Art on the Internet.
by Arun Jeetoo
after George A. Romero
It is 1600 in london a monday
one day after bastille day or my birthday yes
it is 2017 and i read buzzfeed news on my phone
the battery is 39 per cent i will get off the 1652 to stevenage
at 1800 and then go straight to sleep
i wont know the uber driver who picks me up
i walk down the fresh purple street sunsetting
have an onion bhaji sandwich and an evian and check
my facebook newsfeed to see what my enemies
across the world are doing these days
i get to sainsburys and pavlo (first name i dont know i
dont think so
maybe) doesnt even check he has given me more change than its
due and in
waterstones i get a lorde
for ruban with drawings of mike perry although i do
think of brockhampton solange or
one of kureshis plays but i dont i stick with lorde
and roll into hmv
ask for some fukunaga
i
enter a sweetshop
for a ten pack of menthols
carton of neilson He is up in the corner on the tv
the reporter sobs
i am sweating a lot by now and
refresh facebook newsfeed
in tears at status after status with sad face emojis heart emojis like
emojis about him and then
my phone
'The Day the Zombie Died' is a real-life account of my wanderings around retail shops and places in London (UK) and my discovery that the godfather of zombies has died. The mundane serves as a backdrop to highlight this life-altering moment of George A. Romero's death-- an artist who I profoundly admired and made the world I live in that little bit more bearable. Omitting punctuation, capitalisation, playing with the blank document space, stanza lines and pace was necessary to parallel my movements across London. For this poem in particular, I want to deliver a gut punch reaction that leaves the reader pining forever..
Arun Jeetoo is poet and educator from London. His words appear in The London Reader, a gallery in Cardiff with LUMIN Journal, CivicLecister’s Black Lives Matter Anthology, The Best New British and Irish Poets 2019-2021, Acid Bath Publishing and many more online and print anthologies and magazines. His debut pamphlet I Want to Be the One You Think About at Night was published under Waterloo Press (2020).
Arun can be found on Twitter @g2poetry, on Instagram @g2poetry or on Facebook @G2poetry