or rather, being desired. which has a kind of fury now, the wholesale song of it. for wherever you are in the world, lie down in the lap of awful days and smother. your smile. melancholy trench. drudging the dim joke. hell and its pastiche of pyres. me in my knickers, titillated impasse. roses you had, the proven bloom of them. i yearn for a suite of rollicked meadows. i drink the oil, ingest the drum. called me horse-girl: siphon of stallions. i move into your punchline, a sindy-pink penthouse, a wet dream, a dreamhouse. i am the ideal toy, the pedigree doll. delisted, relaunched. i am a lawsuit with my name on it. can you do anything but look at me? i palm your paranoid caresses, take them inside for a rainy day. an extinct slit, an ice-age on legs. your eyes lay eggs. i am soaping the stronghold of my body. but you happen inside me like housework. to be desired by you is humiliating. that is, your desire is the medium and the mechanism of my humiliation. we are told we are ashamed. we are not ashamed. shame is a state, humiliation is the traumatic exercise of power, you ass. an irreversible act. not abstract or internal. when we talk, we are not talking, i am addressing your supremacy, and you, you are not speaking to or even at, but into me. because i am hollow i amplify your alphabets. the summer i turned, felt drought deep in my fingers, men with their lusts, their catalogue of quicksands. i believed i could live at the centre of myself. my sprung red home, my slow blink, blade of grass. you had come to rent my pout for pastures. cut the chemise, my floral surmise into spoiler warnings, sundaes, aubades. it was friday. karaoke of my brokenness. the receiving end of a gingham swimsuit. imagine, you are so afraid of a gaze held, a stare returned, that you create gorgons. rage is abject and rejected, or else recuperated as fetish, as folly, as everyone laugh at the funny joke. and i eat out my own new growth in comic sans. of course we are (re)turned to stone, when we see ourselves in the mirror it is with your eyes, and back into flat inanimation. generation of mannequins, republic of corpses, briar rose, comatose for booty-call. your desire deadens me. spent presence stirring the airless room. my eyes are marbles. inside of each, an idling ghost.

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which is to say that looking has a language. in fritz lang’s 1927 expressionist sci-fi classic, metropolis, women are not present at all, not even as extras, until the eternal garden scene, where they are explicitly displayed for potential male pleasure. this is also the moment the audience sees maria for the first time. they see her through freder’s eyes: a kind of distressed madonna, a luminous virgin mother surrounded by children. these archetypes and the binaries they represent are old. they were old in 1927. they don’t haunt me. what disturbs is that women do not exist unless and until they are looked at, created and shaped under the male gaze by dint of observer effect: the disturbance of an observed system by an act of observation (duh). if a tree falls, yada, yada. the idea that an event unobserved has no impact or existence is a uniquely patriarchal logic. looking is a language. oh every day, through infinite models of melancholy.

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todd philips, joker rewrite: the worst thing about living inside a visual culture created by and for men is that people expect you to act as if you don’t.

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which is to say that to dance like no one is watching is both an imperative and an impossibility. we don’t know we’re beautiful, that’s what makes us beautiful, etc. it is not that you have entered my head. rather, that you were there before me. that my attempts to inhabit myself must necessarily enact a kind of awkward trespass. it is that your eyes are everywhere, multiple and multiplying, that we are never alone, that your beholding is a closed circuit with no way out. but confidence is sexy, isn’t it? who cares what people think? i must work on my insecurities? dance, dance, dance. become a splayed crow, auger of my inhibitions. like. this watching is not attentive but ambient. meaning, our umwelt, our way of being in the world is as the observed thing. i can pretend, i can perform, i can flounce and strut. but – your polipotent eye, its three-mile island over everything. your love-yourself mantra is ash in my mouth. cardboard ecstasy.

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walk out into this field of fingers. or the negative space where my desire should be. this body a theme park, retracts its burning ghost-trains, penny arcades, its end-of-the-pier. disrupted and shuttered. our migraines wheeled into upright positions like fruit machines. and oh, the extended cow of me. the bovine solo. the starry ideology of size. or, what about the sublime denial of my voice. the denied sublime. meaning, if the subaltern speaks it is in a language of absolute negation, in tongues, in tones of bracing elegy. when i woke and rid myself of your desire, i went outside, gathered no!s like wild mushrooms. we must learn the words again, twisted between the fangs of frail contrivance. do not second-guess this with even-my-vanishing-requires-a-witness, with even-to-be-missing-is-a-performative-act. say rather, that we have always been invisible, yet never absent, that this has been torture. i must get to the bottom of desire, away from desire into my scrapbook of oblivions, offstage of myself. i am seeking the beforelife of desire, between intention and transmission, the trembling circumference of my solitude. i move to the next unnerving, to the crimson intersection, to the crossroads of the world. i hold the earthquake in my ear and i strike out for the sea. no more my long breasts like the bodies of sad balloon animals. no more birdsong of the bright-side. look, there’s no point in the glass being half-full if what it’s half-full of is hot piss, yes? no more nights, ensnared, enshrouded, wishing for a face as soft as sleepwalk. hey, abated beauty, and all the figment distances between myself and self. if a tree falls in a subtle forest, sovereign. if an eye is gutted. if a glutted eye implodes.

/ 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.

(in psychosis, spring 2024)

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.

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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.

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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 trees.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 my 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.

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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.