from SPAM zine issue 7, Prom Date (2017)
Dear Matty Healy,
I just saw you play in Glasgow last night. One time back in like 2017 I wrote a poem that compared some kind of narrative flip of my speaker’s life to the flip of your hair, back when it was longer and so mid-2010s nothing else compares to it. That whole decade followed the narrative arc of a terrible prom date, seriously, culminating in the good morning after vibes of the curly girl method. After your gig, which we arrived late for but still in time for everything, I got home and watched you on youtube talk with Zane Lowe about the various loves and how you used to want them all at once, all the loves of 10,000 people and your lovers and the love of a friend, but they’d be in conflict so the ‘malady’ of one love would taint the rest and you didn’t like them to bleedthrough each other. How you wanted to make the loves exclusive as possible. I wondered about that as a kind of ars poetica for what we are supposed to do with creation. How the song changes once someone adores it. When you pour all love for one person or many people shining into the same thing and each time someone reads or listens they replenish it with their love. Sincerity is scary! One time I walked through Manchester in semi-lockdown the rain was incessant, my love and I sheltered in shopping centres amidst the paramount sensation of repeating our steps, one of us was half without vision the other depressed in white lace like willows drooping in winter etc.
I learned from Chicken Shop Date that you’re an Aries. The only other Aries I know are poets or massage therapists. People with fire in the tips of their fingers.
You said your favourite lyric from the new album is I’m in love with you
for me it might be Central Park is Sea World for trees…
*
10k Loves
O prince of the internet
climbing the stage you want to dismantle
every night in the city
sets itself
ersatz sun
inhalations of metamodernism
I am twenty nine for the last time being twenty nine in your song
many lambent americas remember you
some guys behind us screaming “CHANGE OF HEART
YA CUNT” all night
until security confiscated their vapes
and their jumping excesses
I think your ardent excesses
are ascent to attention, this gelatine of the early set
nodding to lockdown
makes me jealous
she’s turned the weans into a kind of wine
against us
sucking a stranger’s thumb
Scott and I debate what’s in the vessels
is it water, true wine, lemsip or lucozade
various Platonic essences
mid-century realism never looked so good as you
peeling back the paint of the not really wood
or having a cold
thrusting up from the job opportunity of
being a pop star’s
Harold Pinter pretence
smoking fake cigarettes
around too many scented candles
after your shift at the financial centre of everything
what’s a fiver
kids want the same dream supremely
whole crowd shouting I took all my things that make sound
the rest I can do without
right back at you in the common heartbreak
fake smoking out the window where the stars
of a trillion iPhones are
When he came around to switch off the lamps, gently
I silently recited my cloud password
in the hope of being swallowed in the play
of the warm, exterior moment
omnicringe to believe
lust songs are still possible
how earlier I had watched a square of you playing ‘These Days’
on guitar for Lucy, Phoebe, Jack and Natalie
all in a moment’s notice
becoming a teenage rationalist
addicted to ballads
like Caroline going live to eat pasta
you’re like our favourite band in the world is The Blue Nile
singing the present
gift
I fucking miss
once imagined myself lost in the rain
of sleeping lightly
sugar guitar
coming so far
I used to walk around in the love
made myself into a sound
walking around
helps to be happy
wintering too many lines
You’re like even remembering the original camera shot
always saw you remembering to almost
die a lot
in the same dream
fuck it
everything tastes the same when you can’t be enlightened
trying really hard
to try
silver hairs newly sprung from my skull
in the metafiction of being a genuine person
ringfencing fresh crush superlatives
The outside is horrible
I grow shyness in expensive monstera to never water it
better than when I am kissed
This is still a review of your gig!
Talk of the fourth wall fell for it
inside the house beat of collarbone
I feel like shiny roadkill
At what point did the feeling thaw
more jumping, climb the rig
inside its precious oil only knows you
want
folk influence
like I want to be guys
augmented on stage
to climb through a video
saxophonist of the lonesomeness
inside all brass
of the bar
turning the lights off
marrying a new year to the same
way it felt
I can’t forget
mariaology 