Felix Herbener

JUGGERNAUT I am a juggernaut of hope annihilation. I am the emotionless void inside my own heart. I am fear and loss, and dead dreams. The longer I go on living, I realise the emotionless void is the heart of humanity. God does not exist here.

ENTROPY Entropic nuances in the spaces between words. In conversation, hesitant mumblings, whispers of an unseen future. Shapes half glimpsed through the charades of corporate television programming. The neo-socialist rhetoric of the government is soothing our petty first-world concerns. New Goldsteins not yet known but commonly agreed upon. Exchanging glances furtively out of the corner of our eyes around the dinner table and the take-out shop. Who will be the next to take the fall? Which revolutionary leader will we chase into a hole so he can be dragged out and shot like a dog? Which civilian population will rise up in anger and riot when the Police have shot dead one of their young men? Last month a man stabbed another man on the streets of London and stayed to chat with the Press, knife in hand. We are bathed in the glow of high-definition live-feed transmissions as waves of edited sound-bite entropy wash over us. The nuclear family has long vanished. Mother, Father, and ...

THE VOID WITHIN In Memory of my Father People just fall through my hands, through the cracks of my life, like I am an open sieve. I don’t feel any attachment to anyone so I don’t lament their passing away into history. About so many people I think “well who the fuck were they” and “what was I thinking being with them anyway”? I don’t feel anything for any other human being and that is my truth and my path to travel. Faces and laughter swim into focus and then fade into blackness, swallowed by the fog of my thoughts. If I had a family would things be different? If my parents had treated me better would I be more human? It is an academic hypothetical question because the only reality is the way I am now. The damage is done. I cannot change. I’m trying to understand how it all came undone. How I let it all slip away. Why I felt so sick. Even now it’s all still falling apart. Like sand dunes eroding, unstoppable, inevitable. I’m swept beneath the shifting sands of my life. Sometim...

ON BEING GAY It’s not like I’m trying to be the Oscar Wilde of the 21 st century. But if that’s what you want, I’ll be it. I always wanted to be Andy Warhol. Or “Drella”, to those who knew him well.  But now I listen to The Velvet Underground and Lou Reed and I miss Andy like a friend. In the 1950’s when Andy was first precariously employed at a magazine he took his homoerotic Blue Boy drawings to every gallery in New York to ask them to exhibit them. Andy had big balls; this could have ended his career before it had even begun. My generation includes Olympic swimmer Ian “Thorpedo” Thorpe and late actor Heath Ledger. We grew up listening to the songs of Ricki Martin on the radio. His name always reminded me of another Martin who shot up Port Arthur a year after I visited with my parents. I remember seeing a tall man with a blonde pony-tail there, he sort of glowed. I cut out the photo of him they ran in the newspaper and pinned it up on my wall. Long wavy blonde hair and pier...

A PRAYER TO MOTHER MOON Mother Moon rising in the sky I pray to you. Please forgive me. Heal my body and help me to forgive myself. Help me to learn and guide me. I tried so hard for so long, to be better than I am. Help me to accept myself. I was misled, I was hurt. I can’t do this anymore. I can’t live this way. The sick feeling in my guts: churning like sour water. Poison leeching into my body. The fear that never ends: the fear that grows. It is a tumorous swelling behind my eyes. All I know is fear. The fear inside me is an ocean of fear about to break forth onto the shore of reality. When will it split open my body from within and gush over the earth, drowning everyone in its path, consuming all? I am a vessel for fear. There is a monster inside of me. Humanity is a scared animal raging against the universe. The pain of sentient life! To know the misfortune of existence: pain, hunger, cold, fear, and predators large and small. We fuck to escape it all and only multiply our s...

BRISBANE STOR Y I walk into the lounge and XX has gagged and hog-tied XY with rope. XY is naked and in the doggy style position. XX forces a frozen ice block into XY’s anus. XX looks at me as if through a shard of obscured glass, hums something guttural and I catch the bass riff from Marilyn Manson’s ‘Tourniquet’. XX comes for me. My beloved the dominatrix will have me next. I stand on the back of a couch and start throwing whatever I can reach. My hand finds a supersize jar of Vegemite and I throw it. It misses XX by a mile and smashes near XY’s head. XY’s face is red. I leave. If you’ve ever seen the movie Dogma the scene was something like when Hitler is in Hell having a Pineapple inserted into his anus while wearing an S&M rubber French maid costume. Walking around West End I pass a party house I know and go in. There will be a gathering tonight, someone is going to Japan. I ask if I can stay the night. The party is a strangely sober affair with hushed gatherings of do...

MANIFESTO IN FIVE PARTS Part I: WOLF It’s dark outside. Butterflies are pounding at my window. They’re the size of dinner plates; soon they’ll break the glass. And hell will descend. His blood was so close, hot in his veins. Like love, like sex. He held me down on the pavement, he said: I will kill you. Just like years ago, the man above me with his hand pressing on my throat. I broke the hold and got on top, but I didn’t finish the fight instead I walked away. I won’t make the mistake again. In my dreams I stand my ground. It’s in my subconscious, in my future. The next time I saw him his face was covered with fresh scabs from a beating someone else gave him. He got what he was looking for; it’s a game for some men. I believe I was born to fight, I need to fight. I need to feel the rush of blood in the heat of the fight. It’s like love, or like hunting a beast you admire. Without fear there is no reason to live at all. I can’t look away when I see them. It’s like we are draw...

RADIKAL ISOLATION My account of survival against the toxic psychological onslaught of high capitalism in 2014 CE. People tell me I look angry. (I look angry? Yeah well you’re ugly) I’m not angry. I’m just good looking and staunch, serious like a heart attack. I have closed my body to sex. I got the idea from a Madonna lyric, “I’m going to close my body now”. I have had several sexual partners. I won’t say that I didn’t enjoy any of it (the f*!king), I did enjoy some of it. But mostly I felt like I couldn’t make a meaningful connection with another person’s body. (Hey there’s always porno) I live alone and I pursue a life of social isolation with no physical intimacy. At times I have tried to be pro-social, and I have been very successful in gratifying my ego. I have soared to new heights and experienced a love for and communion with the brotherhood of man. When I looked around I realised everyone was now jealous of me because I had gone too far and achieved more than they coul...

THE HOLE IN THE SKY It’s hard to say when it was first noticed. At first it was just a black streak on the blue sky. Like a jet trail only an oily black except it didn’t move with the wind. It just hung there, a stain on the sky, and the clouds and life seemed to roll on by. Some people speculated about the nature of the phenomena, if you could call it that, I know in the scheme of my life it didn’t rate a damn. In The Mercury some quack Scandinavian meteorologist was saying it was a sort of aurora, like they get up in Bicheno. Personally I have an aversion to anything that doesn’t bring me any sort of gain so like everyone else I caught the bus to Uni and got on with my life. We ignored it but it didn’t go away. Soon it became obvious that it was spreading, the dark smudge on the sky was growing like an oil spill. It didn’t so much as occupy space in the sky, rather the blue seemed to evaporate somehow, the sky just seemed to lose its substance and in its place was nothing. The n...

THEM BOYS LIVE FOR TODAY Them boys, always having fun, always young, always out there on the streets, in pairs, in groups, or just one. Living for the moment, living for the good times, looking to get high, looking at the girls. Them boys turn the backseat of the bus into an exclusive club, sayin’ ‘hey whattup bruv’, drinking in the park, any day of the week, getting drunk any day the sun shines, let’s meet up with some friends across town. Doing fuck all, just taking a walk nowhere, but it’s a mission you know, to score a deal, no time to stop, but always time for you bruv, do you have a smoke bruv? Come have a drink bruv, we’re going out bruv, who will we see? Them boys they turn the ordinary into the extraordinary, their company makes the streets shine. See my boys drinking stubbies on the edge of the skate bowl? They’re my boys, my mates, my crew. They’re all from prison and going back there soon, they’ll never be nothing except boys and fathers and crims, and they’ll still be...