“MATCH MY FREAK”
says the song. and here, amidst this counterfeit of family, by détournement and fiat, i declare myself legally dead, reduce my name to a somnolent noun, yr mouth mauling the pale inordinate freak of it. kick in yr head, dig in the rubble, excavate an alibi. i wonder what it means, the body: this ecstasy of last resort. i gussied my lungs for u, i lowered myself through an amulet’s eye into the hotel hot-tub, i hung my arms about yr neck in aggravated garlands, i staggered my slutdrop in matalan heels like: am i fun enough yet? tinashe has been nasty. nastiness accumulates inside the hot thrust of her work-ethic. her scuffed thighs part to reveal a genuine hand-tooled calfskin wallet. sex has been thoroughly costed. sex has been reduced to clear, its belly yellowly labelled. which is not really nasty at all. i am the outsized spider in its bandolier of boiling eyes mantling out of the plughole nasty. the jaundiced rejoinder, litany of slits, formidable imposter, medea roided out and raging into the backlash. nasty like bin day in tower hamlets at the height of summer, and nobody wants to fuck that thought. match my freak, says the song. youth was a misfit’s grift, the sky inside my silence knocking to get in, scratching to get out. a girl is full: not of rooms, but of corridors. not of doorways, but of arches. i was sewn into my own breath. pleural residues, aspartame and abscess. sewn inside a hacking cough, a scrupulous refusal of joy. when i was nasty, i flicked a lighted splint into a hood and i climbed the blaze as the blaze also climbed. ben howes with second degree burns. when i was nasty, i was the cobweb part of archway, i was the cobweb part of cunt, strung across a gothic tear in any given window, in any given wall. i was the nemesis of frenzy, friendzone, yr frenzied nemesis. there were pillowy divas, a woman dragging her knuckles through a cupcake, women writhing in the earworm of availability. or there was us. we were nasty like the land, colonized by lichens, haunted by flowers, a flower defrocked, its counsel of collapses, the politely stricken lily, the perforated hide of a moulting rose. match my freak, says the song. in the video, tinashe spasms and thrashes. in the dust like a landed salmon. at the feet of a man. who stands over her. as if he’s about to – unzip himself. and piss. tell me again about expressing my feminine sexual power. go on. i dare u. and here we are, as if love were a version of nandos. my body is rolled in desire like a piece of breaded chicken. i am whatever sticks to me: yr darling logic, the imprint of police, anything tasteful and fake, preening and cheesy, an idol of cheap luminosity. a girl. what would it mean to meet myself half-way? to meet pleasure’s reprieve in a mouth, a mind, a body not my own? to be matched – a perfection so extravagant that it becomes perversity. extravagance a trapdoor to some ecstatic country where devastation is not defeat. give nasty its grandeur. a monster just like me.
STONES
to exist in this space. days when i lived through my longings, my longing to live. i could mean something to someone, i could imagine nothing for myself. i memorised desire. i excelled in theory what i failed in practice. on the island, the women were turning to stone. sorry, to stones. glancing down at the sad drumlins of breast and belly, then looking away. the crust of unfuckability that formed on us. it is not subtle: being stared at, being looked through. imagine a rock so super-massive that it disappears altogether. say the words: hag stone, gowk stone, gawk stone, glacial erratic. common carlins in a round. say cove and cromlech, menhirs and maids. stones of unsettlement simmering, standing tall. the mane of misfortune is blue, is blue as sabbath’s afterburn is blue. sometimes i wake up so angry. i move about the house, accomplishing small tasks with absolute precision and with absolute futility, wanting to smash up the furniture. to exist in this space, scald of assumption, fantastical scar of regard, where we were the whiplash of commonweal, the hysterical swagger of stone. stones. to exist inside yr strategy we were everything hidden behind consent. reworked the moor in the dark crook of our mood. when we were made of flesh, love was indulgent and tyrannising, the look on yr face, caramelised exquisitely. on the island we turned to stones in order to exist. a tor, a tender emblem, limb of flint i wrap around yr courtesy. averted eye is washed ashore. stone, irrational anchor, jury of androgynies, licking the slow chops of intent. to exist in this space. a witch. my incendiary architecture. when the ground sinks, when the land slides.
WHILE THEY ARE TRANSLATED
the moon behind a neighbour’s chimney, pale and still. a stone that grows a fist around it. adversaries, saviours, an instagram of loose-stooled sermonising. we accord the candle its finger of feeble light. the body totters and thrums. and england whose name is a nest, building itself from the sharp twigs of eviction. summer is anything scalpelled out of speech. is nothing that patience contains. failure, from the latin fallere, to deceive. we are deceived. england is a big man, all stomach and scruple. all flags, and officialised enthusiasm. his masochist’s swagger. the tongue is cheaply reeved in its chanting. an indifferent alas. to find out that we were, after all, not naked but empty. is england. the eye, sterilised by insomnia, will not close. in dover, we hear the sirens of its dust-up all night long. we hear those catechists of aggro, setting course. collision or entanglement. and the pally-wally wives say cabernet, cabaret, flagons of mortified gorge. a spiral ripe for lèse-majesté and broken ankles, gavels, grovels, the open-handed chivalry of coffins. england will find us out by the peaty swag of bogs, the boggy swagger sweat from us, a static caravan, white and enormously torched. pain, in the forced umbrella of my belly, the mournful gallantries of ycl members on facebook. another spotlit moralist, beating time with his tongue. cats! spivvy frauds! crossing the flat roof of the kitchen. all the teasing residues of storm. the residue and negative of storm. and our the poets, walling their thoughts in a riverbed, the poet, repeats his sundered pate against the table. there is a rock, propitious to inscription, caresses and exemptions. there is a woman’s mouth, stretching from its strung corners like a web. there is the chaffed stink of coriander, the wan oratory of gulls. the sky is sentenced to feathers. sad dalliance. a forelock, monarchising on the bbc. they balance, then they vanish. despair, magnified and fashioned. once, there was a fig, an olive, a weary staple of bread, a rag of bread, a wet rag of bread, a scab of bread and what of it? there were children, or things that kept the shape of children: shy hirelings, a shieling’s heirs. there were chancers and braggarts, carolling their wounded bromance at each other. in england, pet hair collects behind cabinets, a laugh is wrangled, the yule owl disappears into itself. paul is driving, skimming the dark landmarks of our fathers. skimming the the split aunty, the spilled mother. remorse, paroled. a paroled heil! a heil! holstered, and the gutters are sluiced and our texts are censored. a bed where pain is both the nectar and the residue. the nectar and the residue of sex. he says i am like a slug, i secrete and precede myself, bevelled flirt, edgelord, sedgelord, hedgelord. we step fully-formed from the loins of a corpse, by which i mean england. my hillocks of bolshie spleen. someone is always watching, eager for what power confers. or constitutes. the woman is watching, all my uncivilised embodiments, the glow from my phone. nimbus of the innocents. savouring the overflow. comments thread. turn women into menstrual weapons some incel said. spellcheck suggests exhaustions. pluck a promise like a bud. i need to be gentle. saturated, stalled between screen-grabs, the nemesis. these poets, a roundhouse kick to their royalties, and the frowning spectrals, critics, attritions, traitors. we have a sky that bristles with eclipses. over the medway, end of the day, rosy and foaming. over the medway, polluted taboo. river is the grammar and the government, evangelises and asserts. oh, jerusalem. oh, cherry. destitute of petals – they do not know: an occupation does not end when they leave the land. the occupier lives also in memory, extending himself forward in time through you. his greatest obscenity is that now he is something that you carry, that you incubate and reproduce. oh god, it is morning, this pantomime of magpies. while they are translated – wilful is not the same as willing – the state is treading its measure into our wailing. a skull, tempered against the curb. our erotic apprehensions. we have paid for this. conjugate the squatting body. venus of willendorf. we are ashamed of our bodies. a tactical retreat, abandoned and intact. we are disgusting to ourselves. where is lament born? in the tongue. in the throat. in the gut. the busily stupefied, infatuated fanboys, all these deluded brutes, these brutal dudes. love is a noose made from swooning. the dead man’s finger stiff inside a ring. a dead body emptied of all its gleets and mischiefs. the omitted bird, bird of omission. i mean, paradise. the garden full of wrought fruit, low-hanging but inedible. the uses the dead may be put to as follows: reducing the press of another’s misery to a kind of peaceable could-be-worse horseshit. to deny the pain of others as comparatively minor and selfish, so as to instil a desperate gratitude for the basic human right not to be blown to bits. but grateful to whom? for why? they have outsourced their war. jesse norman and christopher chope, voted against the call for immediate ceasefire. they own shares in bae systems. but that is not all. the dead are versatile. use them as the crowbar of correctness to coerce a performance of absolutes, to big yourself up. affirmations of vanishing. you chattels and you batteries, farm animals, overdrawn in discipline. somewhere between the footprint and the eardrum. the sea eats the seawall. a documentary film-maker stifles a cough. the moon behind the neighbour’s chimney, luminous and shrill. the proverb entrenched in the palate. a rich full day, a rich full day.
ON DESIRE
or rather, being desired. which has a kind of fury now, the wholesale song of it. for wherever you are in the world, lie down in the lap of awful days and smother. your smile. melancholy trench. drudging the dim joke. hell and its pastiche of pyres. me in my knickers, titillated impasse. roses you had, the proven bloom of them. i yearn for a suite of rollicked meadows. i drink the oil, ingest the drum. called me horse-girl: siphon of stallions. i move into your punchline, a sindy-pink penthouse, a wet dream, a dreamhouse. i am the ideal toy, the pedigree doll. delisted, relaunched. i am a lawsuit with my name on it. can you do anything but look at me? i palm your paranoid caresses, take them inside for a rainy day. an extinct slit, an ice-age on legs. your eyes lay eggs. i am soaping the stronghold of my body. but you happen inside me like housework. to be desired by you is humiliating. that is, your desire is the medium and the mechanism of my humiliation. we are told we are ashamed. we are not ashamed. shame is a state, humiliation is the traumatic exercise of power, you ass. an irreversible act. not abstract or internal. when we talk, we are not talking, i am addressing your supremacy, and you, you are not speaking to or even at, but into me. because i am hollow i amplify your alphabets. the summer i turned, felt drought deep in my fingers, men with their lusts, their catalogue of quicksands. i believed i could live at the centre of myself. my sprung red home, my slow blink, blade of grass. you had come to rent my pout for pastures. cut the chemise, my floral surmise into spoiler warnings, sundaes, aubades. it was friday. karaoke of my brokenness. the receiving end of a gingham swimsuit. imagine, you are so afraid of a gaze held, a stare returned, that you create gorgons. rage is abject and rejected, or else recuperated as fetish, as folly, as everyone laugh at the funny joke. and i eat out my own new growth in comic sans. of course we are (re)turned to stone, when we see ourselves in the mirror it is with your eyes, and back into flat inanimation. generation of mannequins, republic of corpses, briar rose, comatose for booty-call. your desire deadens me. spent presence stirring the airless room. my eyes are marbles. inside of each, an idling ghost.
+
which is to say that looking has a language. in fritz lang’s 1927 expressionist sci-fi classic, metropolis, women are not present at all, not even as extras, until the eternal garden scene, where they are explicitly displayed for potential male pleasure. this is also the moment the audience sees maria for the first time. they see her through freder’s eyes: a kind of distressed madonna, a luminous virgin mother surrounded by children. these archetypes and the binaries they represent are old. they were old in 1927. they don’t haunt me. what disturbs is that women do not exist unless and until they are looked at, created and shaped under the male gaze by dint of observer effect: the disturbance of an observed system by an act of observation (duh). if a tree falls, yada, yada. the idea that an event unobserved has no impact or existence is a uniquely patriarchal logic. looking is a language. oh every day, through infinite models of melancholy.
+
todd philips, joker rewrite: the worst thing about living inside a visual culture created by and for men is that people expect you to act as if you don’t.
+
which is to say that to dance like no one is watching is both an imperative and an impossibility. we don’t know we’re beautiful, that’s what makes us beautiful, etc. it is not that you have entered my head. rather, that you were there before me. that my attempts to inhabit myself must necessarily enact a kind of awkward trespass. it is that your eyes are everywhere, multiple and multiplying, that we are never alone, that your beholding is a closed circuit with no way out. but confidence is sexy, isn’t it? who cares what people think? i must work on my insecurities? dance, dance, dance. become a splayed crow, auger of my inhibitions. like. this watching is not attentive but ambient. meaning, our umwelt, our way of being in the world is as the observed thing. i can pretend, i can perform, i can flounce and strut. but – your polipotent eye, its three-mile island over everything. your love-yourself mantra is ash in my mouth. cardboard ecstasy.
+
walk out into this field of fingers. or the negative space where my desire should be. this body a theme park, retracts its burning ghost-trains, penny arcades, its end-of-the-pier. disrupted and shuttered. our migraines wheeled into upright positions like fruit machines. and oh, the extended cow of me. the bovine solo. the starry ideology of size. or, what about the sublime denial of my voice. the denied sublime. meaning, if the subaltern speaks it is in a language of absolute negation, in tongues, in tones of bracing elegy. when i woke and rid myself of your desire, i went outside, gathered no!s like wild mushrooms. we must learn the words again, twisted between the fangs of frail contrivance. do not second-guess this with even-my-vanishing-requires-a-witness, with even-to-be-missing-is-a-performative-act. say rather, that we have always been invisible, yet never absent, that this has been torture. i must get to the bottom of desire, away from desire into my scrapbook of oblivions, offstage of myself. i am seeking the beforelife of desire, between intention and transmission, the trembling circumference of my solitude. i move to the next unnerving, to the crimson intersection, to the crossroads of the world. i hold the earthquake in my ear and i strike out for the sea. no more my long breasts like the bodies of sad balloon animals. no more birdsong of the bright-side. look, there’s no point in the glass being half-full if what it’s half-full of is hot piss, yes? no more nights, ensnared, enshrouded, wishing for a face as soft as sleepwalk. hey, abated beauty, and all the figment distances between myself and self. if a tree falls in a subtle forest, sovereign. if an eye is gutted. if a glutted eye implodes.
THEY’LL LOVE YOU WHEN YOU’RE…
/ dead. erased and multiplied.
/ the poems pile up: a tube of chalky sweets, engraved with lovesick dispensations.
/ and the poems pile up.
/ here we are again. do you like it? its mouth is dark and full of novelty.
/ they’ll love you when you’re –
/ a compendium of heaving rain. and flip phone aesthetics.
/ filters, effects and –
/ the fossilised summons. the dread sensitivities.
/ hey –
/ knelt on a pile of rocks before a statue of the saviour. didn’t you?
/ yellow light through a glass decanter all day long.
/ well, bully for you.
/ anxiety: the article and expression of my faith.
/ when i said dickhead, you’re not a comrade, you’re a tourist. and i meant it.
/ excavate the spacious hood, lift a face up to the light.
/ it’s yours, it’s you. humoured but humourless, know what i mean?
/ a confederate monument draped in a flag. the body.
/ i will be pregnant. with nothing but possibility.
/ and not much of that.
/ you, boymen with faces like clipart logos for artisanal cider.
/ interchangeable bros of early promise. brands. and i meant it.
/ you. yes, you. flatfoot, slaphead, cokehead, plaid-shirt-shit.
/ you. full sleeve on a sack of associate pay.
/ you. cargo pants and camo jacket. reeboks, rubric.
/ you. rhetorician. this dancing opens decay.
/ you. yes, you, you superficialites. you’re not a – etc.
/ you’re a growth-mindset with a fringe.
/ you’re a carefully husbanded nicety. a smugly privatised phrase.
/ this is the kingdom. do you like it?
/ of coots and codgers. menboys and old men. with a lifetime’s ban from greggs.
/ the kickabout skulls they strove to stove-in. at half time.
/ all the keepie-uppie faces. of sanction, restructure.
/ here, with the the heightened mutability of fetish. the snuffed potential of mere visibility.
/ and you. and you. and you. your prefab pride. your sticky wet rainbow turned on like a faucet.
/ yes, i am talking to you. you beautifully proportioned incels. you gutless mediagenics.
/ patent our deathbeds. in a tasteful font.
/ the pharmacopoeia’s savage parentheses closed around the latin for –
/ this malady of anchors.
/ will cauterise identity at source.
/ until i am a museum of failed mnemonics.
/ this sickness. cancer’s expansionist prattle. the neat white loaves of enclosure.
/ bits of me under a microscope, microscraped, and very finely sliced.
/ they’ll love you when you’re –
/ congealed and leaking. well-meaning dullards accelerate enlightenment.
/ there’s a difference between the mindful and the full mind.
/ you softly censoring prefects. you straw-boater clichés of managed decline.
/ you classicists. you classists. you manilla folder full of fucking invoices.
/ you broadhead contract, you wide receiver. you agents, you accountants. you legally binding deadbeats.
/ you mandarins of language.
/ here is a collected works. ambitious little maxims. a soggy, date-stamped farce.
/ the sob-sob-sob of your lacrimal analogy. cursor moves over an encrypted dream.
/ it’s a told mode. it’s a method of thought. it’s a poem. ta-da! do you like it?
/ look. you dream in circles. in downtown container park rebrands. in contactless payments, in frictionless sharing. streaming the flat-white into your open mouth
/ you gob on expenses.
/ you pate on expenses.
/ you –
/ well. respecting the flesh: let our shadow be your star.
/ we are the peasantry, and we are revolting. everyone laugh at the funny joke.
/ despair is our best tradition.
/ is our only political tradition.
/ but we are not rolling back.
/ we are now. and we are made of now. we are only ever now.
/ the black ram. the buried wran. the throbbing dirt.
/ and you. the very hearse of rhapsody.
/ you’ll love us when we’re –
/ silently assumed. sublime inside the insult of your –
/ expenditure. exchange. obituary kudos.
/ dead. ’cept we won’t be dead.
/ free. bird a blade, dishing the raw wind.
THE ECSTASY OF SAINT VALERIE
(in psychosis, spring 2024)
this is what you wanted. well, isn’t it? the conscience, cicatrized care. their sensitive dreck. feelings will be scarce, recycled. face like a freak accident. little embassies of dread. little dread-ambassadors, tritely spouting. they love you. but that’s persuasion’s suck, that’s big-ticket shtick. and their gale-force lack of humility, their crummy stanzas of dispatch. this is what you wanted: some big mr shit-the-sheets shining his pate in your lap. ashen windbags, schmoozed beyond migraine.
+
you eunuchs of utopia, sing it with me! the body’s gilded witchcraft, sing it! to be a hyena you have to decide: are you an object or an attribute of fucking eternity? c’mon, what do you think the soul is? try on that dress, it fits you like a limp handshake. ah babes, you are maximum carnival, that which defies and produces the power. ah kid, an inspiral dérive toward collision. the women are coming, their hot breath condescends. your pulse, a perverse interval wherein the devil – a split in the neck – will sequence your quivering. stand by to await upload. stand by to await – so much laboured torrenting. isn’t this what you wanted? person on the internet, launched into light, a known unknown. morning is an insult of sparrows. will tread this minus tide. is idiopathic mumbling, the monkey’s paw, withdrawing round its one remaining wish.
+
this is what you wanted. well, isn’t it? and there’s france, sagging in our sight-lines. picture a girl, homely and vicious, pretty as a pound-cake. that’s you, that is. your brother is writing the biography of a vile star that eats and unravels all things. black hole with added elbow grease. joyous day! that’s you, that is. all oral and no tradition. and hey, there’s no cash in the attic, because there isn’t an attic. madwoman in the loft, pinioned between carpet offcuts, polyvinyl christmas trees.
+
so what, you’re working class? fuck ’em in their price-per-barrel, fuck ’em in their renege and there gyp. to be torn down, levelled flat, turfed over, used for language. to convert sorrow, through ideation’s phases, into cold ambition. caught between the trespass and the tryst: ectopic. that is, out of place. so what? to strut when you ought to scoot, dragging yourself like a sombre dog. what you fail to appreciate, how you fail to thrive. babes, you are failure inflamed. sorry, failure in flames.
+
no, not like fake-it-til’-you-make-it. more like flaxen with felony and stare them down, all those lustrous saxons, making their anglophile whoopie. more like the hiccup in our hormone. more like our strung haunt. nature, amplified, deranged. oh, how they percolate occasion, these pundits of profile, randos of a new low. hey, you enchanted neuters, sing it with me! rub silicone into these marbled gullies. an old scar bristles with wiry hair.
+
here is a secret: a poet is an animal, flown at half-mast. dosser’s moon tonight, moon in its overstayed welcome: confessor’s blue, museum blue. poets write about the moon, don’t they? just gathering dust like some vandalised heirloom. silly bitches with clip-art eyes on twitter, prospering unselfconsciously. we know better, the moon is a loafing butch. she’s menopausal. carries the gene for secrecy but not for sleep. she’s not on the side of those deadbeat aggressors. she hates them dead, she’s one of us.
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blah-blah-blah, we don’t care what you think. you bankrupt apologists, you dweebs of love-you-when-you’re-dead. we didn’t fail, we didn’t succeed, we just endured. we are not going to eat more protein, nor dress for the job we wish we had – like a reverse mermaid, in a one-size-fits-all shroud.
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somewhere between the steeped fig and the stewed prune, he advances on you with a lordly tolerance. who are these parasites? a fiction of sisters, a hand to hold through all these happened ages. a hand to hold you under. a hand to hold you down. isn’t this what you wanted? not quite a forgery, not quite a copy. irrecoverable knock-off, the hooky looks on you. and here they come, dewy with status, striding across this limbo of lawns like they own the fucking place. can i click unsubscribe on my life, please? can i hurl these mouth-breathing basics out an airlock? as it is, you accidentally reply-all with the following statement: thanks and everything, but at this stage of my career, i need a gold star for trying about as much as i need a chocolate tampon, so how about no? hotlips, i love you for that.
+
woman is a nightmare, though, is a slick mother slashed. blood root, blood wort, a trench cut in never, a pink-washed decree to stick in the craw. you should understand, when they talk about types, they also mean you. and the pale rocking-plate of your belly. and the bald dredging pan of your womb. yes you, don’t believe the open-mouthed immaculate of them. you, the fatigued mistake that no one will suffer to stand, a gamy syllable spawned in meat, a dangling treatise of bones. for the last and final time: this is what you wanted. well, isn’t it? bright world of swelling precedent, spontaneous yet hollow. flowers, the ancestral expedient: and you contain such purges. the whole deal, witlessly multiplying. it’s gonna get worse before it gets better, sing it with me! don’t cry. or do. see if i care.
“LEAVE THE CAPITOL”
/ dismissed from its pedant republics at last.
/ convulsing and doubled, clumsily thrust.
/ between buses, a girl going io! io! the throat unburdens itself of arrows.
/ all of its wrecked formidables. her moonstomper’s oi! inverted.
/ pours out of herself. i hear the way her pleasures tear.
/ in pubs, those ashtray mafias, ashtray try-hards, running a numb hand up her slick no-brainer.
/ on wanker’s wharf, and a scant tree held in the misfire of an eye.
/ to be all muscle and no memory. the thames, a degraded membrane.
/ sick neuritic twitch.
/ in pubs they will open her body, a versatile blade.
/ their dictionary of cigarettes. the aptly translated lie.
/ clever boys. the flawless, disaffected pause that passes for –
/ lotus cheaters. compress usself into a five-point plan for progress.
/ to preside over and haunt this ballad of cladding and scaffold.
/ our tender silos, burning.
/ breathe in the jinxed blueprint of it. crossing the urn in its amours.
/ grenfell, greenfield, misfold.
/ in syllable and tissue. such sky. missold.
/ dismissed and turning. little grief of methods and permissions.
/ all roads lead to –
/ circle and spill. the quotidian-acute.
/ and no roads.
/ shall abide its winding. the limit and eclipse –
/ of money.
/ will be anchored and then discarded.
/ to break, if not free, then thorough. over the medway, the blue-brown stretcher of small resentments.
/ a golden rusk of light, skimmed, succumbing.
/ dream of an elsewhere we call berlin, moonwalk the mouth through its thin obituary deutsch.
/ pretend to a summer of priory walls. necrotic couch-surf. a carnivorous species of great unwashed.
/ alone there, with all us sovereign insomnias.
/ and the sun, expectant brute, banging his tin drum, waiting for us to –
/ falling. spectacle of last resort. radio: archive of grating feudal melodies.
/ want to be neutralised in suits to the tune of an airless oh, baby!
/ and celebrate dead versions.
/ you wouldn’t be the first averted eye to enter the big world –
/ and crack.
/ says go, if you’re going. sulky wastrel facepalm. london is paradise with a slow puncture.
/ and that’s on a good day.
/ stagnant apprehensions, burials, peak liberal dogshit.
/ thwart gob stinging with public apology.
/ or the hot, pink mess of cynical allyship.
/ those bastions of homicidal price-gouge, their staple of rainbow tawdries.
/ and wow, look us: heat-seeking and sealed against empathy.
/ was feebly monstered. laughed up us nullified guts.
/ going which side are you on? eyes like sterilised zygotes. eyes like dashcams. lidless thicket of eyes.
/ fucker, why so in love with this syndrome of sides?
/ like error into anvil.
/ like a face, vaguely razored.
/ like munitions, components, oracles –
/ have anything to do with the pained, miraculous expansion of being in a body.
/ or what you mean by nature.
/ depredations, depredations. rotting modalities.
/ dismissed. this is not a country, but an industry.
/ shining and shouting. the brain is a hutch, the brain is a kennel.
/ there is nothing to love here but things.
/ she says: with my rage i could bend girders of bone.
/ a golden ticket taped over the mouth. battlehymn hemispheres, this is where it hurts.
/ in a city, furtive and permanent. inflamed, but depleted.
/ lie on your side in a high-ceilinged room, tidily miscarried.
/ hell has many mouths.
/ to survive entails a mutation.
/ and is it any wonder? working your gorge like a pro.
/ aberration unceasing. buildings rise like ultimatums.
/ a textbook of trick questions. accountants’ disclaimers.
/ is it any wonder? your future that important blue you wipe yourself on.
/ synthetic death. backhanders, switcheroos. put your finger on the problem –
/ poem: extravagantly roving slut.
/ if this is what we made with words, are we sure?
/ if this is what we made with words, are we sure it is the country?
/ if this is what we made with words, are we it is the country we want to escape?
/ and not language itself?
/ like you were a dirty old man, hugh crain, and you built a dirty house!
/ like trying to make thoughts from –
/ the core, the corona, extracellular aggregates, plaquey snarl around the stem of speech.
/ will go from city to city, establish our achilles future with serene affect.
/ oh horrors. plotline of pigs, preface of weeds. chorus of dead ethereal twinks.
/ row upon row of mad, capacitated crowns. royal babies. this basket of corrosives, down in one.
/ the capitol. its toxicity is meagre but extreme.
/ a bad luck that travels as both particle and wave.
/ backwards, lacking, locked-into –
/ cancelled.
/ there’s that word again. has the stink of endowment all over it.
C U T!
i tell her i blame the cashless society, how it tricks people into believing that culture, and not economics, is the basis for political reality by making money invisible. all this dicking around on the surface. she says –
what structural level?
and maybe she has a point. we keep telling ourselves we live under patriarchy, but maybe it’s worse than that: if patriarchy is the organised expression of misogyny, then misogyny is patriarchy’s opportunistic, endlessly adaptable mutant fucking spider-baby.
don’t you understand anything? patriarchy is a constipated dinosaur. it consolidates power into one big lumbering egg-bound legal monolith. misogyny has embraced and absorbed our tactics, our language. misogyny looks like us.
that sounds a little –
ffs. it’s not us. that’s my point. any more than fucking nambla had anything to do with queer advocacy in the 70s and 80s. you get me? i’m trying to say fuck identarianism and love each other. otherwise – otherwise – otherwise –
/ it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
/ and it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
/ sinéad o’connor says fight the real enemy.
/ ripping up a picture of ayn rand and says fight the real enemy.
/ tearing a wish-you-were-here to shreds says fight the real enemy.
/ this country is the enemy.
/ this city that holds us, with violence and without passion.
/ and the same logics as always, degrading and rational.
/ ooh, sets the standard.
/ apprentice to nightsweats.
/ the spine perspiring, all summer through.
/ kids with old faces who know only how to compel.
/ the black flag nailed to us breast. ball-gag of broken tweets.
/ were crouched in the camera. inside the cliché. the camera collapses us snouts.
/ internet of things. its coldness closes thought.
/ and a thou-shalt attitude, banderoles of wan support.
/ pinkwashed saps. the easily fooled.
/ a hundred-thousand angry faces, little coroner’s emojis.
/ queer lives smashed, smeared across its increase, over its aching.
/ christ, this fully-funded morgue.
/ this morgue-draw with benefits.
/ more certain by the day that the city hates us.
/ wants us to hate one another. ourselves.
/ wake up one morning as a marketable tribe.
/ who sold the kids at the conference the books they burnt?
/ choice is for children. grab everything now.
/ by meaningless degrees.
/ let’s run away. a line of peeled suitors weep at our departure.
/ pain can pass through a fingerprint. dismissed.
/ all the quartets of recovery, singing their point-blank soprano –
/ out.
/ and into the fens. no dust but distance.
/ speak about london in hushed tones. holding their wealth in a frozen sling.
/ want to live lightly, grow things. this dowry of marrows.
/ us get for us pains is a steel-toed don’t.
/ fast-acting lament. unfriended.
/ moored to this screen, this field.
/ who have we ever really loved, us radicals?
/ that recollected lunatic.
/ some slapstick conspirator twice as doomed as ourselves.
/ friend with his folksong about the unclean parts of the animal.
/ what did we set on fire? lightweights of pyromania.
/ stubbed, self-mortified pansies.
/ going over the bridge. the awkward water, floating its spittle, dark cutlets of filth.
/ that girl, crying io! io!
/ want to say something like the aftermath is an ethics.
/ consider the other as an extension of ourselves. those bodies.
/ inhabit their hair. their wrists. their lean electric clutch.
/ leave the capitol.
/ partial suspension of property.
/ temporary cessation of hostilities.
/ when the breath glues the body in place and we stare.
/ renewed.
