/ 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.