I think about that in the context of the grips upon my and my loved ones' freedoms that fascist cowards and dork-ass bootlickers have now and historically have had, as it is difficult to think about anything outside of that context at present, I am forced to consider the ways that my own becoming and unbecoming, my own monstrosity are both salve and wound. And so I wrote a prose poem about it.

I'm Inventing Mostly

"If I can't fix it, maybe the other me can."

i can’t say i’ve ever asked for more of me but i suppose i’ve been chasing after mirrors for quite some time, i’ve hoped to confirm that i cannot be the beast i am in moonlight, in the case of wallace and the were-rabbit, two beings sharing skin and blood, there was a hunger that could have been his doom could have been their doom could have been his doom, in the case of myself and the shadow puppets i marionette, i’ve shared my hunger with them and they have devoured my doom, ground it to a paste and stuck it to my ribs, it filled in the cracks, it covered the holes, it clasped shut the clay locket i keep with a picture of what my heart once was next to a sketch of what i hope it to soon be, valves as vases lilies with petals spilling, pollen spraying into ventricles, walls etched with portraits and blueprints revolutions of self pumping blood straight into vials to be filed away in a lab, and we’ll call them protected, not hidden. we’ll become we’ll only let our plasma prism light when we trust the townspeople won’t perceive it as flame. we will sell it for rent, we’ll  infuse it in our inventions, our wrong trousers, our rube goldberg toasters, our mind-manipulation-o-matics and we will fail in letting our creation smother its doom, they will be weapons used against the pitchforks at our necks. in the theater alone, 10 years old on the brink of my own self, i ate popcorn with too much salt i took notes on gromit’s facial expressions and studied his silence. when wallace’s rabbit twin hutch appeared on screen, ear-to-ear grin, wrench in hand as he fixes his mirror’s machines, his mirror's mistakes. hutch tells us he “invents, mostly” and i learned the utility of constructing your bones somewhere unseen. while evil victor quartermayne took aim at wallace’s unwanted alter ego, i began writing the rabbit’s obituary because i knew how this story goes, when there is an aberration there is fire. where there is smoke there is the bindle of the disowned, the monstrous, the scrapped clay faces. the priest will round up the mob and raze our bones until all that is left in our wake is our baptismal water when the film crew recrafts us we beg them to start from scratch and if we survive, we’ll eat wensleydale instead of vegetables. like the doctor tells wallace not to, like gromit begs wallace not to and we will ignore the traveling hurt of our rot. when we eat our vegetables, they will claim the harvest and the bounty hunters will shoot us dead for theft. when the hunters mock our hunger and lick their lips, you must bite them off. you must paint their visage while you both stand in front of a funhouse mirror and hope the reflections don’t blend. you must reconstruct the glass. you must invent.