Miss Anthropocene is a selection of short lyric, ‘ethereal nu metal’ poems responding to the Elon Musk/Grimes complex, from intimations of emerald fortunes to billionaire shares, conceptual infinity and big e-girl energy. Through academic research, poetry and music criticism, I’ve been hinging on the ‘miss anthropocene’ project for some years now, and the arrival of Grimes’ 2020 album of the same name, on the brink of pandemic lockdown, was the final impetus to write this. Responding to the record’s conflations of misanthropy and our current geological epoch, Miss Anthropocene explores weird desire, gender, material intimacy, temporal distortion, apocalypse vibrations, pop music and a petropoetics of excess and residue within the frenzied dramaturgy of late capitalism and climate crisis. In lieu of the doom scroll, this is a post-internet ecopoetry of ‘massive dance lament’, lyric survival, surface tension, sexy ambience, dreamplay and visions.
There is a place where these supermassive roses might be planted. A harsh place that exists at thin resolution, we have to resample; I am doing the maths to know how 100gb permits her entrance. The process slows because this behaviour is not natural. Her entrance with the roses bundled in giant’s arms, and the long tresses of foam and seven neat words she has tucked in a satchel of crocheted pea proteins. She is attuned to a certain instant where it works that she plants the roses. They are gnarly, monstrous, thirsty. The roses are not sober. And the girl? She stumbles on her third negroni, abstracted, poured by the silent one who inhabits the hedgerows. Vermouth of sun, gin of moon, aperitif of the bitterwort and marshes, garnished with wedges of orange from overseas. These seven neat words I will not tell you with her lips sealed blood sugar, femme confection, a certain rain, a squall.
The clarity is lost a little when we adjust figures. But the girl is still there, in the corner maybe, bundled from sight with impossible flowers. What do we know of a girl and her flowers? She could be a waitress, a bridesmaid, a funeral attendant — but no, this is extravagance to belie all such professions. The flowers won’t fit in the picture this is. It is not merely to carry. Some say they are hyperobjects, but if so, what of the girl? She is also beyond human proportion; she would live a thousand years. Sprinkle hundreds and thousands of leap years merely upon breakfast, and yet at nineteen does she not look a million? If you were to splay the fine skin between her thumb and forefinger, you would begin to see the star stuff which flows in human capillaries. But at such resolution!
Of her face since nineteen, the narrator of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover [L’Amant] (1984) writes: ‘But my face hasn’t collapsed, as some with fine features have done. It’s kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste’. So when the girl lay down for another of her size; they were a cloud, it rained, the girl awoke with child. But she gave birth to nothing but roses. She was a fixture of the processing plant. Initially, sealed in mousseline baubles, they were not even roses but rosehips clustered among thorned vines. And you would imagine these vines entwined with her spine, climbing them as if the destiny was always her neck. She would speak at night, tapping the fine glass, warming them as eggs. Give everything away: the rose-meat of petals and their pale, inward jam, hatching saps, their crying.
A cloud always passes, it creases the sky. Cars go in and out at night.
~
The fruit of rose, especially a wild kind when I write of a Mary Sue or brush her teeth, when she is more tall than willow and yet I have set her colours inverse so in reaching for rosehips she must reach into shadow and isn’t that all in the working day of dreams is deferral of Edenic cinema, she grows in wilderness also known as the fortress of lossy compression where trees are shaky with original pixels and her clothes are torn as mine would be crying forever by the sea with my dairy allergy for twilight ‘The blues are because you’re getting fat and maybe it’s been raining too long’ and if she is me then I am she rehearsing definitions for litany via prayer, supplication, complaint am I a melt vector on cutting board you call me aslant with the knife tucked close to cupid’s bow of my lips ‘she was noted for her command of dialogue’ but no one said anything lipsticks: sweet chestnut, amarena red tender rose and orange delight shaking the rosehips all night for Roman god of erotic love is just rare labour of the shepherds in pleasantview, saying sorry or what colour your blouse is, mine is damask you could press to make attar so I know how I love is mother puts glitter on a wreath of ivy and dying hydrangeas to hang on the door, entrance Mx I give you generally acceptable apples the shop called jazz, they are wrapped in plastic we look up to see the planets ‘almost touching’ but they are something else entirely easy, lucky or free. These green diamonds don’t occur in the wild; she makes them from slices of apple glitch effect plumbob oil of rose is condensation a playable simulation novelist in decline as I lick the sea wall cast this upwards to where another hour is ravished you start to read.
PART TWO: SACRED PORRIDGE
Perhaps this would be enough of the rose-girl if she would stop haunting me. I dreamed Bernadette Mayer wrote a novel overnight, it was midsummer, she was 27 and had a fountain pen the size of the Eiffel Tower. Tell me what she was smoking, was it Marlboro or lemongrass? Maybe cloves? I get mixed up, I’m darks and pastels, nobody likes me. Open a beer to share regardless / Crude oil streams from her words. I became suspicious the rose-girl was a fiction of Bernadette’s, that I was stuck in the internet fiction and whittled away. There was a poem called ‘Thorn’ about a penis. Brexit or no Brexit, I was anyway hoarding tins of beans in the hope they would get me somewhere – a similar purpose to breakfast. Recite to me from memory these stats about lactose, creatine, muscle enhancement. I lift my arms to reach you, I am hauled to the new wall painted mint to match the green iris tea of your eyes, it’s Greenwich Park / I am spent with apple pips and cauliflower hallways. I want to be hurled across continents sprightly / put acorn in pocket. I am not her but she is me, here, in a harsh place. You are the smoothest nut! What was the novel? I don’t know, I have this line: ‘the negative capability of raisins’. Don’t kill the squirrels! Sunday you make porridge with peanuts, sour cream, biscuit, honey, drops of chocolate, muscovado sugar, extra milk of oat – why not acorns? The rose-girl watches. Her breath is a draught.
She is so huge you would miss her. All December the faint scent of her pea satchel follows me so I know I couldn’t possibly have corona. Plunge my nose in vegetal folds. I would be the aura of plasma around her sun, that’s all and merely. Does it rot? The size of these roses, really, is impossible to measure. Expect several hundred metres or miles, stumbling in the world of error where we go to buy bread. Is it for months you have been a tile, a talking head? You are very delicate and I stroke your nice hair, which loosens through the screen to meet me waterfall. I climb to the top of the beanstalk we braided from eating well. We read Lee Harwood in the rain, As Your Eyes are Blue, and drink mulled wine. I guess I am riding horses to catch up with the size of these roses, blue ones also, fat and mellow. Jackie Wang calls this ‘outlaw jouissance’; a phrase I wrote in my notebook, quickly. The line gets whipped! I think about Cy Twombly. The horses are all kinds of colours, but mostly the pearlescence of inside seashells, or mollusc aurora’d in a way that seems Björk or genital. I suppose the rose-girl arranges them nightly as saints do, genial; I suppose it is like Sylvanian families. Sometimes from copses of rowans, the tops of the miniature or minotaur trees, red-berried painted I read her SylviaPlath. My poison voice must catch the wind exact, ‘The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea / And comes from a country far away as health’, as health shall be a human dimension, unrhymed, the rose-girl considers. She is the only one of us who has seen a corpse flower, in a third-floor apartment where somebody important had smuggled the seeds from Chicago, where was she. The corpse flower is not a singular flower but a cluster of blooms, and so is she. It all stinks, I say, so I don’t have corona. If you touch the flanks of these horses so smooth your hands will vanish in gossamer, they become other materials, still smell like hay. This viscosity to friction feels good, it’s lush with endorphins — why don’t you try it. The water is warmly you and me, like the sea; it comes from the eyes of the rose-girl, crying.
~
There’s still time to shop, you collect from store towards a possible come on let’s go of the literal it stings, who you would be in the dream not the enemy’s eye or the unripe banana I stayed in bed til mid-afternoon writing feel-thesis, correcting citations of Clarice Lispector it’s Christmas, you know I don’t have corona on the phone to Avanti the songs are played in such intervals of 45 seconds as to make you hate the very nature of a chord progression is desire’s deferral and will you secure a seat for us at motion sickness what is necessity feels like Velocity is I am washing my hair with tar shampoo and cider vinegar. Come close, wish soon, revese December. Should I call someone? It might be you, explaining multiplication to me, you carry the one and the two, and then I never do read my old diaries smelling of blood and sleep deprivation acrid bulimia, spray of A7 garlic mussels, scarlet muscles my brother says he will donate his plasma for medical causes, have I fear of needles? Lady bird shell collect bathroom dust, antibodies, I am clean and typeset like the stars. You open my coat because of this Reynauds, too cold to unbutton. My anhedonia is cyclical, I stick little poems to the wall they go like
once upon a midnight weary came the lovers on a ferry they were drunk and very old but never had they had a cold over the hills and overseas they could be you or even me
It’s like the Friday of 2019 I read Hannah Weiner’s clairvoyant journals from low-res pdf festive darkness crying in trashland and couldn’t stop tasting purple for a week of otherwise phantosmia, what I smelled was the crushed illustrious rose of infinity pinned to my bittersweet nasal cavity as I am to watch corpse flower time-lapse resemble green diamond, they erect an umbrella and a rare titan arum bloom beneath you typing at the library am I bike spoke, a concept strike for closing the erstwhile windows? Click to know mood… We keep going We leap in a pool of pure negroni and my lungs keep coming up blossom of orange and call you “Hey everyone welcome back to the room, you can open your eyes now” Like probably I have told you before about the band I am starting, a synth-punk deathcore revivalist outfit called Yoga with Adriene I have her permission, she says May all beings be happy Move from a place of connect Present and awake Love your neighbour Things get better, they have to It’s a revolution of the muscular laxation of the life you find cored If you have apple belly thick-skinned of futurity, there will be a chorus and verse for this that goes like scream Motive, Trust, Floor, High, Kindle, Salve, Soften, Strength & Harmony My thighs are burning brightly, it’s the end friend of my Norwich or Brighton, Manchester, Glasgow and some kind of New York resemblance is ‘cracking America’ at the top of your list I have never been to the south coast of an average celestial body yet watering your houseplants I won’t go viral in the night with pills and tweets There’s no cheating in yoga, you make it your own as I do cartwheels on a leap day of acid comedown they say I do it too fast the flight gets in and distant cat miaows as I do kiss you a lot they say catharsis is found in the blues and green laps up the rest is stretching if you can only find it like the sweet spot asana with arm across chest I am become rowan tree, flexing queen of the prom you pluck fruit pastilles from inside me the sea, first try is easy.
PART THREE: TENDER ALPHABET
A. will write in the time of commute B. prefers spearmint toothpaste C. is inside of me D. the size of Paris cumulus E. is all you can eat, ecstasy F. who I love G. has grown H. the hendecasyllabic I fail to write I. doesn’t rightly exist J. sends endless emails K. is a joke L. for loosening jewellery M. with dark sweet cherries and doubles N. conspicuous passionate weekend O. checks the notification P. of classical pleasure Q. minds the gap R. is a rising rat-souled singer S. supposes the cognitive deficit T. exists in lyric saloon U. then driving me up the highway V. to frangible lust I am W. of shimmer lamb X. into cowbell rhythms we go Y. yellow warning of wind has been issued Z. is a property of citrus
PART FOUR: FLOWER SHOW
In The Besieged City (1948) by Clarice Lispector, ‘the flower was showing off […] it too was untouchable, the indirect world’, ‘exhausted’, ‘What is the flower made of if not of flower itself’.
OPEN LOOP ( BOUQUET ( ) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!! ) )
The flower exclaimed a soft orchestral impression of breathing. Adults no longer snack in movies. Spent five hours on a train, six on Zoom, three in the outside air is nice. A time-lapse corpse flower, the music being used, pace of light. Heat syncope of the sea, we dive. Someone is hired to recover her pearls or pears. My skin is peeling from sanity gels.
A fault language of shiningly happy teenagers. Rosettes for the nuclear pony. It’s all total showers today. Condensery of lemonade gemstone, sertraline, the lapwing massacre in a Sufjan track / so I am endlessly sorry.
PART FIVE: NATAL SMUDGE
When everything started to wilt, the moon was too late. Untouchable stem of a name, yet the rose-girl knew what to do. She swallowed the world like a gobstopper, a lightbulb, a tulip. The arrogance of sundown was only that it knew how to try.
Turning over, see the supermassive rose in her belly.
Superstitious gemstones include violets and opals, sleepflower, nightshade; don’t @ me if you think they are cruel or kind. Marlene drops cranberries from the wall and you piss twice as hard in Scarborough Fair, are you sad, buy me blue cheese, there is vigilance in the dead. Rosemary for memory, thyme for a life you led, who sells it. Marlene says she misses Alisha, that’s not-me. Pray you arrive here safely, smudge of tarragon, mushroom photography, lines of flight.
We, after Sophie, after Frank, say Ask for everything!
Regarding conjunction, something about publishing, spirituality, knowledge and authority figures. There will be tension with Aquarius principle. A slip of paper. I was born at 06:20, in a thunderstorm.
[Oh yes! x]
The rose-girl had an overture: she tore wedding pearls from her branch-sized clavicle, let them scatter from the tub where she lay and the tub was a cloud, the pearls were snow. At the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, she was a divorce child with her hair in two plaits we would climb up to kiss at the nape of her neck, that’s it, I play all my aces so we won’t die. These cards are beautiful, we turn them away. There will be no dying, not here or now. I thresh the rest of my skyluck, lager, my skylark. I’m lucky the mirror is showing up nowhere. Sometimes it is Freud’s voice, or an oil pastel. The foam from her brushed-down hair. Of the past you have given me everywhere, Andromeda, minipops, electronic renaissance. In writing the poem I am playing the cello, I am playing the cello of poem to death, why not?
It’s up to you It’s down to you
Don’t be so mournful…
PART SIX: SCENTED AND GENEROUS
I had a dream about the diary with the days mixed up. Each day had its own fragrance:
Cognac, cannabis, dill pickle, mown grass, libido enhancer, sweet vanilla, jasmine, ylang ylang, who shares all, heart notes of shrub, blackcurrant, oak moss, popcorn, peppermint candy, lavender, ginger castoreum, chypre, neroli, understory, wooded and tonka, ambery, orris, top note, emily brontë rose, cinnamon, hot shit, gold dust, brine of ocean, roast aubergine cologne near airstrip pheromone, oil pipe explosion, special cinders, vetiver, slots into psyche, balsam, absinthe, cassie, frangipani, saffron, strawflower aka immortelle, black liquorice, lactones, myrrh, sassafras, fruit loops, chocolate ice, pamplemousse or french for grapefruit martini and rockrose, peony, tobacco, peppercorn, petitgrain, scottish myrtle and soft fir, nutmeg, new car, coffee brew, pine needles, indole, musk of course.
Pitseleh means little one. Elliott Smith sings, ‘no one deserves it’.
I’m turning a petal to see you better / that I am someone’s difference.
Dear Alisha,
If we were to wed in the childhood memory where you circle the prairie with diet cola and you always know what to do, I see the cherryade reds in you, sanguineous of first degree and alacrity pitching your letter. The post office is closed. I eat more peanut butter than Elvis and nobody stops me, I get it from Aldi. The day feels closure and we edge towards lockdown, I’m texting, Starbucks is open on Christmas Day, will you bring me something? Again, like the time we ordered starlit capitalist fuck lattes and dusted methamphetamine before shift; we were exquisite, fruit toast, the nourishing glitter in our hair was ace; we served 200 covers, sixty quid in tips, and you were scarlet in the uniform poem called A Scarlet Letter. Not the one or the many, just any. I knew this already. We had written them all! You have to have dashes of green to make red, tell Hilary, which is why I am writing to you from my rowan tree, fred asks is this a rowan bush, I say a rosehip, I don’t know what to do; the inchplant is coming up fast, it will ingest the television, I look forward to it. Brockley Station, Nina Simone, stomach cramps, star flood. Must learn how to climb / the branches brightly.
Write to me of conspicuous passions, such as aging, or the fairy fountain with permissible agelessness. Crystal arpeggio. The various glacés of Rome, ornamental corpse flowers, pistachio and your deep, carnal desire to dance. I brush all the sea-foam from the rose-girl’s hair and she would collapse in panic. What the heck is in this carpet. Can you send me again the dimensions, dots per inch in terms of the plant, or planet? There is much to do. I am sewn a yellow word and kissing you cherries to lemonade, black to blues. Needing earth for it, rich stuff, thoughts on allotments. Omnidawn is the word, when the camera pans out and one million people have streamed this song, the credits come up. O blush, Love’s refrain in summer! 500,000 ampersands, can you imagine it? My new grand dreams of porny conjunction…
You taught me how to shoplift the various accessories of girlhood; I’ve given it up. See how my brows disapprove!
December is cruel, the dark green foliage of tinsel and shrubbery, poinsettias, it’s kitsch. I learn a blue-grey song on guitar but it sucks. Mum makes paella for xmas eve etc. Pantone named yellow-grey the colours of 2021, Katy is raging as I might too; I had a poem about this from before f-sharp, it was all about cycling, snapped ankles, absolute melt. Get to you. The way you arc your arms just so is centrepiece: everything will be the same as the sum of it was, serving us dinner. Cryptocurrency, wrong-name, Tony Blair of bad air was trending, you do it last-minute, pronounce it soft, you wear a blue velour lace thing, fka misty. These are the suburbs where doors were slammed, and these were offered cookies. Fuck a lawn. But you dip your feet in scant oasis, you break off a piece of the dark chocolate donut. I have dreamed of this. Stillnesses are not without purchase. Another spam mail arrives, dear pal—
I am going out to buy us blowsy hours, belong and casual distortion. Black forest gateau and log of the roasted poem, emitting steamiest lines, pleasure days, no breaks just ganache is that thick language. We lay together, birthday of shadow work, wrote sunlessness. I draw dark green liner on their eyes like vines. Wish holidays longer. We enter the alone wood with natural lights they are strung they are simple, leafage pressed between them. 1800 dpi, virus gone, unmute the sea. You are warmly invited.
~
Mermaid Chunky – Gemini Girls
‘Til Tuesday – Voices Carry
God Help the Girl – Down and Dusky Blonde
Sunflower Bean – Moment in the Sun
Phoebe Bridgers – Graceland Too
M83 – Karl
Tomberlin – Hours (Katie Dey remix)
Gia Margaret – apathy
Felicia Atkinson, Jefre Cantu-Ledesma – And The Flower Have Time For Me
Lioness chained to hillsides of lavender the sun is streaming oversea entirely conceptual homeland 5G howl like how a fractal glint constitutes one or more endings and is just never never never never never lavender exactly who unimaginable loses when fox does borrowed snouts language of flowers fuck this howl again five dimensions
Is you said to me a common placard stands vantablack in the manacles jason cries his heart broke in your jaw I swam all night to the motor show roseate perfume of the problem being born out of lobster wedlock to be ravaged by the neo-marxist programme of naming us wasp and other wasp sadnesses it is for me as I for you better at swiss twilight when I was community
In the womb wept effort of what insomnia does from the latin meaning wandering policy of “rural lust” I will swim I will swim through hedgerows I will swim I swim this isn’t the song turn up your sleeves we enter the chess in brightness mode I wanted the heat the reat skelped by autofictive descent another coxcomb texts you back O lariat
At that altitude paying the rent in pale world and even if she has lost control what a car does in green light heaven obscenity pedestrian the ground here opal silicate owing you a crush moratorium cheques out after all this is just a modern rock song adjusting styles pane of my old wound, new wound at clydebank the skycastles at four o’clock who are u
Harvest season was accordion sonnetry I lifted my volta skirts for assholes feeling perennially strange in melancholy chord progression of certified orange is this out of the question lazily in the grass lexie and cecil and ariel open your mouth be lucid corduroy when stevie sings harmony on thursday morning exhaustion I thought just swish would do it
Could be 1995 how will I get there painting the ice- course with fairways is all that I have boygirlboygirl varieties of noodles bunny calls it cloudheartedness be mute in serious leaf together is falling the same as time at all / it got claws hi can I have some more bourgeois heroine pastry
Okay to just swim and arrive here my salty fiancé is a type of fish did you enjoy The Shape of Water and other films to which I might fuck glitching in the real world darling is a missing numbering merely the sun streaming feminine voices never never a century of the Laurieston & all of my guinnesses are oxygen saw another fox
And wherever you are I suppose the squirrels are listening as bartender came home w/ three crystal ocean we stub the ashes out we stub the ashes out it’s him that I am smashed mezzanine phoning my dad big blue energy another song about the suburbs / mineral & gem sometimes I can’t believe
Red lions and lionesses are not metaphors but love laura no lies & lilac passion in the first place I wrote about you in my notebook: we might not even be awake in the worldis still in the kitchen scratch at my socialist lichen second paramore whose kisses are madness my counsellor said yeah I like those mornings also London fog, London fog
~
Oneohtrix Point Never — I Don’t Love Me Anymore
i_O — Castles In The Sky
Quirke — Luxury Red Pence
Mogwai — Dry Fantasy
Salem — Red River
Songs: Ohia — Lioness
Silver Jewels — Federal Dust
Johnny Flynn — Lost and Found
Keaton Hensen — Ontario
Life Without Buildings — Sorrow
Drop Nineteens – Winona
The National — Dark Side of the Gym
Weyes Blood — A Certain Kind
Marika Hackman — Playground Love (Air cover)
God Help the Girl — Pretty When The Wind Blows
Porridge Radio — 7 Seconds
Elliott Smith — True Love
A. G. Cook — Beautiful Superstar
Bat for Lashes — Peach Sky
Lemongrass — Sayonara
Tennis — Tender As A Tomb
The Avalanches — We Will Always Love You (feat. Blood Orange)
Golden Mean — Midnight
Phoebe Bridgers, Rob Moose — Punisher (Copycat Killer Version)
Angel Olsen — New Love Cassette (Mark Ronson Remix)
Belle & Sebastian — This Is Just a Modern Rock Song
what if she entered the sliver of morning and haemorrhage left for her
on the rooftop, signal that someone was still coming in caustic shoes
theorising a free continuation of handsome disorder, to access the paywall and free us from pain
she could breathe here, just
to feel like getting trains, filming herself speak only to speed and lag
in practice of relative motion, to feel it
“how all the protests ceased” but not to look was to watch the hard tomatoes soften from green and the weight
to glow awhile, orange and I miss
a strategy of oratory whereby someone has a line from beautiful afternoon television, like “who would buy this house?” as if there were choices
next to the undiscovered shaven lawn
*
I’ve been having dreams about family and scaffolds
how she just lay there literally until the child began throwing soft toys at her in the 1990s
anyone could come to life and be numb
I want to read Graeber’s thesis on magic, slavery and politics
she didn’t say to me
do you ever feel free, for instance in fugue state when brushing your teeth
I’ve been dreaming about ancestors stuck on trains killing rabbits and eating crackers it was that easy
all season complaint of what’s coming, knowing nothing of photography
when you can’t measure the wind by the grass
she had this enormous laughter
*
dwindling into ambivalence if this isn’t a dream exposure
and we can’t enter houses
I’ve been trialling sentences, Bernadette Mayer says I’m not faulting being periodic but sentences with caps and end marks do seem so bloodless to me
You swing gazelle legs over the actual You wait in the room for the wine You pull collectives out of the sink
distracted, I watch through windows turn on my flash to lead workshops on trash and poetry as finance, like eons of speculation had brought us to nothing but numbers
and the anxious among us, cooking the numbers
I watch her slice an avocado in the dark and the police van opened to reveal us with leaves in our molars, perfect hello it’s autumn
in the bloodless sentence
*
dreamt I was tidying the rooms of siblings
this mad kind of everywhere acid I couldn’t clean up
in the panic of rich, linguistic Monday, you are part of the story, too smart for me
the interminable smell of pine resin, kimchi and menthol gum yes, just there
in lightness rimming
I made this commitment to sleeping ‘upstairs’
taking pleasure on my editor’s credit before the treehouse snapped
*
I can barely listen to music anymore it’s all error
describing her pain as shooting
when I smashed my thumbs in my eyes you kept going it was Jupiter
now
cruising down Alexandra Parade to send you the voice message of not seeing nightingales, a bathtub attached to a car I wish I could touch between times is when I most feel ‘we exist’ and just like that the cornflowers won’t die
and we can’t enter houses
and you end with the fresh heat of illusory commute
I could say anything new
in dumb, erotic anonymity where all this falls
*
she had lit up the sad remains of the tree
bound to other seasons, even look good
despite not hearing this live I like it, finally summer light on the same
even if we live
in adrenalised versions of trying to keep warm on the video call or wavelength
of audit continuum
she was all “it is up to the unassuming […] to represent reality” in The New York Times
and the well-oiled loss of taste
feels the same the shadow
years of tax avoidance edible sundown
*
what if she knew before all of us doubled in running away with me
I dream all my friends attending the burning
“where have you been”
and you could put this to archive
swipe left for the hidden indentation of nothing happening
20,000 years ago
mostly I worry if she lived in the dream I had to wake from
cradling the ersatz animal, sprigs of rosemary
having clambered reality over again and knowing you survived the scaffold GESTURES FOR LIVING AIR as the art was told “I just need to check your temperature” a rough kind of festival kiss that was listening
in the underpasses of everything prior to millennium
installs a magical feeling that :heart: you would be at the station
‘Hear me, hear my silence. What I say is never what I say but instead something else. When I say “abundant waters” I’m speaking of the force of body in the waters of the world. It captures that other thing that I’m really saying because I myself cannot.’
— Clarice Lispector, Água Viva
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin
— Adrienne Rich, ‘Diving into the Wreck’
On becoming a body,
the little abundant shines and its pores are clotted with dust.
I saw what sound it was a wave makes
when startled by gestures towards this torsion
a long beach, the false irrigation of beautiful islands.
The melody was a long intimation of losing faith
in what is meant by a certain colour, not
this blue which runs in the prussian rain.
I want to run up the spine of your back
and settle the amygdala city, tie
my lyrical wrists in mobius fibres
and return the rights to speech.
Do you want to continue?
He was born and beautiful,
he might have seizures. We interfere in definition.
The depression of time is a beautiful curve
in the small of morning, named
after the call you wanted.
Blue dust of feeling.
Blue dust of biblical name.
I worry for his tiny heart.
Glycolic, afloat
in the radical millions
when I say this bird
is a nameless bird, plotting
and pecking the wreck
I go down
in such hunger
I go down
without formula.
Not this.
The world is stuck.
I sing to you
in the echo, in the rich
and greatest loss.
Who hurt us?
I had a dream we were swimming
in the San Pedro Bay, just like the video
it was almost sunny. There will come a time
when my car won’t start
if I ever have a car
in a lightless world
the structure of passion is a ritzy hotel.
Your hour is a fucking astronaut.
Imagine Disney injected
arterial dreams
this crudely.
Imagine a fire in the minibar
at the back of your mind.
As the relation to your wreck
I call it ship, I still want
the elsewhere conduit of thoughts
to sign my brain as treeware
in the black black gold
my oleochemical, fear of soap
and gaussian world is a kitten.
She burns it all up.
On becoming this back-lit
history of pixels, we pour into jars
the last of sea-glass, liquid shingles, I cut the bird
into salad I cut this sort of pristine hope
to feed the kitten.
I thought the picket
was shining in rain, a sound.
Something is drawing us out.
I make a romance from your shoes
and the kissable way of these days
is a no-show, mewing, the marketing
of genital shame, the apocalypse breakfast
tastes of salt. Come back into my life,
I always found you
with a breath laced in pesticide,
a currency of morphine
dreaming me
back like a thrush, I want to wreck
the multitude of this song
with its hyperthermia, its oil-made
hide of feathers.
You want me to be less literal,
littoral I like your wildlife.
Lighter, somewhere
what we see
without reason.
What can soak
up the dark this good.
I like your messages.
I like to react with my abstract halo.
The rediagnosis read depression, to kill
not clean the long and beautiful rain.
Prising the daylight from its packet
I want April, a lot
of lilac song.
I go down to the nervous water,
deep in mammalian blood
I am, I am
not breath, not bird
west coast
my body is a poke of air
in the book. And it lets in
the crudest wind, reminder of gold
in the room where we woke up last October
in my father’s house
in the valley
where frost never leaves the cornicing forests
or sets its voice to speak
for the sodas and junipers.
If we could just avalanche into orange
like the song, Mount Eerie would be a genuine place
to kill or not kill the birds we oiled
in the prussian rain, they gleam
like unemployment
doesn’t in the colourless streets.
We share a little nest
of noctilucent materials.
I was jobless
as the natural light, listening
to your comedown opening chord
which is to say, I think we should stop
seeing, I think we should stop
seeing at all. I roll around
in the oil of this
happiest adderall
to sob uncontrollable
to stop trying to see you
as snow,
if a former love should fall
very cool, like a two-minute Uber
costs less than lunch.
Ducter, he
could break me
the ultimate mosh is us.
I have said that he could and he could
I have said that too much.
To float like capital
back to your panic
I smooth my sleepless residuals.
Ducked it, ducked it
you come back, holding a blink
to know
that time is a gleam, we had a guest speaker
passing out in notional
structures of passion.
I wrote everything down.
It is a wreck to think in the beautiful rain.
It is all that dissolves
to remember
I hope to meet in code someday
again, to set this
in parenthesis, very lightly
choosing to run
the artificial palms
horizontal across your eventide.
This was all ours in the poem.
Prospering, we’d know
each other
so much more than mineral
in the flotsam
way, a lot of coffee
fills our faultlines
and the tar sands sing, and the quicksands
go astray, what of the waters
don’t touch what we were
to sing something
hurting, to rainbow
the quoted weight of your heart
is only debris
I go so long in the rain
to break her
I go so long in the run
as to make a beach
in loops of oil
to empty my purse
of mermaids, to feel like
the only decorated islands
in the United States of America.
*
This poem was written following a talk I gave on Energy (W)rites: Telling the Embodied Stories of Energy, as part of The Curatorial Fellowship: With the North Sea series at Peacock Visual Arts, Aberdeen. It responds specifically to Lana Del Rey’s ‘The Greatest’, where the mournful twangs of a classic rock ballad play out over sunset scenes of Long Beach in the San Pedro Bay, whose four decorative ‘Astronaut Islands’ were built in the sixties to camouflage offshore oil derricks and muffle their sound pollution. Classic rock is a genre and industry founded on oil: vinyl is a type of plastic made from ethylene (found in crude oil) combined with chlorine (found in salt). PVC, the resultant material, is a highly toxic form of plastic, for both our health and the environment. Perhaps it’s only ‘natural’ that Lana would style a kind of vinyl-nostalgia to sing of various kinds of tainted existence. If her earlier work was dubbed ‘Hollywood sadcore’, we might note this recent aesthetic shift as something more like ‘anthropocene sadcore’: where the cinematic eulogising of wasted youth, ‘the greatest’ American Dream, is played out against the false beauty of late twentieth-century petroscapes. But alongside oil there is also water, and the brilliance of light, tone and pigment. There is haze and trace and repeat. Lush tints within variant opacity. A khoratic space where the colours soften or harshen into each other and something of form is held between, with varying paleness or intensity. It could be Billie Eilish singing of ‘burning cities / And napalm skies’ in the apocalypse unconscious of her song ‘Ocean Eyes’; it could be a flare of orange burning into Grimes’ ‘permanent blue’, its elegia for opioid bliss and extinction. The weird pleasure vistas of a scene we can’t quite name. An improvised blur or break. What the water speaks as a force of shimmer. The accompanying visual works are by multimedia artist and sculptor Jack O’Flynn.
I am trying to find a narrative arc for this month. It is somebody reaching out to say, I can’t let you be. There has to be a simile to describe white sheets, expensive linen and French cologne, detritus of a Joni song and the world, the implacable world beyond windows. What is this like and is it really like this. Too much world in the song. A crease is a melody also, or a cramp in the song, the bit where you fall asleep in the story. Rising and falling in tempo, you climb right into the album. In a room of friends, all of them peaking at various levels. An arc is a part circumference of the circle or curve. I only have the bassline in my head; it is a soft morning bass, ‘Forgotten Eyes’ maybe, but it won’t get me up. D. had an endless playlist and the hours were indigo, endless. I am trying to find a narrative that goes up, but it comes down and is also left, right, start + a. I forget, I forget. Nobody knows where b went, but that’s okay. Joni I’m sorry but I just can’t listen. I want to cheat and do all the levels at once.
I say there is too much world in the song, but there is so much leaf in the leaf and again it is a thing that folds, then falls. 🍃
She says the cat might look over your face before you fall asleep, paw your features, but it is only because she wants in. There was a fold in the day that we lost, because our heads were fog, because of that blur I think in plural. There were various selves I could not chart because the grid-lines were squint. Can you shorten this? Bernadette Mayer says maybe if you grow your hair long you write longer poems, and ever since she cut hers it’s all short lyrics. I want to shorten my emotions to a cut: yes, this is that, yes, say it. Imagine going into the salon and saying I want a haiku haircut. 5 x 7 x 5. Your eyelids fat wet petals of overlay. Nothing works but shapes, and I pass them silently through sheafs of language, and I don’t say much about it.
Gold flakes off cheeks, mascara blackens my vision. Is it okay to not brush your hair or get dressed or think about anyone else’s necessity. I bring a velvet satchel to the party and empty my grief in lottery tickets. Everyone is happy. It is so easy to pick a number.
At six in the morning, watching him do card tricks.
Is it so easy to pick a letter?
I get home at nine and while everyone heads to work I am watching Morvern Callar again, putting tinned soup on the stove, watching this film simply for the scenes at home with the cassettes and the fairy lights. Plum-coloured nail paint, that’s how I remember it. I watch it on mute, feel eerie.
~
Google says I have to validate my identity. There is a toll for walking the way that we do, so fast, defeating the days, and I felt the bright sensation of a coming air, like this was performance. The layering…oh it was, surely, 2018 and I felt the first flakes while listening to Songs, Ohia — maybe it was ‘Tigress’. Had I known then I would buy a tiger coat, two years in the future? Drink cups of green tea in the empty morning, stalk my email? Certain messages grow in spines of grass, until they are so tall we pluck them for the gaps between speech. ‘God watched us talking in the mirror’, Jason sings, and I think I’m some anonymous, single star.
Extinction chews us over.
You could tuck me away in the sheets; I don’t protest the air.
~
saying now when the feeling came strongest: how I miss the future, it’s sideways surrender. — Lotte L.S., ‘As If to Misread Song’
There was a storm, and the streets were quiet for Saturday. It felt really good to battle the weather, to write long email, to listen to Sharon Van Etten and wallow. I would only do this for a while, a week say, and then the threads would release and I’d come home soaked in rain, with extra red in my tresses, I’d say the emails were terrible flowers I couldn’t bear to read. You can read a flower like an algorithm; it takes a certain kind of smartness. Outlook says, your inbox is 97% full. That in itself is confession. My eyes smart. The flowers…they have a strange way of opening and something of poison honey in them warms, and I want them. Cats are allergic to lilies and raisins. I put petals on my tongue and think about the word ‘beautiful’; how pointless it is, and good for nothing but everything. The lecturer asked us to chew on a raisin. I listen to Jack Halberstam give a talk on nothing, the exclamation of Gordon Matta-Clark, ‘nothing works!’. Jack asks, ‘What does it mean to destitute the world?’ and I feel jaded and warm, and an hour or so later I order soup, and the soup arrives late. We talk of failed dates with the children of the sun, and know this is also study. What they said or did not say, that counts. Nothing is hypothetical, only the walls of buildings we move through. Why do you sleep in the middle of the bed.
When I first wrote this, it wasn’t raining; but now, on the flipped side of yesterday’s blueprint…
I like that bit in The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin, where Shivek says, ‘I am going to unbuild walls’. This initiates a general phrasal collapse, like how all of us were Instagramming sunsets at the exact same time, all across the country that Sunday. And it felt more important to look at those sunsets than read the news, collating each one, the various colours. In the car, telling F., you know I always wondered if the sun actually sets on the east coast, but now that I’ve seen it…
I can’t tell if this feeling is vertical or searches horizons to meet.
S. says, I’m going to find out where your wound is.
Le Guin: ‘the hand you reach out is as empty as mine’. Why all the letters dissolve on the keys of my laptop, so I type in the alphabet of blur. Why all the luminous grey of Tuesday. Oil in my scalp.
~
Another question mark, a cascade of candy canes. The sky’s pale outro, my twisting gut.
~
Jason sings, ‘We’ll be gone by morning or be together by then’.
A.’s hair is curly again like the hair of the girls in Mystic Pizza. I think of K.’s story about the girl, is she a girl, who sheds all her hair and it is monstrous and she is chastised by society. She is followed by the fall of her own dark locks. We share teenage stories of hair loss, scaling cliffs, or in the kitchen. Sometimes I find a tiny black curl in the carpet and think of the commas still between us.
Evan sings, ‘Can I believe in the me before I knew you beautifully?’.
If you let all that hair like a river, if you let the stream continue. All my life feels like content repeated, the last time I saw him was the middle of summer, the last time I wore cobalt and cardinal together. I love like the rain in combination, additive river, a clarity. K. says you just need to be lucid, there’s Clarice for that. Am I also an alarmist?
The sky is a needless worry.
The sky is a needless worry inside me.
I require surgery to cut out the sky.
When they found my stupid heart, they said it was a wind turbine and set it to air.
I had all these essays to write, I was blue.
I see chunks of time as colours: years of purple, silver and green; minutes in violent red; seconds of airy teal; golden months and bloated months of solemn navy; glowing yellow mornings; decades of rainbow; the indigo hours between me & u.
I spend so much money on pens.
I’m such an alarmist! Always messaging, messaging. Why though: mistaking her middle name for Rose, reciting other names out loud, wishing it were June and I were lost on the west coast, feeling the rain whip me out of this slump.
~
‘You still exist and I feel good knowing it’.
~
Alison Rumfitt has this poem, ‘Pollution is Just a Mindset!’ and ‘We’re all going to get swallowed up by a big / whale angry at what we’ve done to all the whales’. I want to know the difference between the big whale and all the whales, like is the big whale part of the other whales, and since the speaker ‘had a dream about it’, she knows ‘it’s at least metaphorically sound’. That’s how I feel about the days now, they have to be at least metaphorically sound. That’s just the bar I set. It’s lined with tequila and milk. S. says sometimes a spoonful of milk will settle your belly, like if you are so hungover you can barely keep down the air.
Perhaps that’s just it. The fog in my brain is pollution. I need a spoonful of milk. A glass of charcoal. In class, we swerve from the topic of stars to molecules of oxygen. C. sings don’t piss in my oat milk. There are passive aggressive adverts for Oatly everywhere and so everyone is writing about oat milk but I already had a line about poems ‘brimming with oat milk, / cornichons, kimchi’. Our best fermented days. Alison writes, ‘It didn’t look like a whale but I knew it was a whale’. That’s how I know about the fog in my brain, the long and bulking whale of it.
~
I swallow myself on read.
‘You left gleaming’.
You shouldn’t feed cats milk.
You shouldn’t feed your child to the tiger.
I had so many babies, they were all just poems, and I fed them to the tiger.
I put on my coat.
The poem is a rectangle.
The whale was only algorithmic.
Is that the same as metaphor.
The tiger was soaked in French cologne.
The tiger was starving.
The whale is a wave.
The whale is a mean old daddy.
The whale ate the rat.
I give it away for free.
The whale and the tiger, fucking each other.
I found the appropriate clip art and dragged them into your golden ratio.
I wish it were really rectangles and not always squares.
Instagram addiction.
Our theme is ‘climate change’.
I need to start deleting emails.
~
It turns and it turns. Make of the heart a spectacle, so you could pour it with what Sophie Robinson calls ‘dynamic emoji’, so you could feed it popcorn, synecdoche, wrap it in sheets like Kafka’s hunger artist. Harvest each beat until you are ready.
~
‘I am going to unbuild walls’ from the squares. I am swallowed in the pictures you post on the internet. Some of them simple compositions of shadow and light, black and white. Spooky quality, quiet mew. Sometimes there are people, and this hurts because people are so beautiful and knowable, but ultimately…
Sometimes, in the distance, like at the top of Buchanan Street say, we see the turbines, tressled in lilac.
I draft the email, the sky is a needless worry inside me. The future is or was always surrender, but here I am with my yoghurt, ignoring the sell-by. I want to ferment the future inside us. You can always recycle, but does it work ‘in the end’?
~
Lana Del Rey bought her Grammy dress from the mall, a ‘“last-minute silver” vintage-inspired gown’. Time shimmies.
There is a pause where she turns just so, a moment prior to smiling where you know the smile is her personal glitter.
You can’t put it on paper.
Time shimmies under the moon.
I start to think of paper as something you have to continually feed, so writing itself is no different from keeping a Tamagotchi, say, and it’s the telekinesis of keeping a pet in your brain. The writing is sometimes a snake, sometimes a rat. I can smell it like new rain or the sheets after sex. Time is hunger for writing. A lick of it. Sometimes I wake with a bad taste in my mouth and can hear him in my ear, screaming THERE’S LEAD IN THE WATER.
I want something sultry.
I want the impression.
It’s as if all the sequins came off the dress and clotted the pipes, and I could die glamorous and pointlessly poisoned. It’s just the old way you die in writing, falling within the rehearsal of speech. I didn’t expect to see you, etc.
She looked good after all. Sometimes the dress just fits and you can get it for six hundred dollars. I sleep in those sequins because I don’t sleep.
~
After the workshop, M. and I saw a dead pigeon. She took a photo.
~
Imagine the weather were French cologne.
He is so lovely in the red and the blue He is close to the stream
In motes, the arc of it caught in sun.
You take a photo, then another, another. I love this.
~
The arc is a nightclub moted with fragments of moving lavender.
~
Sometimes it’s fine but then I zone out, start replaying these moments. The allowance of volatile quality, another baby, I didn’t open the door, I mumbled down the buzzer I’m sorry. Tesco is so empty. Lorde sings ‘But when I reach for you / It’s just a supercut’. I have to believe it all gets better. D. gives me chilli jam for Christmas, my arms are full of marigolds, C. says hello, I want to collapse. It happens again; is there memory?
Brexit message from the Principal.
All I can smell are the other expenses. Silver and gold are so much silver.
HOW DO YOU DO IT? HOW DO YOU DO IT?
January slants backwards. I forget how to dance.
…
…
Type this / typify
Report search prediction…
I dream a checkerboard transparency and see the bars resolve. A pick-up truck is dumping a garden-load of shrubs on the Gibson Street tarmac, a place they’re re-laying; the streets resolve into alien characters, Megadrive graphics, the shopfronts boarded up. This is a different city, believe me. In the dream there is a river, a lavender river, and teenagers go there to play at drowning. There is a whole millennial economy of breath. Someone with a shaven head says, “I just wanted to forget my breath, just for a moment”. No, maybe it’s “I wanted to give up my breath,” as if that wasn’t the same as dying. No, maybe it’s, “believe me, the air is better down there.” I’m in this disaster, it held me too, and I wanted to slip in the lavender water. And J. was holding a guitar, wrapped in fairy lights, and it was just like the movie I saw on her story.
26,240 words already.
‘What also touches me […] is the unendingness’ (Hélène Cixous).
Apparently there was snow, I stayed up all night and I missed it.
And Phoebe was singing I love you in someone else’s song. And that was enough.
~
Bright Eyes – Hit the Switch
The Beatles – Happiness is a Warm Gun
Big Thief – Forgotten Eyes
Savage Mansion – Karaoke
The Weakerthans – Sun in an Empty Room
Brick Distributor – Another Personality
Nasari – Spoilt Milk
Danger Mouse, Sparklehorse – Star Eyes (I Can’t Catch It) (feat. David Lynch)
Sylvan Esso – Coffee
Lorde – Supercut
Mitski – My Body’s Made of Crushed Little Stars
Pinegrove – The Alarmist
Adrienne Lenker – Angels
Anna Burch – Not So Bad
Porridge Radio – Sweet
Soccer Mommy – circle the drain
Nap Eyes – You Like to Joke Around With Me
Lens Mozer – All My Friends
The 1975 – Me & You Together Song
Frances Quinlan – Your Reply
Quirke – Se Seven 7S
Double Discone – Espionage Industriel
Wuh Oh – How Do You Do It?
Palm – Memories of Winter
Hatchie – Obsessed
Pet Shimmers – Mortal Sport Argonaut
Disq – Parallel
Julia Jacklin – Body
Happy Spendy – Take Care of Yourself
TOPS – I Feel Alive
Katie Dey – So You Pick Yourself Up
Hovvdy – Ruin (my ride)
Purple Mountains – Nights That Won’t Happen
Songs, Ohia – Tigress
Karima Walker, Dominic Armstrong, Bobby Carlson – Blue Thread
Van Morrison – Astral Weeks
Sharon Van Etten – Give Out
Phoebe Bridgers – Two Headed Boy (Part 2) (Neutral Milk Hotel cover)
Excited to launch a new pamphlet, Rainbow Arcadia, published by Face Press. The launch will be a double affair, alongside Katy Lewis Hood, whose gorgeous sell-out SWATCHwas recently published by glyph press.
Gloria Dawson
Kirsty Dunlop
Katy Lewis Hood
Maria Sledmere
~
Rainbow Arcadia (Face Press)
A suite of eight ambient poems printed in full-colour risograph, Rainbow Arcadia dramatises the sensuous carousel of the late-capitalist plaza and its whorled ontologies of hunger, shimmer and infinity. Exploring a lurid, kitsch and gelatinous anthropocene aesthetic, these poems embody the surrealist poetics of our material excess: lines whittled to sweetness and dissonance; an archival trace, a precarity.
SWATCH (glyph press)
Written over a year of locational, seasonal, and apparently epochal changes, SWATCH is a series of poems caught up in the tangles between language and matter in and against the captures of extractive capital and ruptures of environmental breakdown. Thinking with the (natural) histories of colour charts and all kinds of animals/vegetables/minerals/plastiglomerates, these poems play with, borrow and re-locate language in an attempt to inhabit entangled relations.
~
Katy Lewis Hood is a poet, editor, and PhD student currently based in London. She co-edits the poetry magazines amberflora and CUMULUS, and her poetry pamphlet SWATCH is forthcoming with glyph press in autumn 2019.
Maria Sledmere is working towards a DFA in anthropocene aesthetics at the University of Glasgow. She is a member of A+E Collective, freelance music journalist, Poetry and Nonfiction Editor for SPAM Press, Poetry Editor at Dostoyevsky Wannabe and founding editor of Gilded Dirt. Her new Sad Press pamphlet, nature sounds without nature sounds, follows the recnte publications: Existential Stationary (SPAM Press, 2018), lana del rey playing at a stripclub (Mermaid Motel, 2019) and a slender pamphlet of sonic essaying with Max Parnell, titled Pure Sound (SPAM Press, 2019).
Gloria Dawson lives in Glasgow and is trying to be the communist poet you want to see in the world. Most recent publication is circlusion (Zarf Editions, 2018) and you can also find work online at Datableed, amberflora, and other places where writing dwells.
Kirsty Dunlop lives in Glasgow and writes: short stories? poems? e-lit? collaborative fiction?- she’s not very sure most of the time. She is interested in the exciting possibilities of cross-medium, cross-form writing, and is currently working towards a DFA in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow. You can read some of her work in journals such as SPAM and From Glasgow to Saturn.
i.
A jail cell of pin-striped trousers
And jelly is stretching
Ben and Bridget’s collaborative secret:
Stripes vs polka dots; battle of personality
For personable sense
A ballet of silk as scream
All Jack Wills plagiarists
Pluck a little learnèd relief,
My trypophobic kitsch.
ii.
The over-blunt rust of the pencil takes over
With Anthropologie’s rich, ornamental fruit
All that plasticine:
infinite optic nude.
E= Mc2= seafoam equalities
Teeth keys,
No,
Keys having sex
Some sexy metal grinding grind core
Towards the yonic aporia.
iii.
Runway & Egyption palette of
Patchwork architecture w/ international sunset
Peach plastic, has to be fantastic
Too many black hole doors of exhibited thrill.
& Wind massage
Pulses the butterfly, connects such dots.
iv.
Ribbony eel of clandestine dreams:
Gel pen explosion, want that scented mint,
Bubblegum and banana
=> Warp nostalgia
Almost forgot about my cola phobia
Piña colada for the pleistocene.
v.
There’s a woman reading behind her triangles,
Meeting the tender tremble:
Slimy triangulation overlaid
Blurring pyramidal bluntness
Blooming bud above belly a bus of mixed feeling;
Keep looking, unhooking
The ghostly room and pastel pleasures.
Wish you would tell me where we’re going
as though in a car, snaking down the road
instead of waiting for breakfast
waiting to say this and chewing your oats
It’s dark outside, gets darker every day
this isn’t supposed to happen
I only listen to radio on Fridays why is that
like a song or something
everyone is leaving the party already
afternoons are reminiscent
of last week’s afternoon, come over later
and tell me what you did
I feel quite sick when I think of a lyric
and a stranger asking if I have any filters
You could put a white tip at the end of the poem
like pushing oil into cuticles
Nobody glides down the rain like you do
Which is lifted all bent from a love song
milder than cheddar
You listen on Sundays for wine, she comes out
of the willow to speak to you
coyly undoing her hair or herself
There is no reply, I hold in my grammar
with a bell for the wheel of the eerie freedom
something better than nothing
is like aaah is like aaah
I think this is the song you wanted
me to send, edgewise
sounding the commute back to verb
and speaking in frail duration
send me the book
like send me the lemons in nets
I tear up my tights on your thorny gaze
said nobody ever
one or two poems to think of the future
coming all orange across my eyes, ode
to the hairbells, ode to spring
Nobody does better the song of your loss
becoming this twice
aligned with health, somebody calls
the corner out
Even circles of knitwear have their factions
This is what it is to order a reef
when the coral runs out
Nobody will visit
wherein all the albatrosses start to sing
of plastics, clattering outwards
the slick of your thong is a sorry
I did not want to include
in modes of deception, lesser
named firs for timelines
going on to wherever
the trees can’t stop like dubstep
I know he’s still alive because he updates his tumblr
with black and white versions of parisian film sets
What is the speed of your smile times time
I’m the you in the nobody, ask me a question
Twitter matters
Align with astral cancellation
very bad glasses occurring small
sweet sertraline as if we—
dream in which on the hill you kiss me
and I can’t call a doctor
rolling over the hunger
looking at anything for the memory
sparkle chips click in my eye like granite
Haven’t felt this good about feeling for ages
I could say there’s a veil
dragging the face into thrill of the lyric
repulsive sense just is
ice jam
made to appear like sickness
lifting weights in little reps
Always seven or ever eleven
salve for lateral acid
lifting my arms for the shape of you gone
I don’t want to leave the house today
I don’t want to stay
I don’t want to leave my dreams tomorrow
Who was it that wanted their post just so
and tripped over horses
how clean he looked, sans cigarettes
we look better like light I suppose
castles are glass apparitions
when pressed against cereal
somebody lighting a candle at noon
This final luxury, fold me fast
my wicked friend how are you how are you
I ate all the rotten satsumas
a cascade of raisins
You see of the sky is it stars
or loops of moon
coming everywhere over like fruit
A bike ride, spectacular orbit
undoing that future
share of negative, however pristine
you will your spirits
they glide, authentic
collapse is verse of vice
Dark logs in the fire of order
sharing a wary winter
therein you see me not as it seems
not as in dust or starry application
this diminishing
dictionary effect of your all-sorts
soft liquorice next
sorting the necklace
It got really great before it stopped being anything
the girls are just men
and the men are waves like william said
is it the string that fallates a sea
change in me
the cloud is light
the cloud is heavy
something comes on in the breath of the lethe
I wish I could write like her it seems
wingless to admit this
Drowning dreams me
A pallor of belly and sound
What we read then we read only as extract
locked in the lyre of mind
a fragile cant of flint and ticket
a voice comes out of the hurricane
like sugar and the serenity tint of your missive
I would be wreath and tea, I would be holly
and berry your eyes just so I like them
shinier on high apparitions of pills
pain-wise it’s easy to breathe
absently-minded the child again
sits on the hill, stirring a little
leaf with its fist
and singing of latitude, sisterhood
lustres of puberty hurt
a poem rolls up
a play in the middle like sequins of toffee
all cooked up
heroin-rich continuum
babies are blue and twirling their words
fertility is lyric
lately a georgic thought
updates the landscape, refresh of its disk
in embers, cabling dark a sigh
a fish hook, best to cock
one’s eye at the sun for money
evolving lizards
caress the sand
and scatter monopoly houses
if I were so young as a werewolf rage
and twang of your green-red tongue
and sunwise; no matter for affect
aphexxing light without face
and girls of the sea
and boys of the sound
resting, newness is blue and plenty
writ of the world for day
and rage, opening indie
pseudo confusions of listening
imperilled chicago
What nobody has is time
or velvet, less of you
is always the bulb of next year’s
failing spring
and how did the system get so notorious
coming everywhere glowing like solar
panels in squares of gardens
making this civic
bliss of the window, fifties
kiss-catching my way into the country again
how did it get this mild
cradling the absent children as lambs
the way we did then
sweet green midnight je suis shepherdess
a ridiculous landscape
clatters upon the stereo, two hours ago
hold out for multiple eclipses, active now
man you taste like whisky I love you
better in nuclear energy
a plantain reply
it doesn’t matter which outlook you use
the tax is similar
season three was a language parasol
being small again eating polos off your toes
I’ll be in that bed forever
better apple of revolutionary england
did not occur
let milk shake
I hate to say all general evie
and everything made for you
everything hurts
A big star fell on your pillow again
traded the oolong for tooth
this is february fifth forever and ever
do you want to come under the duvet again
as if it was made of straws
do you want to come over
threading first storm of loss
the adequate tapestry
Mostly recyclables, hold out the phone
as saul does a melt
to speak as surface
gliding nightly a rare casino snow
soldering palms for oil
and dairy dream of cold pastoral
drunk radiation
flays me, such nexus flesh
equivalent fern
in the kitchen
lunarium death and starving time
the driver was listening to angel of harlem
a fair blue world
a bluer fur
who would crowd now the pale critique
closing all windows
the way you fell over.
mariaology 