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.

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.

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.