Michael Tilbury

Words have power. I find poetry and specifically, the use of brevity to aid in my healing process. I can paint pictures with a handful of words more easily than painting on my canvases. Mental health should never be a taboo subject. In my experience, the more you talk about traumatic experiences, the more you can give them the space they deserve to cope with them. Talking and writing about these events dilutes their power. The power that I want to reclaim through my art practice.

Michael Tilbury is a disabled combat veteran who recently graduated from the Maine College of Art & Design with a Master of Fine Art. His work focuses on his military experience and the extreme warhead-on-forehead culture he was a part of. He equates his time while deployed in Afghanistan to that of being an extraterrestrial invader in a UFO. He seeks out real aliens through his love of science fiction and astrobiology. He has since discovered AI image generators. Together they create artwork to be used in their video poetry.

Deployment

fumes from melted CDs

I'm ordered to burn

waft over me and my cashmere scarf

melting and twisting in the light

snow coats the frozen mud

I'm left outside huddled

round the burning barrel

I dance with the blackened smoke

side stepping with my boots

fat flakes descending

the mortars still strike

explosions in my brain

shaking and rattling my bones

empty my weapon

placing the clip upon my bed

and the barrel against my temple

I pull the trigger

2022

Do you have my fingerprints?

fingerprints took half an hour

my blood?

ripping off the band aid stings more than the needle

I'll provide dental molds

of my now straight

but tea-stained teeth

duck walk in my underwear?

not with my knees

nose and throat swab

check my vision

that blazing white circle

blinding each eye at a time

can you spot the dinosaurs devouring each other?

UFOs that hover above the optic nerve?

or the missile strikes burned onto my retina?

2023

Old man on a bridge with a gun

old man on a bridge with a gun

half that age, but new specs of silver

in my ruddy beard

the globe stopped spinning

flung off I find myself standing on a bridge

rails rusted and flecked with a light green paint

that gun, grows cold and colder with the snow

shoot the sky,

wave it at the oncoming traffic

I'm an old man

tired of people honking their horn

pissed

shoot or jump, old man

I'd rather hurl the globe into the river

or scream into the snow

shouting match

both freezing

old man on a bridge

2020

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