/ dismissed from its pedant republics at last.
/ convulsing and doubled, clumsily thrust.
/ between buses, a girl going io! io! the throat unburdens itself of arrows.
/ all of its wrecked formidables. her moonstomper’s oi! inverted.
/ pours out of herself. i hear the way her pleasures tear.
/ in pubs, those ashtray mafias, ashtray try-hards, running a numb hand up her slick no-brainer.
/ on wanker’s wharf, and a scant tree held in the misfire of an eye.
/ to be all muscle and no memory. the thames, a degraded membrane.
/ sick neuritic twitch.
/ in pubs they will open her body, a versatile blade.
/ their dictionary of cigarettes. the aptly translated lie.
/ clever boys. the flawless, disaffected pause that passes for –
/ lotus cheaters. compress usself  into a five-point plan for progress.
/ to preside over and haunt this ballad of cladding and scaffold.
/ our tender silos, burning.
/ breathe in the jinxed blueprint of it. crossing the urn in its amours.
/ grenfell, greenfield, misfold.
/ in syllable and tissue. such sky. missold.
/ dismissed and turning. little grief of methods and permissions.
/ all roads lead to –
/ circle and spill. the quotidian-acute.
/ and no roads.
/ shall abide its winding. the limit and eclipse –
/ of money.
/ will be anchored and then discarded.
/ to break, if not free, then thorough. over the medway, the blue-brown stretcher of small resentments.
/ a golden rusk of light, skimmed, succumbing.
/ dream of an elsewhere we call berlin, moonwalk the mouth through its thin obituary deutsch.
/ pretend to a summer of priory walls. necrotic couch-surf. a carnivorous species of great unwashed.
/ alone there, with all us sovereign insomnias.
/ and the sun, expectant brute, banging his tin drum, waiting for us to –
/ falling. spectacle of last resort. radio: archive of grating feudal melodies.
/ want to be neutralised in suits to the tune of an airless oh, baby!
/ and celebrate dead versions.
/ you wouldn’t be the first averted eye to enter the big world –
/ and crack.
/ says go, if you’re going. sulky wastrel facepalm. london is paradise with a slow puncture.
/ and that’s on a good day.
/ stagnant apprehensions, burials, peak liberal dogshit.
/ thwart gob stinging with public apology.
/ or the hot, pink mess of cynical allyship.
/ those bastions of homicidal price-gouge, their staple of rainbow tawdries.
/ and wow, look us: heat-seeking and sealed against empathy.
/ was feebly monstered. laughed up us nullified guts.
/ going which side are you on? eyes like sterilised zygotes. eyes like dashcams. lidless thicket of eyes.
/ fucker, why so in love with this syndrome of sides?
/ like error into anvil.
/ like a face, vaguely razored.
/ like munitions, components, oracles –
/ have anything to do with the pained, miraculous expansion of being in a body.
/ or what you mean by nature.
/ depredations, depredations. rotting modalities.
/ dismissed. this is not a country, but an industry.
/ shining and shouting. the brain is a hutch, the brain is a kennel.
/ there is nothing to love here but things.
/ she says: with my rage i could bend girders of bone.
/ a golden ticket taped over the mouth. battlehymn hemispheres, this is where it hurts.
/ in a city, furtive and permanent. inflamed, but depleted.
/ lie on your side in a high-ceilinged room, tidily miscarried.
/ hell has many mouths.
/ to survive entails a mutation.
/ and is it any wonder? working your gorge like a pro.
/ aberration unceasing. buildings rise like ultimatums.
/ a textbook of trick questions. accountants’ disclaimers.
/ is it any wonder? your future that important blue you wipe yourself on.
/ synthetic death. backhanders, switcheroos. put your finger on the problem –
/ poem: extravagantly roving slut.
/ if this is what we made with words, are we sure?
/ if this is what we made with words, are we sure it is the country?
/ if this is what we made with words, are we it is the country we want to escape?
/ and not language itself?
/ like you were a dirty old man, hugh crain, and you built a dirty house!
/ like trying to make thoughts from –
/ the core, the corona, extracellular aggregates, plaquey snarl around the stem of speech.
/ will go from city to city, establish our achilles future with serene affect.
/ oh horrors. plotline of pigs, preface of weeds. chorus of dead ethereal twinks.
/ row upon row of mad, capacitated crowns. royal babies. this basket of corrosives, down in one.
/ the capitol. its toxicity is meagre but extreme.
/ a bad luck that travels as both particle and wave.
/ backwards, lacking, locked-into –
/ cancelled.
/ there’s that word again. has the stink of endowment all over it.

C U T!

i tell her i blame the cashless society, how it tricks people into believing that culture, and not economics, is the basis for political reality by making money invisible. all this dicking around on the surface. she says –

what structural level?

and maybe she has a point. we keep telling ourselves we live under patriarchy, but maybe it’s worse than that: if patriarchy is the organised expression of misogyny, then misogyny is patriarchy’s opportunistic, endlessly adaptable mutant fucking spider-baby.

don’t you understand anything? patriarchy is a constipated dinosaur. it consolidates power into one big lumbering egg-bound legal monolith. misogyny has embraced and absorbed our tactics, our language. misogyny looks like us.

that sounds a little –

ffs. it’s not us. that’s my point. any more than fucking nambla had anything to do with queer advocacy in the 70s and 80s. you get me? i’m trying to say fuck identarianism and love each other. otherwise – otherwise – otherwise –

/ it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
/ and it’s all just a little bit of history repeating.
/ sinéad  o’connor says fight the real enemy.
/ ripping up a picture of ayn rand and says fight the real enemy.
/ tearing a wish-you-were-here to shreds says fight the real enemy.
/ this country is the enemy.
/ this city that holds us, with violence and without passion.
/ and the same logics as always, degrading and rational.
/ ooh, sets the standard.
/ apprentice to nightsweats.
/ the spine perspiring, all summer through.
/ kids with old faces who know only how to compel.
/ the black flag nailed to us breast. ball-gag of broken tweets.
/ were crouched in the camera. inside the cliché. the camera collapses us snouts.
/ internet of things. its coldness closes thought.
/ and a thou-shalt attitude, banderoles of wan support. / pinkwashed saps. the easily fooled.
/ a hundred-thousand angry faces, little coroner’s emojis.
/ queer lives smashed, smeared across its increase, over its aching.
/ christ, this fully-funded morgue.
/ this morgue-draw with benefits.
/ more certain by the day that the city hates us.
/ wants us to hate one another. ourselves.
/ wake up one morning as a marketable tribe.
/ who sold the kids at the conference the books they burnt?/ choice is for children. grab everything now.
/ by meaningless degrees.
/ let’s run away. a line of peeled suitors weep at our departure.
/ pain can pass through a fingerprint. dismissed.
/ all the quartets of recovery, singing their point-blank soprano –
/ out.
/ and into the fens. no dust but distance.
/ speak about london in hushed tones. holding their wealth in a frozen sling.
/ want to live lightly, grow things. this dowry of marrows.
/ us get for us pains is a steel-toed don’t.
/ fast-acting lament. unfriended.
/ moored to this screen, this field.
/ who have we ever really loved, us radicals?
/ that recollected lunatic.
/ some slapstick conspirator twice as doomed as ourselves.
/ friend with his folksong about the unclean parts of the animal.
/ what did we set on fire? lightweights of pyromania.
/ stubbed, self-mortified pansies.
/ going over the bridge. the awkward water, floating its spittle, dark cutlets of filth.
/ that girl, crying io! io!
/ want to say something like the aftermath is an ethics.
/ consider the other as an extension of ourselves. those bodies.
/ inhabit their hair. their wrists. their lean electric clutch.
/ leave the capitol.
/ partial suspension of property.
/ temporary cessation of hostilities.
/ when the breath glues the body in place and we stare.
/ renewed.