Annaleese Jochems

Annaleese Jochems grew up in Northland, and works at Book Hound in Newtown. She won the Hubert Church Best First Book award for her novel Baby.

SUPERMARKET SURVEILLANCE

A poem about supermarket shopping with my Dad. The family joke is that he’s very naïve and vulnerable to inane marketing ploys.
Then what I’m sure he finds most ridiculous about me is the amount of time I spend online.
The poem is about how both of us are vulnerable in the same ways, to parallel manipulations, because we both want to be seen and loved as special individuals.
We want products that see us, and we want to be seen online, and more and more those pleasures are merging and growing in power.

In any well lit place my Dad forgets the prior shames of all his bad purchases – the slap chop, the Metamucil, all the cowboy hats, the enormous skate shoes etc

He roves like a tom cat, taking swaggering pleasure down the luxury wide isles of his small town countdown

I watch his satisfaction when he turns around a packet of decaf and sees another farmer
From elsewhere, smiling

It’s like a real market where instead of stall holders
The products themselves talk to us

Every product speaks to him but only some have listened

Listen

Any product with a little peep hole for looking through
Loves me

In the future everyone will be a house wife to a big loving entity that will adore and appreciate us and give us our exact desires / and always be at home with us / and always give us the space we need

Tell me what you are
What you want
it says
And I do and it believes me - oh you are a hot girl, yes of course, get these tiny shorts

Because I google like a hot girl
Google googles me

All it knows is fantasies, but still it knows everything

I’m most beautiful when correctly looked at
Everything I say is true and smart if something listens in the right way
If no-one likes my tweet it goes direct to god

In my life no-one sees me doing half the brilliant things I do
In simulation I’ll do nothing, but be seen doing everything – brilliant

Just like me and my dad, you too need so much attention
But everyone only has so much attention / to give

What if there was an attention that didn’t need attention?
We could become better than ourselves

Documentation