TY - JOUR AU - Barwin, Gary PY - 2014/04/27 Y2 - 2024/03/29 TI - My Nobel Prize JF - UnderCurrents: Journal of Critical Environmental Studies JA - UnderCurrents VL - 18 IS - SE - Creative DO - 10.25071/2292-4736/38541 UR - https://currents.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/currents/article/view/38541 SP - 25 AB - They stick the real Nobel Prize to my chest. The pin goes through my heart. Don’t worry: it’s made of a new material that I just invented. It is both wife and participle. Royal jelly and particle board. It is shadow and light rolled into one like chocolate, riot gear for the end of the world.<br /><br />In fact, I recently invented myself. I am entirely new. A new cloud, a new ant. Hook me up to the flat screen IV and let the 3D beam through my veins like weather. Change my channel. I sleep.<br /><br />I said, the mind is a lawnmower chewing up lawn. There was a dog in that yard. It was a problem but it is a problem no more. That’s why my heart got pinned with this prize. My mind-blades ran over something no one else noticed, but I don’t throw away the bags. I am all new.<br /><br />Newsflash: Nobel Prize pin insertion causes end of world. The end is very small. It’s far away. You would need a giant’s telescope or death-defying binoculars to see it. They thought we would all die. There are clouds over my tongue.<br /><br />An enormous whale or a bean from the edge of the universe, a universe that still doesn’t have a name because it keeps getting bigger. I invented bigger. And I forgot my newness because I invented it so fast I finished before I began. I said to the universe, You can’t kill me because only one of us is going to die because of some kind of spacetime thing which is very complicated and that only I can explain.<br /><br />Yes, you should thank me for receiving this prize with my only heart. My words are shadows in my hands. Now I open them and let the dove that was never there become something small and far away, far away as the end of the world. In conclusion, Mr. and Mrs. Committee, I’d like to begin by inventing someone else. All this new gets lonely. ER -