Publications

Excerpt

BROADCAST

 

   Most of the truest things I’m not saying usually

start with a torso or vest, flung round

in a cold humane gravity that of sylleptic

 

   touching to no touching at all: but without

meeting myself or later parting company,

without such cosy demarcation, there this familiar

 

   figure just is, so close in front that

nothing’s been drawn in behind and my hands

will never be weapon enough. In this place

 

   I must be willing to hurt or else I’d never myself be able

to beat the living shit out of me for joyous done

instead of not screaming hours and sharded

 

   light flags pocks in the rained tarmac til almost another

no touching at all day seeps in and things close off

and I as usual say nothing about kicking

 

   the shit out of me, and knifing me in dead

responsive air near a bin. But fuck me it’d be

 

always one of the truest things I never

 

dog curfew

bell, regain finchsong as ’tis, breathe

 

   say if I said it. Proud pragmatism saw me out

and through when having woken saying pointlessly out

loud I’m so tired and having got

 

   myself downstairs to a bank or a bench or

window or basin or London I forget I puked and

pissed and bled and shat and wept, and

 

   the cops outside my skin screamed to ask was ever

there poetic thought more valid more unchosen or

without alternative; it’s running down my chest

 

   and gut and legs now, hardening down and in into

commodified dissent, a little biscuit or soften down and in

produce a song about it; sample down and in some sort of olive from

 

   the hut round the yard corner; spinning relay room now

of acrid friendly froth; this is literally the hairs now

on my legs encased down and in

 

   in working outward tears shit blood and piss and puke

and some subclause no doubt all seeming equally and so

elaborate in their corroding iridescence like a bad bird laceratingly no

 

will we get glassed retweetably into a funk as ’tis we

cannot miss who if I yelped, among striated cops, out, would hurt me were wrong. No we were wrong.

 

So spoiled-through that yet-unregistered as spoiled

nostalgia ski-ran to get toxic spoiled flip turning cloak ladder spoiled

pine for whimsy into spoiled crass of register dissent;

   at spoiled worst we were again hungover in a way

   we weren’t hungover before. No will we go outside for a walk, get now

a takeaway tea from that place where

 

tarmac computer he does

readings make and our

fire the dog metal

plate survives unlit

 

   A man you don’t know screams down his phone now

in the park. It’s important for the present purpose that he’s right here doing this forever.

 

   I used to think this didn’t explain everything.

I cannot control my dog, or anyone else’s, or the cost

of sandwiches at larger London railway stations.