Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.
Angela Stretch is a media poet whose work extends to visual art that explores poetry and text with audio-visual technologies. Her work has been exhibited in exhibitions in Sydney and interstate since 2008. She was awarded winner and people’s choice prize for Amnesty International’s Freedom Art Competition 2008. She was awarded highly recommended at the Marrickville Art Prize 2009. Her video poems have featured in the Australian Poetry Festival 2008 & 2010; Sydney Writers Festival 2010, Federation Square, Melbourne, Overload Festival 2009; Ribbons of Cursive Razors of Font, Australian Council for Arts, 2011. She is the coordinator of the Brett Whiteley Studio poetry readings and is producer and presenter of Talking Through Your Arts, 2SER-FM.
Angela’s Poem
Nothing to Show
Always receding
you are
what I come out
to see.
You
“multi-you”
who shuffles the cards,
who never comes forward
but simply appears
on a roller coaster
or walking down King Street-
the static poses
in which I multiply myself.
In a sense you are
what happens to me,
speaking through events
or when you choose
through aura’s last residue
of touch-
the product that says “buy me,”
the object that glows.
When I understand
I see
and when I am tired
or confused, I have
nothing to show
that sliver of the whole
that is just you being you-
a new moon which grows the old
again and again, but different
each time.
Tonight’s heavy as
an enormous peach
drooping over a side street.
The light a fragrant slant
That lingers through next day
changing
as you yourself shift
from lover
to father or mother,
from singer
to silence,
then back to song.
In you
I view myself
at a distance
yet from there
you always seem
more real than me
more able to move
or think or speak
while I can only
write you off
