How relationships change
and then take the old form
if left unchecked
if the bitterness
sticks like dust in the lungs,
if the corridors
are lit with regret.
What are the right questions
to ask ourselves
to ask each other
now that we’ve come out of the wet,
our backs against
white-lit kitchens,
our bodies undercover
close to kerbside cigarettes?
I mash chickpea,
lemon, spinach and garlic
into a pulp.
This is nothing
without the transit
of these things,
and the rhythm of my arm.
There is no meaning
without movement.
Pay close attention:
The grey paint fallen
off this wood,
leaving islands
and continents
on the panels;
in several million years
Africa will crash into Eurasia
and a new mountain range
will be formed,
a crescendo too slow
for our musicians to follow.
I speak to you,
tell you I would like to meet,
to move a little closer
in my second hand coat,
tapping out
a new line
to get things moving.
The moon a peach segment,
translucent.
The bodies pile up and
NGOs ask the question:
How many more need to die?
Necessity and death.
Do any need to die like this,
their bodies bruised
and crumpled sacks
coated in dust?
The evening light is so sharp
it feels as though
the silhouettes of church spires
might fall, and the city
pull apart in concertina,
the river alone recording
these dark shapes
reflected on its surface.
And the bodies pile up
laying together in concertina.
Enough to fill a stadium.
Enough to fill a stadium.
The moon waxing,
the dark is so sharp
you can feel the stars falling,
the past
poking holes in the depths
of all we don’t know.
And the bodies pile up
and the borders are broken
and statehood is given,
gifted, questioned, denied.
And you sit here
eating peach segments
out of season,
the taste so sharp
you can almost feel the world
being pulled apart.
The world contains
so much,
not even dreaming
can touch the sides
of everything.
On contact with this
we have
to find a way in
against the tide,
an opening.
The arctic cold
snaps the moisture
from the air,
and skin flakes like pastry
from the first web space
between my thumb and index.
The world tilts
into the snap of air,
rubble flaking like skin
the death toll an index,
to count and confound
in the arctic cold.
The pieces are there
to be moved,
the margins infinite,
our language incomplete,
the instruction manual
torn to shreds
by time’s teeth.
Your attempts to change
always marked
by gain and grief.
Enter your verification code for this:
a world
that burns the roof of your mouth
so hair-like slithers of skin
dangle from the point of the pain.
Here you will find
a whole array of shops
lit up in near-perpetuity,
a flock of migrating zombie geese
dropping their acid shit
over semi-deserted conurbations,
people selling body and soul
to be come those who haunt:
this purgatory,
which is the only form
of immortality, complete
in its wretchedness.
Others polish their possessions;
cars, watches, gadgets,
before stuffing them into the earth
and falling in with them
down to the muddy richness
of disintegration
before they are disinterred
at the penultimate station,
where the burnt arched roof
is under permanent repair.
From a certain point there is no more turning back. That is the point that must be reached.
– Frank Kafka
Have we reached that point
of no turning back,
on the cusp of a complete slick
on the rails of a stuck thaw?
It was double figures
on Christmas day
now back within
a ‘normal’ range.
First: Is this where we should be?
Then: “Who is this ‘we’?”
Then: This is where I am
eating Stollen
trying to comprehend
how things end up
where they do:
organic lemonade
extraterrestrial craft
woolen fibres and
kraft napkins and
unfettered whispers and
inherited trauma and
the crisp new pages
of a hardback book.
There are things I think
that dissolve on contact
with the page.
There are things I think
I should not have said,
but I did – they broke
beyond the edge of my lips,
and here I am
in a cafe with
inoffensive, overplayed,
dull jazz-funk dribbling out
of the speakers,
breaking and reforming,
breaking and reforming.
Subjectivity lives in its own unhistoric time of unending doubt.
– Boris Groys
Three years. My feet and hands
numb from the river,
the sunlight falling through
Conham Vale, the two churches
like doberman ears either side
of the peak of the hill.
Three years. Glitching in
and out of lockdowns, the
weeks dissolving in me
like inefficient aspirin.
It’s tedious now to say
that time did something strange,
because the way we moved changed.
It wasn’t so much about tempo
though it’s easy to draw that
distinction between fast and slow.
It was more that time came apart
like a clump of soil in water,
or leaves separated from the trees
at the approach of winter.
It altered on contact with
a different state, defined by
a different set of relations.
Now, I sit in the new flat
with hot ginger, lemon and
manuka honey, staring at
the black, hand-me-down
Ivar shelving, trying to imagine
another different state
as the evening creaks by
like a rusting gate.
The news is shit today,
it was shit yesterday
and it’ll probably be shit tomorrow.
The middle ground
fast disappearing
in another great conflagration.
Fuck ‘insert any number
of national leaders’;
my eloquence recedes
from this torrent of shit,
these men and their two-bit
imaginations. Splintered land
the aggregate of our histories
as residual fuckers pay
no heed to lines in the sand
that turn into ellipses.
Shit.
Fuck.
Cunt.
Set aside ‘decent’ language
for a moment
for a long moment
in this climate.
Be free to voice your anger
before picking up
a piece of shattered hope.
It won’t fit the shape
you had in mind,
such is the fuckery of life,
but collect it anyway
and keep fucking going:
illegitimi non carborundum.