#DROWNINGNOTDROWNING
to find me, plausible and aspiring in a relevant dress and full of promise. oh internet,
oh tumblr, at twenty your sunniest meme is a church i enter, mouth full of feigning: i
will be well. to find me so, industrious and suffering. sweet bean or sesame, darkest
soy, an oyster sauce i squeeze from me. my pores are little sepulchres: my face is
thick with foreign bodies. my face is foreign bodies. you don’t know. except you do.
i do not know about anything, weary and sleek at three a.m. what is it to be so heavy
with lustre that you can’t even? in my vault of suspect valentines, a boy whose kiss
is an absolute brat and it wants what it wants. he said i had become intense. he lead
me not into temptation. in the night, when the body is its realest zoo, couldn’t we all
use a few of those flavourless mercies? and by mercy, a kind of white-people tea. you
drink it off hot and without sugar. me, when the heart turns watertight. me, at half
the speed of me.>> <<to find you, i won’t. days of lulling wound, i know, when
hands cannot comply. youth is being in the world and the serpent under it: better
to have not been born is the penitent subtext of all our comic fonts. oh internet, oh,
blog of blogs. atypical silk of self cut, and a softer filter over us. a squealing dream
at night. i’m unzipping a damsel. i’m climbing in through her face to say yes. and i
thought if i could lay my shadow in a stranger’s lap, could stretch myself the length
of my light reading, i would be sane. i would drain the blank page like solemn milk.
i fail. by theft, by thrift, by pills, by mania’s several devices. to find you. if anyone
could. if i could reach back through the rabbit for the hat. paranoid, and nobody
wants to fuck that thought. nobody wants to deal. what does it mean to go
under? to become: sclerite, the spiny element in me. kelps and corals, colonial
forms, good sea-stalwarts all. down through fleabane, limonium, and sweetest
vulgare. a red finger gropes for light: gorgonian, ghostwhip, plumrose. enemy.
anemone. down. through thresholds of fatality. where flesh is a territorial
fauna. the sea has mouths enough.<<>> to find us, and you might, in whatever
preening days remain to you. not immersed, submerged, of our own crocodile
doing. and when it is time to peel this weakness from us. when we are all body,
gorged with form. then you’ll see. oh dear one, oh internet girl on the internet
who never made it. i would give you my growing if i could and none of its pains.
the mind is not our fault, at fault. the wreck and the reef. the wreck and the treasure.
HYENA! IN ANOTHER JANUARY
low is a mood and a sound
the mood makes. our days
are a kind of cow-slow
inseminated sloth, and all
those moon maidens who
write about the moon. did
i not tell you i was ill?
drawl the hopelessly dead
like the bourgeois losers
that they are. hyena’s
moon will not shine, is
a kind of stitch this! is
a kind of what used to be
called a gorbals kiss. say
that out loud, like a pound
of mint imperials, as quaint
as breaking glass.>> was
there something specific
you wanted? as in: ever?
do the likes of you
desire? beyond, i mean,
a bland appeal to nervous
muscle. our little days
of doomed recuperation,
luciferian pursuits. moon
like a soaped mouth: oh,
i’ve gagged more than i’ve
spit, she says. no more.
hyena is both sacred
and taboo. her mien
of waxing ransack. has
redly circled every
crummy calendar
mischief.
across the carpark,
loping. where dealers
go to percolate
apothecary mottos
into bingo calls: doctors’
orders, unlucky for some,
thumb screws and crutches,
alive, alive-o. every day is
halloween, caught in her
cauterizing stare. solemn
coward, star of her own
cold loathing.<< but
seriously. here is a gull,
wings spread to a storm’s
foretelling. all you can
prescribe is a kind
of legal coma, or a kind
of legal curse. streets
contain hyena’s vatic
dread but barely. auricular.
oracular repose. hyena
conceives through the ear,
immaculate with caffeine.
her children born all
still. moon maidens, listen,
i’m on to you. belligerent
flirts of occasion, sonorous
and circumstantial. you
were dumbing
the candles down to
a flicker, an inward
electric lie. i saw your
long eyelashes. aloof,
assuaged with saying
a slow blink. bovine
and fake and low.
is for scarcity, for
being scared. the moon,
with its stethoscope’s
testimony. an abscess,
and ulcer, a blister on
the lip. hyena’s moon
multiplies dissections
in the cutting room.
short of the waste
of her substance, use
her. we know you will.
I AM TOLD
that dry land is not a myth. i am told there are women
who come with the neatness of an undertaker’s sneeze.
i am told about myself. by poets, mainly. in the freeze-
dried stickling of their lauded forms. days of equivocal
spleen, dear god. today i am sick, itching, slick with my
obsessions. i have learnt eruption from the gulls. a way
to make my whiteness mob. my body sings its curvature
of dirt. is pasty and assailable. i am told to speak up, to
voice all the unsaid sinews of this hurt, the heart one
cartoon bicep flexing. one big rubber muscle. i am told
we can live on thirty pounds a week, what to do if my
symptoms persist, of my imploded promise first. alms
for the poor, and how i let him down. a girl is dicking
around, mudlark at the limits of the criminal. i hate
the cocaine cosiness of her to death. smugly wayward.
one day, diva, you’ll be barefoot backstage, fixing your
own hair. you’ll be mariah carey advertising fucking
crisps. hyena will not wait for the law to have mercy,
nor to be adored. i am told an animal cannot suffer.
hyena is the suffering tongue, stuck out. her dead
name. her deadly name, i mean. love, conditioned
and conditional. the pigs in their dalek glide behind
farmfoods, steady rain, and kfc, with its ugly
confederate albinism. the stink from extractors, all
day long. lips meeting with a voluptuary blush. i am
told about love in its low-hanging dopamine: tedious.
hyena, annulling a nervous blush by opening
a vein, by picturing the key, confirming the prison.
which is literal and everywhere, by the way. her
desire is a double negative. bare with promise. i am
told how brave, in spirals of grimacing ecstasy,
a guardian interview leaking our feels. oh please,
enough. i am going spare. i mean. is a poem ever
more than a high-pitched whine about legal violence?
ticking of the endometronome is a skew-eyed pain
out of sequence. fuck. i am told it gets better. i am
told to take up yoga. i am told to live what
i love.
