I had the delightful honour of being invited to perform two spoken word pieces as a warm up to Sophie Cook’s Conspiracy show in Wollombi.

I have an addiction. It’s not a healthy one. And I’ve been trying to break the habit for years. I’m addicted to the Book of Face and to doom scrolling. One way I tried was to set myself a challenge: if I caught myself doom scrolling, I needed to stop and immediately write the darkest, nastiest, scariest poem I could, based on what was swirling through my mind from the barrage of mixed messaging I’d been taking in. It didn’t work to break the habit, but it did leave me with a series of dark, horror poems. Conspiracy is one of them.

The second piece is called Fish Reading. It’s not a poem, but a short story, originally written in response to an image prompt.

Video thanks to Robert Gibson.