Three poems

“And neither one particularly appeals to me…”

For Peadar

to be rid of the spring, i said goodbye to blossoms, those brown and blousy doubters after fact. their lugubrious kitsch i cut and shook all down. how life is like that sometimes, goes on convening its crushed filth in your mouth, and poetry, this tumbler of ready silt.

what should it mean to set it down, those tried and brackish sanctions? the nights we lay, fermenting in our beds. children, toeing our small retorts. what have you done with your life, biddy? i have remained to meet the weather in its bottomless monotony, i sit amidst the whim and drift of loss, flicking pebbles at the sea.

but what should it mean, to number ourselves among the poets? to be stood up in the borrowed offals of someone else’s pain? poets, their stony ministry, sinister moan, the scrubbed verb scoured through. poets, those new templars, moralising everlasts, baby-faced fogeys, chumps and dupes. it is the clever ones i most despise, boys who would flatten his mongrel alas! to a single volume of paraphrased sulk. men of svelte pledges, websites, words like sweated cress. turnkeys, retainers of turds, anything that savours of restraint. i saw his face fall open, and need’s pursuing sickles round and around. rows of enchanted pedants, tucking their grief back under their toadstools shyly.

there is a wrinkle in the finish of the song, a small hitch in the liberty of breath. lift the arm, drop the needle. again, again. afternoons, dejected and dozy. oh, i am a poet, old wound-chewer extraordinaire. to write makes my own small axis of disavowal and i loathe myself this tepid conceit of bees. honeycomb apologist. gibbet me to the screwed rant always. a regurgitating harlequin, eternal stock-ticker of piss-ant rage. there was a smile, his teeth like the pale brown icons of civilisation, dug up and loosely museumed.

i am in the yard, rooting out, paring back. the garden, at least, will go out in a blaze of brevity. the brown bin shut with a brick on a heresy of lean grey arms. whitefly over everything, and we carry our former islands like an abscess in the gut. yet here we are: inflamed, thirsty, testifying, various. bewilderment of scorched cantos on the subject of garden pests. fear’s blackthorn shiver down a torn shank. my trembling farsight, spring’s departing ecstasies. at night i flood out the dark maw of myself into a banishment of beige sheets, lumpy mattresses. this too will pass, says so-and-so. rent and wreathed, head in the clouds, no coffee for seven whole days. and this. what you put a perpetual shoulder too. how we go on, colossus of pointless fortitude. how we go on, not knowing what for.

“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.

The Ecstasy of Saint Valerie

(in psychosis)

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 tress.

+

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.

+

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.

+

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 your 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.