As then

Her head hurt on top like a plane through the crown or headphones with spikes on the inside or like she’d dropped her curved metal dildo right on top like it was being forced open the front of her skull peeled away like a mask and the back empty like a grapefruit skin or a coconut shell and the hollow just space like everywhere else no more inside her head only the world and the bits of her in it

she could have taken pills but it’d been days now it’d only have come back she’d had this one before she could sleep through it but not sleep it off it was the kind she negotiated with she didn’t start a fight with it she lost

it was just how it was

She disliked this person and daren’t have said for fear of offending someone she disliked which offended her and which she disliked it was late the last train was gone the shops were closed she’d eaten nothing and she was sitting here wishing and waiting she was fucking stupid or she’d realised that there was nothing only loneliness and waiting

people passed and looked in at the window only lonely people were out this late no one who could save her from it we needed to be where the happy people were for that to happen and she didn’t go there because she wasn’t happy

a boy a beautiful boy she knew him slightly he smiled waved she could have talked to him she smiled waved

always this and then going home again but she had lube it was fine

and the thought of leaving as life was about to begin missing the boat again and the thought that there was no boat to miss that she was the boat that she’d sailed a hum of machines being put to bed for the night of a café closing it was time to go sweetie to her empty lube

Snow kissed the scrolling slit of her flickering window a dream machine for dancing houses the earth was still the earth was still only the clouds were moving

her ears hurt someone must have been not talking about her it happened she was full of herself and as she was composed largely of anxiety and sadness she was full of tears

her head hurt to the back to the right a quadrant of it like a watermelon throbbed like something were growing in her she prodded feeling for the kick something in her something indescribable carried in her pregnant with it the glow of it not like sex like drugs like flashbacks not being changed in knowledge and experience only in memory but transubstantiated she was not her she was new not human or not the same kind of thing not just not the same thing but different in kind in her quiddity

she put the coffee on

the day spread before her like endless vistas of snow-capped cornfields a sphere of clouds from above the metal yard was clanging if there was an edge this side there must have been another feeling it seep into her the edge of it like a long noodle the commitment in waking drinking it into her with each bitter mouthful the black bile of her day and yet the warmth of it the feel of the breath of eternity against the apple of her cheek smiling into the sun with curly red hair and freckles and a gingham fucking frock but she had rainbows coming out her ass

in the present tense in the past imperfect in the future she would have been perfect and continuous the small things that amused her were not so small in the face of the vast fields of the fallen that pressed against her skull women were fickle all we cared about was hair and makeup and not being raped

her legs were smooth and shiny she liked herself from here from in herself she was herself in herself not in the mirror she was transformed in kind objectified classified lying here looking at her legs she wasn’t anything just was

what did men see in the mirror someone else a fight the edge of violence the snow scored the window like wire wool on an iPad men saw someone else women saw something else the mirror constituted in men their construction as persons in women our objectification it was a privilege the mirror stage a white male cisgender heterosexual privilege to be only alienated othered deracinated thus ordained an agent capable of alienation deracination an other was someone a woman wasn’t anything until someone looked at her

she had to go out later she ought to have put her face on the snow gave way to rain bleeding tears like a virgin the glass that never filled her headache had tilted sideways like the cave of her makeup mirror she felt sick

old enough to not care and rich enough to not have to the grey one with the lemon the vastness the horror raw alive natural the clutter of accumulated passings of time the ashes run through the hourglass christian property dealers a boy reading the same book as her what were the odds she should have spoken to him he was leaving she’d eaten and the night had passed this was sufficient

but she’d changed it wasn’t not now nothing would be she was disturbed and wouldn’t settle not now not ever it was a good book too

some people were too stupid to spend the rent on Vivienne Westwood it was hardly her fault there were people like her and people not like her there were people like not like anyone Hitler the fucking buddha there were people there was her she wasn’t a kind of thing only what she was she wasn’t people

she felt nauseous and wobbly and wrong everything worked maybe that was the trouble maybe she should have broken something easy uneasy posted something she’d regret a wounded sailor a wound spring tight under winter’s boggy dew she was going home

a headache pressing thumbs on her forehead fingers into her soft skull like she’d pop like a cherry tomato in a hungry mouth or all down her skirt eating with her mouth open everything with her mouth open aghast agape the rain had stopped she was going out face on something to wear the cold the damp scratching her fingers on her fingers wanting to be somewhere else where she happened to be

Flaky nails a gathering below but everything was below except for the boy upstairs then she was below in her fucking dreams enraptured she didn’t even know his name

small flowers small clusters of small flowers a small heart then swollen to a seeping mess in the presence of such a small love and then missing you the presence of you just being in the same café as you two tables over talking shit about Rigoletto in sight of your ears the thrill of showing you her thoughts like showing her knickers showing a bit of leg for the likes the sunset everything if sadness hadn’t been so beautiful there wouldn’t have had to be a small sadness wrapped in every beauty

A booming laugh pealing straight from a silent film splintered the soft tension of her morning coffee working into the lines of her face like botox a grey sky thick with yesterday’s light the day drawn from a conté landscape box small birds penciled short strokes from one falling to the next wheezing songs like a beggar accordion then still windless a green pond and the windows that looked in to the world from out there in the exile of home

crisp paper-bag imaginings crumpled her brows green life spotting the desolation like mold a glass one too many times through the dishwasher and the small things gathered in the bowl of it

her hair fluttered around her like moths a quality of light deeply saturated in shades of grey an old cathedral organ strained across time and space through priest holes and smugglers’ caves the lines of flight all reading afforded intersections the building of a morning’s woke dreams into something intelligible like a cairn from memory’s ruin

the birds it was the birds until she lost herself in it then it was what it was

Trills curves another day the smell of bed death a vague fluttering like agitated fingers twitchings and sideways glances and the terrifying normality of the fall a smelly old sweater the spring-green indifference of trees a taste in the mouth like unwashed socks squeezing one corner till the other came loose a luminous floating sadness the telescope of memory pulling old light into view as from dead stars and the high proclamation slicing the ambulatory undergrowth like a telephone wire through clouds then silence a space a gap a puddle the inverse of an island lacunae lacunae without end all she wanted to do was to wake up

The hangover without the party and the bed smell on her tongue like lichen filaments trailing yesterday’s dissipation into today’s and blue clouds that didn’t care and a playlist she couldn’t be bothered to skip and thinking she smelled and her nightie smelled and her sweater and thinking she hadn’t been out of it in days and thinking that she wasn’t really coping and skipping it and the Go-Go’s came on and she still smelled but she was happy and she heard now the birds were happy and it was a beautiful day and she thought she’d go out

remembering that nothing meant anything and looking for a rock to roll and realising there were no hills in this endless horizon and not really having much to say that she wanted to hear but she wanted to hear Forever Now only the sleeve was wrong and she didn’t see it and her eyes felt tight like botox and her hands smelled and she could almost see the individual leaves

it was a smell like cardboard and sweat like bedsits like popcorn throwing up in the cinema on her friend’s new leather jacket and a white bird like a paper airplane slicing across the moldy green treetops like a zipper only there was no one to help her out of her dress and she was not Jane Fonda

Sweet shimmering sounds like a sea breeze through a wind chime like the dust streaking the window and the boy upstairs doing what he did a distant alarm and small traffic the whistling singing of things and feeling fine after last night’s too quickly swallowed headache drinking vinegar chocolate with clementine oil settling sun and warmth to an Ektachrome finish creamy on the palate like cream like garlic butter cooking from the middle of the mediterranean and the sea breeze in her wind chime she was small today and happy like Antoinette Cosway under morning’s glass she was soft like the feathery down of birdsong that flittered through the honeyed air she was washed like grapes like the new flagstones in the scene of a shower’s retreat seen from the shower like Paul Strand she was clean and spirited and gentle today she was part of today

slow sounds flapping cawing like mocking laughter evening light like sediment and the greenness settling to ground level long shadows a greasy mark on the window and her day silted around her so that the pole got stuck and her punt just drifted against the low bank but she didn’t fall in even though the water was perhaps two feet deep

then insistent strident a football whistle the first words in a foreign language strange beautiful a lock of hair baby’s first tooth trundling then one half of a telephone call hesitant like bouncing bombs and unenthusiastic streaks of blue like blood on a damp swab reflections and nearly things leaning but not falling over a soft thud a blunt instrument a night that didn’t fall but slowly stooped and crosshatched rooftops set at just the angle of her needing to pee screaming children unconvincing even in play a turning motor the lifeless hum of the refrigerator but there was a bottle of Grillo chilling inside go to the toilet and make dinner

Naming naming a film of sweat a patina a verdigris a bloom square buildings a perfect gradient all of the trees cut from the same canvas buildings in the same terracotta patchwork today wasn’t even trying but it was fine even the day needed a day off the last supermoon a perfect swallow described a perfect arc across the unwashed window a cubic curve from an old PostScript printer and the silk line taut vibrating like a guitar string of some spider worm moth picked by the unbroken sun uninterrupted through the effortless stillness hardness of an afternoon’s morning

rare earth a prime a flight from the thirteenth floor hard resistant incorruptible transgressive fuck with her as they must and lose red leaves a fifth opening purple a swollen mouth beaten lost open that stupid paper hat asleep on the tatami waiting for the rain to dye her hair blue a rinse a dead nun the barren filaments that stretched across her fire escape the flight into soft entanglements a hammock the mess that kept her from falling we made love but had sex one a possession one a creation picking up a mango slipping oil through a clean slipper clear mint-green old the ticking of the grill and cut bread slowly burning until awoken by the smell she put down her pencil her lip back from between her teeth cracked burning the clack of the ice box melting spears of iridium Sicilian lemons a Grillo a caponata lunch

Spoken there in green strokes of summer’s first light piercing black shadows of birds burned into the heat of slate roofs dusty with baked mosses falling now over blessed scenes angel-watched with dappling beatific grace and the red bricks and stones folding around the silver strands all spun across this way and that in dry tarmac broken a loud voice to murder the clamouring silence of morning song that filled dark spaces like gold in a hoarder’s vaults and everything she could see hidden long by winter’s thrown blanket and the straps that slipped from her shoulders yelling so why so sad and knowing that she loved you with no regret thankful for what she had given the world if not for the world itself life had given her something at least that she had beaten back the hand of fate by giving more than she had received

Burn the whole of it and make of the ashes new kindling for fires lit litter literature the cold heart of it feeling its way up the grey wall like slugs through blue chalk deviations reclamations the smell of it their hard-won privilege sharp with nails to beat down the losers at their heels the campaign for equality of superiority a level field for the winner a kick in the cunt for the rest of us

was it just what happened as soon as people made it that they turned on the people who hadn’t

their turn to shit on everyone else she believed in equality she wanted it all up in fucking smoke

Subways and blue fingers

Noise swarming like sickness across a sparsely desecrated silence the white rain like a war of attrition English lace the pointless aftertaste of a burned stock already in the bin our culture she was a charmer still what did it matter really to keep reading writing as though that world could have gone on just because we could remember it what did it come to when everything was finished but what did that even mean when there were people more people than ever how could it be over she just didn’t feel invested in the future but she felt invested in her future her own future her life then she saw no place in the future for her future and still she kept on burning the dinner and drawing painting with fire so to be burned seeing things in the ashes even finding meaning which was all of the meaning to be found this finding

The sound of the past the still slow glaze of yesterday’s traffic like wispy clouds across the blue sheet of the chirping sky untorn by the flight of anything that didn’t sing wilting like her plants stationary the weight of a sweet spring set on top like a stone on a pot slowly flattened like flowers in a press the lost lowland horizon out of reach the other side of the window her dress was beautiful she could have shared it on vsco the spectacle of everyone she knew slowly losing the plot the will to live hope for the future the collapse in this strange beautiful peace softest of wars the twiddling crochet of a bird’s indifferent joy fingered the linen blind the windows needed cleaned she ought to drink some water and shit

A slow headache hanging in the thick slept air the clang of the waking world and an upstairs orgasm or two lift the blinds open a window let in the silky light like milk onto porridge she could keep one step ahead of it if she kept moving

early neighbours on the low street cooed like pigeons the sounds bounced up these narrow canyons cleft between tenement blocks in slow echoing zigzags rapped against windows tinkled into dreams woke babies but they fell away like dust like foam back into the sea of it trucks unloading and the overhanging lacework of long scalloping birdsong

Inner landscapes thighs and blankets the fold of a knee a cascade quilted hills dotted with wild flowers and the pink under-sheet tumbling like clouds scudding a Scottish sunrise the valley of soft legs that rolled into the morning mist of her negligée dotted with wild flowers birds visited sprinkled songs like motes into the soft focus of indolent days’ impoverishment it was almost life

richness and starvation more life further away there was never only one axis

Noisy Sunday the leaning red blocks roared and clanged the slamming and the fucking and the simpering light a light nose of rotting fruit hung from the bowl of the sky grey and blue like her scabbed eyes then Lauren’s voice holding her together it wasn’t a question of drowning it out just of something clear to hold on to in the middle lashed to the mast as the ship went down and all of the banging and fucking raged on but outside of her that was the thing to have the assault always on the outside then it was not rape

Signs of life clutching a distant industrial annoyance all directions then in then the back of the drawer old phones memory sticks corruption and the birdsong always the birdsong corrupting the death of the sealed sky welcome bee at the window welcome fruit flies clothes moths welcome bewildered drunk rattling the streets at three a.m. but careful to welcome the unwelcome transphobes rapists there was life and there was life then welcome the absence of dark life in the new benign prophylactic blue world the gaps in the concrete but the concrete too and all that it bound the aggregates of the new confinement a new facticity was a new freedom

Colder warmer all in the same direction more or less watering her plants watering herself taking a shit a car door children warbling a Verdi requiem hard pieces of air soft water shifting seats chimney stacks the corner of a bus a small ladder a brown cable snaking the window vertical lines a hand and cigarette hung from a ledge and the low grumble of a city in lockdown a gap slow memory but vivid verdant like spring her childhood friend grounded late one peculiar night air against the wet uplands of a great inverted island and not making it to bed jumping out the window in her nightie then hearing the buzz of next door’s consumption she was brought back to her cup of tea and missing a biscuit wandered driftless to the next room

A bashed straw hat and a scratched MacBook Air a bunch of dried roses hung upside down the memory of the first seed of desire in which she now sat drinking coffee the tree house of longing’s fruit a purple cushion between her bum and the place she sat things wanted and gotten and a small reminder that things wanted could be gotten and then why not higher things the spells and rituals the branches she’d climbed to be here where in the tree of life sweet breezes but you were not here

who the fuck were you anyway and why did she care because she’d seen you reading Jane Eyre in your delicate hands you’d held her thoughtful intense dark and brooding a fantasy you were a fantasy she was in love with a ghost

cedar smoke filled the grey planes a bounded space architecture that only looked architectural to be so desperate to tell the truth that we hid everything else

her attractive legs in her very attractive tights and the best of being inside her that she couldn’t see her face so that what she saw of the outside of her agreed at last with the rolling vistas of her inner landscape so that at last she was actually extended in space in the world by way of her body her embodiment therein and not only separated from it thereby a skin a plane a boundary the nothing that was the perimeter the delineator between two objects formed expressly thereby the zero-width line that marked the square the inside of the square the outside of the square but a skin breathed look see the pores like the pores in the pointelle knit of her tights her favourite tights miraculously untorn but she could taste the cedar smoke through the chocolate she ought to open a window

then campfires in memory and things burned thus committed to memory a bankruptcy consumed and the heat and the fury of it appropriated in the cooking of potatoes the spontaneity looked peculiar from the commitment of memory like yesterday’s lottery numbers fixed inevitable but the thing was to just live

then all of those mistakes or not mistakes things we did were mistakes things done to us were what violences the word wouldn’t be retracted Polly it had come and it stood forever now the barred entryway to such remembrances a lofty policeman peaked and crossed and saying no but she was fucking her fantasies again well better that than being fucked by her nightmares

the things that roiled from a morning coffee we never knew what was in it anything any sip of anything a toxic shock a hangover a cure for a hangover the morning after a day’s abstinence she was ready to make mistakes even drunk Polly would have found embarrassing

Grey settled like layers of cement a vein of iridium the gulls just hung there like scratches on a screen the whole in a fog water behaving as air the cold red slab of the building opposite like a gutted salmon a mild unease a surge of emptiness crosshatched in architectural pencils and a strip across the horizon where the paper showed through and the hum of the bone mills and the realisation that she’d always been in the labyrinth since the day she was born

Kyary Pamyu Pamyu still gave off a small warmth like a candle she carried to bed on invernal nights like a kitten in the cup of her hand like blood and snot dripping through her fingers like used lube atomic graceless magnificent an aerial scratched against copperplate catechisms blue on blue desaturated submerged

raven rook her rusted shell slumped against the fuselage of her worn luxury an aristocratic decay the part between the ashes and the ashes with an ashy taste a film on her cracked lips there had been a moment once when she hadn’t been able to taste it anymore and couldn’t taste it yet that was when she was alive

it was like a film the connection was gone the causal chain we just sat and it went on like a train from nowhere to nowhere he slighted her some petty wound a small hurt and she fell one too many she fell and she was sat there in the shit and people were looking people were laughing and the big man walked on it wasn’t like he’d pushed her what the fuck were they looking at he wasn’t scared not him never and she started to laugh started to giggle as he walked away and they were looking but they didn’t reach out no one reached out he was sick of her he wouldn’t reach out he wouldn’t take her hand he didn’t listen to her he didn’t want her he didn’t want her hand death of Samantha

Haze settled like flies on the dead horizon a tree flapping airless like a landed fish and a gull across easy like a polystyrene glider from a child’s rubber hand or curling like skimmed stones flat on the surface of the night a glass frosted by tides and the cycle of the seasons and then a moment of silence like the note she couldn’t reach that reminded her

Some professor some billionaire workers standing up for their rights a smell a dusky morning ripe with pollution the taste of the traffic to be cold blooded and not give a fuck cute cuter cutest she’d never seen a kitten

falling backwards rising the earth in the air privilege was a lethal weapon flies and motes in her eye and the tangle of her hair peering out through the wood a fallen tree a little cottage a cleaning a clearance a framing that only made the world a picture because a picture couldn’t hurt her

Sleeping and waking and legs smooth in the languid shining of soft light pushed against the window expanding in the heat like hot bodies in an elevator and her body like a mercury thermometer rising to the heat like falling backwards a blow to the head blood to the bloodless and her silky skin the sheen of it like sheets inviting sleep and waking the danger of waking always in that waking a smelly old sweater a cozy halo of old sweat a helicopter trundled overhead an electrical storm a discharge

We’d put candles on her grave

Feeling French the longer she was stuck in England hot in the autumn chill all the outsides a silk scarf a summer dress a winter coffee and cake for comfort motherless childless loveless a queue at the door learning to write learning to walk talk see to tuck and to forget a pirate beard a reminder a remainder a crunchy biscuit day a Saturday styles so retro she liked them or so old her youth had cycled round again but it had she was twelve listening to Adam Ant a puberty upcycling a body she’d found into one that actually embodied her and fear and shame into witness and thanks a cold bouquet a paper box the ripples in a plate like a frozen lake parts of people’s bodies that passed the window a headscarf a folded napkin a plastic sign her sunglasses hooked between her boobs blonde highlights a chasm a dry wind her ring scraping the pen as she signed her name learning to sign her name learning her name remembering to forget seeing herself in other people in a bus window in the pattern these hanging bulbs made in the air being late being lazy in love with this girl’s shoes a dog’s winter a frosty welcome being normal being herself taking time taking space the glimmer of heat exhausted at the tailgate of her wrong afternoon turning in circles being still being clever being stupid being free surrendered the joy of incompetence the failure in every end and the win of playing for the game when we stopped enjoying the journey we’d arrived at our shitty destination she was over it this whining boy a strident conviction being right being happy being indifferent she had nothing more to say even to hate them only she was happy she was not them and she wrapped her things in the folds of this girl’s diffidence and let the ripples carry her onward all the pages in the wrong order as though there were a right one a disarray implying some array she was as crooked as this girl’s knee as aimless as this fly her pockets were showing she couldn’t be bothered being bothered the sun dipped like a silver spoon in honey and the crunchy reflections on cooling bushes made bokeh in her glancing escape like tiny moons a million in their tickling mischief flitting elves going shopping going grey being old being childish being dandy

a cake like a housebrick a scratch on her iPad nothing much to say shoes she hadn’t worn in the longest time a biker jacket that made her look like anything but a biker a college sweatshirt a worn stop sign painted on the road every swing had its own roundabout kicking a metaphor back into place pushing and pulling but in which direction vectors were never binary a song from a younger playlist a mixtape only actually on tape a portastudio a demo tape chiptune solo regressive rock retro retro retro hetero homo the male end of her guitar lead into the female hole in her amp an electric arsehole the time she’d killed herself playing a guitar the time she’d trashed her guitar like a rock ‘n’ roll gender confirmation the wrong lead in the wrong hole Teenage Fanclub at the bus station all the runaways a softly spoken boy things she forgot to do and things she forgot she’d done Cobain on the radio fucking fucking fucking remembering where she was when he died Elliott Smith on Byres Road people she’d known people she didn’t and the slow convergence of the two a fizzling of steam the rusty urn of her future contained released a plate made of crusts wearing the soles of her feet to leather her favourite song but no longer a blow to the chest only a gentle tease taking her plants for a walk taking herself for a boss taking her life for a game looking and not seeing walking and not falling get down stay down soft reflections in shallow waters a taxi the colour of blood knickers the colour of piss the stale dead smell after death knowing it was coming from herself

Mouthfeel

Hurting hurting hurting some people were allowed to breathe

we were about to be sold out she could feel it she felt sick like shit like a wobbly camera when she stood up too soon and hit her head on the arcs of colour shat out when flowers ate light mouthing the words I hate you I hate you I hate you

you were the second person today

winding clouds reeling backwards waving trees laughing birds the light of a stationary summer sat like an old cat on the desaturated horizon the dull light of the buildings like yesterday’s jam and falling bits of it a quiet road a grey brown roof like the sole of a shoe the tread of it gripping the sky a merry-go-round of starlings and the song and the drift of it life’s murmurations

and then thin torn-out wisps webbing obliquely and a grey thing darkening from below a shadow thrown at the sun a boot stamping on a human face and the rise of the traffic and brown lines and the flickering of it like torn tights and the flowers with their nails in holding on against dark like wind and a caw a warning as the clouds stopped as the treadmill came to rest and one of those spikes of memory like splinters in the carpet slicing nerves like ice water and stood in the fountain in broderie anglaise shivering and laughing and crying she was so much more than this

Squinting listening to Stoned and Dethroned a sky the colour of shit and shit the colour of sky her teeth felt like they wanted out a blue arrow pointing back the way she’d come a mouth like Texas full of cocks she couldn’t find her hanky and her sleeve was wet with blood and tears and the brown light spilled up the stairs like blood and a gold tooth lit the horizon like a drunken fuck and she went to sleep thinking about you and died and when she woke up you were still on the other side of the world and bits of her had fallen on the paper like dust and her skirt had fallen down when she went for coffee it was a hungry ghost gulls carving the sky park scoring the stewed light like diamonds on glass and the icy buildings like plastic chunks a fluffy diminuendo like blue balls of cotton clinical absurd a Rioja Reserva the weathered copper plates of the new square chapel a green christ the fur on the back of the land the fat of it quivering in sleep uneasy tremulous thinner than lines a pink bit like dripped blood in a bath of bleach the dripping of the sky like vinegar newsprint a slow fall a great fir taking its time hitting the ground

Sombre voices clouded like a stroke of soft blue ink from a long calligraphy brush calling the sea from somewhere over the horizon wet dabs in the wet air in her wet lungs the Marais somewhere over the horizon melting like treacle on a green copper vase smashed on the tiles against the tiles on the floor the pieces dancing in her swimming eyes an engine growling in the phlegmy wet miasma coating the street below trying not to breathe learning to be embodied

the soft silver femme sun silted over the rooftops a soft embankment breaching the window bay kissing her left elbow the seam of her skirt an asking a fading coming in waves like a cat lapping at her wavering refusal her softening resolve a company of angel doves welcoming her to her new eyes little sister these were here hands her elbows her skirts kissed silver in dawn’s beguilement a pure kissing like ice frosted on the skin of things a film like milk

The gold evening light splashing up the buildings like piss on a drunk’s shoes then draining into the blue night and the glistening of birds’ cold lullabies a dry stain with an Amerikan accent black grapes at the bottom of the glass still icy still her pink headphones a staring eye but it was only her camera facing the other way

It felt like yesterday wasn’t finished yet a headache like a fish hook in her skull rattling plastic cans she could do it

She was the last tooth in a rotting mouth hung by a sinew

a headache behind the brow ridge like avocado stones the nut that broke the cracker a yellow beating throttled with a roll of police tape do not cross thou shalt not a marshmallow pink with retribution the far escape of sleep drinking off yesterday’s hangover a smeared paper licked with the taste of regret to cut herself to fuck herself the gold standard a ten-inch dildo in stainless steel check her mail check her feed check her privilege ha ha she was drowning in their love

a cut band the soft play of splintered bone and steel and heat seared like ice like the stab of a laser the smell of burning hair a crack a snap mechanical from behind like life like it was ice cracking in the freezer the thermostat fucked like everything else she hadn’t spoken to a soul in months

chocolate cake was chocolate cake a fly who came in from the cold hovering in her lap like a tiny floating kitten a boy with a microfringe and tattoos she couldn’t quite read standing our ground and being called a threat which meant only a diminishment of their threat a threat to their ability to threaten us but she’d bitten more chocolate than she could chew full of beans coffee and cocoa it wasn’t fortitude it was flatulence and she’d be a simpering mess weeping the cork from a pink Prosecco in mere hours an evening that opened with a sigh but first rain first supermarket and a flat grey cardigan of a day a split in her tuck like pissing aftershave on a shaving cut invisible rain sweating the tarmac a competent judge and finding the judiciary wanting giving up on it all a critique of judgement itself and raining so hard now against the window she could feel it through the glass kids dressed for the beach and laughing and remembering laughing and managing a tepid smile and realising as the rain began to ease that when it stopped she’d be back to only having nowhere to go and picking at the crumbs then she enjoyed the nothing that was left of her cake

Emerging from a dark vehicle a white man squashing a squashed hat on top of his squashed face a thrusting automotive precision in his careless demands then a music-box tinkle from his phone scurrying him into the still dripping outside like the fly she swatted absently strutting now the glass partition like a man on a wire containing like a monad its own red future as only a stain to be squirted over with pink disinfectant and wiped like an equation she no longer understood the teleology of entropy being and nothingness hearing things and knowing she was still real a Japanese photobook a chill in her soft sneakers which anticipating the rain shrunk like cellophane over the fists of her feet she tried to read the weather but found no signal through the boundless precipitation now engulfing everything that was not on fire

Some new thing dipping her hair in her lunch tugging the itch of it feeling not safe but safe enough thresholds all things no more violence than she could cope with it was the little things and then crying because her cake was as nice as it was almost finished and that stupid refined sadness a disquiet finding an abstract sorrow behind each tangible one but it wasn’t it wasn’t like that at all she wasn’t really crying for cake but for life and the cruel discrepancy between learning how to do it and having enough of it left it was the children’s books she’d gifted herself in lieu of the childhood she’d never had it was living in the space between never had and never would in the quiet in fact between disquiet and joy and learning to walk that paraconsistent line thus to make all things true at once and not true a lifting of every veil and a woman passed in a visor like Darth Vader and a bougie boomer dude in Julien Macdonald and a man who spat in the gutter and a wobbly line in the wall that was only where one colour stopped and another started abstractions in the material plane a substrate was a projection the things we could see and the things we could see ourselves seeing reflection and self reflection a farmer’s wax coat white boots the bent radiator on the back of the fridge bananas in pyjamas dots that didn’t mean anything encyclopaedias in forgotten tongues a sugar crash the marquee of precipitations the things to be done now she’d preempted her reward a new release old shoes nausea like a cork wedged over the Prosecco of her agitation the sadness for all that she loved there were days she hated and days she didn’t and days she hated not knowing one way or the other she was going a walk the coin had dropped everything would unfold now like a paper lotus in a bowl of water a purple sweater a tilting landscape vertiginous bathroom floors upwards at forty five degrees

No she was not ashamed and she had no fear only unused to the heat she was and this stickiness it was unexpected thus to be celebrated the Sun low in the sky the lateness of a late summer the waning of the sun a sort of regret for the passing of time and all the things unaccomplished beads of sweat across her cheekbones a weeping for the year like an eightieth birthday party a sun that illuminated only backward like the low siren receding into the distance a mourning and not a fanfare the light of a candle on the altar not the fluorescent light of a maternity ward everything slipping like her sunglasses down her nose her makeup the trails tinkling from her armpits down her yellow flanks the falling away of all things like shedding hair and a fly flickering like a neon emptiness a boring man droning like power tools in a monotonous shirt a hand a pocket a heartbreak but she did not want to be this girl younger and prettier only to be herself in beauty and perfection envy as an insult to the cosmos when she could simply appreciate this girl’s beauty as a complement to her own as a celebration of her own and her own fading summer as the very beauty of her lost and frosty spring words failing her in the heat and solitude of her oneness the wail of children like whistling birds the crumbling evening spreading across the tablecloth of her stillness pasted between too hot to stay any longer and too hot to move she was no longer ready nor reluctant only a pool of gathering lassitude a coalescing into entropy the soft familiarity of chaos the very unboundedness of all things the arms in which she let herself fall sinking now an amnion of pink torpitude a cadence or a soft decay the unwinding of her sapphire coils an ankle tattoo another fly or the same one another hour another day the hissing of the kettle a bruise a lightbulb swinging in an absent breeze the currents in the heat like water she was ready now to bathe in it to be submerged the beach at Cannes the Ayrshire coast midnight skinny dipping in the vast Atlantic cloister a purple black a bruise a passing radio the pain of healing wet denim a paean a dogma a bruise

annoying bougie people invading her space struggling to be gracious or fuck it struggling to be honest failing to be gracious because they were genuinely objectionable and entitled the poisonous silver spoon crushing the skulls of the children in silver mines dying in thousands for their convenience and she knew of course every minute that this was how the world worked and it was her privilege to be able to forget to put it from her to wrap herself in a bubble and pretend these people didn’t exist and it was the same inequality that spared her the silver mine and the thought of it and the only difference was that these people liked it and she did not she did not

pink hair purple hair grey light tortoiseshell glasses a profile to die for plastic windows plastic doors the ivy waving in the wind goodbye goodbye to marginalia books of stamps housebricks made of human skulls our Soylent really was people ground up in dark kitchens a slave class to make Romans weep delicate fingers delicate skin translucent sunless a recycled sky a plant in a pot taller and more blighted than she was but she laughed at herself and her operatic manners the truth was that she enjoyed it life and this was how she enjoyed it walking and falling what else was there opera onstage and off there was nothing better than Rigoletto a razor-sharp curtain of red-silk hair a perfect square a small gathering for a show that wouldn’t trousers turned at the bottom showing her work but she hadn’t worn trousers in years the numbers embossed like fridge magnets but her download was done she could shake herself and go

looking out the window from back here up the tunnel of the space she still sat and looked out the window but the frame was deper from here she saw the space and the people in the space and the border between the space and the other spaces the shape of a pocket a ball with all these little pockets across the surface a ball of spikes here to be out there what would other people do at every turn then write the other way

running toward things she knew would make her sad swallowing things that made her ill feeding the trolls falling in love getting up in the morning she needed a shake a kick in the arse a firm hand in the fucking dark it was difficult to give up what was toxic to her when she was toxic to herself oh but who else would she have been she wanted to run away with herself not from herself she wanted to cry to console herself to hold herself to be her own hand in the dark she was her own dark it was only fair yellow scissors a slick of light across the road caught in it like quicksand in love in love in love she was a fool she hated herself she was alive

the day she’d been born the skin she’d been born in but it wasn’t that day was long gone and so was the skin and the birth certificate then what was she commemorating a mistake since corrected the ghost of someone she’d never been it was mean girls day it was something in some calendar or other everything was everything then she was everything and not nothing then why did she feel like nothing and not everything not anything less than this fly choreographing the sun it was because someone who was something was nearby someone to whom she would be something in some world if only but in some world she was beautiful in some world she was rich and her wildest dreams were not dreams but disappointing failures already and the beany taste of this coffee enjoyed and regretted but still too present to be forgotten and looked forward to again

Gethsemane

Red blood-red leaves and then a jumble of small cornflower flowers a pea-green pepper tree with open arms then dried orchid leaves veined like skin a dusty bowl then the orchid itself herself staring cinco de maio but why left to right if life was a book need it have been an English one

a velvet cushion lined and stained in orchid blue a broom of dried roses a spray of tights blood-red entangled two sets of pink headphones the red leather strap of a cross-body bag a lightening cable a copy of the Cam the Clare Review and the small forest of mint that sinewed purple wood beneath the window sill not linear but clockwise there was always another reading blue shins a bed-sheet blue a blank sheet the coffee-black ink folding creases in tossing this way and that what did it mean only it was a record of her sleep dreams from the outside yellow whispers a gas boiler the lemon twist of a rug in gin-blue and purple stripes but stripes that somehow suggested order lines bleeding a gradient only the thing between the floor and her feet but the floor was between the floor and her feet she was two stories up sticky the dry tears of yesterday’s garlic butter keeping her flammables by the fire all of the hard bits in one bite a creeping small thing that wouldn’t find its way couldn’t someone design a window that was easier to fall out than in the sour bite of another summer’s fruit bitter colonial the wind that held like ghost walls between the songs of various birds and the trees that jittered like Father Christmas Hamburg night in summer

avoiding her triggers was a full-time job

Strips streaks smears and speckles golden lights in the bruise-blue canopy the tattered overhanging firmament dripping sickened memories like wormed fruit into the ravelling basket of evening’s liquefaction darkening darkening the blood rising three small glasses of wine a pine orchard pitch peach blossoms the rite of spring rosin in the churchyard a purifying confetti the chips in her tutti frutti the splintered marble of a last confession and Saint-Sulpice from whence had she sprung which bud soft and tremulous haired with a thousand walks from Montparnasse to Saint-Germain a dick with a drink in his hand the pulled-up scrotum of life’s worst joke pass her the vinho before she screamed like Antoinette in red cold England give her to fucking puke give her a round of applause her red itching arms hairless empty a peach tree in a glass teeth cracked on the stones wailing laughing and crying walking and falling at the same fucking time

Distant square like sheets of paper one upon the other brown grey parchment sugar paper blue macaroon papers sweetie papers a crisp poke a world rendered in junk recycling garbage into stories about garbage but that was all recycling was a story

clammy underwear a chalky coffee the staggering interruptions of her wooden thoughts shuddering through the walls from a boy whose cock had never been in her mouth Maggoo Maggoo shame on you never and not yet there was a world between

that was what a world was a between a bounded computation space a delineation that was why keeping it together that was why scattering was death a world’s end the taste in her mouth it was her own ashes

and then it was recycling again

a thatched roof swallowed up in green wood and the towering copper bulk behind like different times fighting over one place a click of something coming loose then an unclick as though our actions could be undone try separating eggs from flour

feeling old what was it but feeling present to her inner child adults recalled who peopled her inner landscape a favourite art teacher and then seeing herself in them or them in her but they were in her now they were dead was that what boys

Wounds that wouldn’t heal nails that wouldn’t grow where the fuck was Saint Mungo when she needed him all around all around in the birdsong and the lines of flight the motes in the air and in her eyes memories of Paris in Polly’s beautiful photographs the shitty guitar playing upstairs in toxic masculinity a sudden pang for someone she’d once loved then still did who’d once loved her for that she supposed the stab of being hurt by someone she loved or thought she did abused and disabused wiser only meant more hurt

a slam but distant like a bass drum through a blanket an army of kittens to squee her to death a roar that felt like a purr attempts to hurt her that only left her stronger and more brutal but never she was only tenderised like a steak

a yellow taste like broken biscuits the pain of knowing the people who hurt her didn’t care throttle and clutch the brake the brake two cushions a bag of broken flowers some days cut roses were less than enough

A Velvia day rubbing her kaleidoscope eyes but it was really there this saturation the sounds of it everything wicked dreams let them go a harp shimmering in her heart forgetting to take her pill and water the plants a parcel on the mat things to do time to do them and then after when there was no time nothing to be done a furlough

old shit calcified on glass a fossil record of her slow degradation but she could change her earrings now it was fine a June reindeer a tumble of pink socks a perfect little secret a sticky mouth

A Pinter slow as winter six degrees a burst spring an excuse for woollen soft concealment Michelle of the Resistance her comfort her refuge a blanket of youth and the port at St-Jean-de-Luz and you throwing the baby sharks back into the water a scuttling thing along the window disappearing like memories a gull hulking over dusty gleams the light trapped forever in the skin of her befouled glass and scuttling back into view a shop along the Rue Gambetta the girl’s curly hair the colour of spring’s beach and her tumbled Basque English rolling like ice in a whisky sour and glancing up to see the thing fall from the wall and lay on its back a while before wriggling over and beetling off again behind a jar of dried flowers and a flap of wings and a low headache like fingers on her brow she huffed through the coffee maw of her open morning and tasted her way to the shower

a thicc head on thin shoulders a finger in every wrong place oh stop Maggoo she loved herself like no one else but she loved putting the frame round a border a mount a calling card she was awesome watch her put her finger in a socket

she’d forgotten to check the weather

Inside the rain the torn plastic bags and milk spilling like an eye the world was a razor then and we the flecks of rust cutting infecting the splintered exposure of one to another a harp a timpani then silence no song in it only a broken yelp like a squeaking wheel on an old pram and some kind of parked vehicle she could almost see and the lines of it the weeds reaching and the blot of the soiled sky when would it all be over then searing or slicing the lash of it cars scoring the distance like lamps in a long exposure the matt-glaze palette of a hatched day sliding through time like egg dripping on a wall and some far glimmer a plea in the spare traffic the knot in her hair and a burning helicopter that caught in the label stuck out at the nape of her soft neck the languages she didn’t speak the women she loved and the men who had loved her pushing layers peeling it to find the day the truth when the onion itself was all

garaged a vanishing point slipped out of the frame when there was time she should like to paint its picture

gulls burning the singing slates a conflagration of laughter and sweeping it away now the arm of the traffic that swelled on the hidden freeway then how did she know it was there she could feel the long needles of it piercing her heart a bleeping lorry the threat of the normal a honeyed moon that never ended forced at last to lie down she wept

Drifting only fast away like inundations drifting like a waterfall her chipped nails the drone of male violence small windows this way and that and a rising light like the pressure in a Bialetti and a small blue piece like a smudge a fingerprint a chink in the light a sailing ship like Peter Jones rounding the Cape at the King’s Road a fat gull pushing the current that rose like a fist pink and red and pea green and lace white and a more yellowy green like parched grass and still these black boxes it was Saturday shadows on a plane then eaten like impressions in a faded photograph the end of music a bowl waiting to be filled

supping her brose like a gumless fish a tussle in the treetops below small yellow flowers asleep in the pollen and scoring then like skates across ice blue swallows sharp and easy like a card shark’s tears a cluster of something like steam formed at the edges of what she couldn’t see and the clouds had changed like knickers yesterday’s clouds she was drinking them when she remembered when she remembered

the machine-gun fire of male laughter again like blows from a boxer like an echo all of the beatings that still beat in her heart and the friends the friends Polly the ones who hadn’t hurt her yet the stents in her half-written dream a construction that wouldn’t stand up well what would there was only falling faster or slower before the line or after a building full of people yes yes thank you yes

Felled like a duck the ticks on her legs and shoulders a desperate flapping against thin air and the trees eating the buildings for breakfast a rare sobriety her reward for a night of rare debauchery the morning light a glowworm in a bag of mud and the yellow flame of it of life bleeding at the edges like fogged film we called them imperfections the artefacts we came to know and love but it was a poor life without them

and then the turning meagre like biscuits on a griddle and the Camberwell looming suddenly into view as from a bus and receding then red faced like a siren lowered its tone as it passed and letting it slip away into the mess of London plastic bags caught in trees

Elizaveta had made her think or made her feel or something

worse she’d made her remember

but she hadn’t made her she’d remembered was all only she’d been thinking of her first

what would a skeuomorphic photograph have looked like a photograph of a photograph a visual representation of a photograph but it was what we had film-emulation filters artificial bokeh sprocket holes from a template from a photograph a photograph of a photograph then her paintings which were not paintings only skeuomorphs

hot then and suddenly tired again well she’d been up for an hour she should eat something man could not live by coffee alone nor women neither nor women neither

slipping off and starting over and over a life in a day in a morning one day was as good as another only some days her cardigan hadn’t shrunk yet and some she was in Montparnasse and the heat was melting her plimsolls onto the tarmac

those days when she felt like she was following herself around like a lost child vaguely aware of the grown-up hand that dragged her like a fisher’s fly through the swamp and life snapping at her heels always monsters under the bed a spring clearing for fairy rings we never grew up it just wore thin

A sky the color of English tap water the battered trees shaking trapped but she was trapped too in this day all day

the rain hissed the face of it like cat scratches a bird fell from one side to another like a girl from an open window

cheese for breakfast cheese for supper and the fucked dreams in between were only the mermalada of her hopes and fears

that tiny piece of the horizon she should never have come here

A smell that wasn’t her or this chair that she only smelled when she was sat here like it was this exact spot she should move her chair and see if it went away but her wine was at her elbow and besides moving was

a rosé like rhubarb and brambles the red and the green the scarlet and the black the heat death of the universe the gravity that kept pulling the pencil back to the page the agglomeration of structure and lies the scent of it a song she found triggering a greasy shit an empty glass a heart full of jaggy tears a nice day drawing to a close the noisy birbs chanting their slogans like slides at a rock show let it go let it go he was dead what was it to her now

there was more wine in the fridge

put Taylor Swift on

have a biscuit

autocomplete was suicide

Peonies were perfection was it bad to snog them did she care lips hips tits clit slender legs that curved to perfection and a brace of cool green arms to be held to be held nosing in to the layers of wax-paper petals pink frills like French knickers and that smell like nothing buried in it waking in it sleeping in it closed and then open wrapped in it like a shawl an affair to remember flickering through the brush of it like invisible ink like a slow bomb tight packed little balls of it and then everywhere exploding over the course of days and blooming through the course of a season a brief encounter a may fly a may flower to the ends of the world forgetting to eat forgetting to drink water forgetting to get out of bed forgetting to live forgetting in order to live twisting her hair around her finger leaning on her hand looking up and seeing the window remembering to look out of it seeing birds and thinking that was why she could hear birds

That time was bad

Let it let it let it all go to hell queer transphobes woman-hating feminists a hostile world was easier to resist than a world that made no sense

then make her world remake her world the world she made she’d only herself to convince she was her own g0d now drawing lines the world that died with her

what did she care her love for scat would never be socially acceptable her love for the socially unacceptable the line drawn always around what she wanted to place herself outside of the Place Ampère the wrong side of the needle tracks wallowing in her own exclusion from their mediocrity and banality gulls dragging the day off like a tarpaulin to beat from it the living dust a double exposure a soft film shot two stops down at the wrong iso a cloud trailing entrails pecked by oily magpies and the pulchritudinous despair of some warbling thing wanting what she’d had for lunch for dinner renaissance architecture under Ionian suns and the punishing grey climate of northern towns hung like cloth clouds over the low light a swoop through and across Albania Galicia bottle to bottle and no time to clean the glass between the blue sail wrapped like nori around the flake white of the cracked mast for g0d’s sake burn it down a wee tiny fly on the window that disappeared when she stood up the furry feeling of milky tea on her teeth and her missing teeth and the life she’d never bitten into even to have known how much she could chew and the puddles in her island dreams all the lost souls the flowers that had never bloomed the bird that never grew a ring box an orchid a dogtooth emery board a curling yellow leaf like banana peel her invisible socks the invisible summer the crushed emo inside of her who couldn’t fly but had never grown up a puddle of crayons and pencils a string of stillborn blooms dried in spring to burn in the fall a day of remembrance and having lasted longer than expected longer than her teeth falling and burning and bloated like the blue bags under the sky’s prolapse a cracked wing scraping the summit of dust-spattered slate and rainy fingers clutching misty at the edge of the blanket rushing now like suds in a drain and recalling someone then recalling that they were dead thinking her head might have been too befuddled to epilate tonight

blood and wine and other things pieces of tooth a broken glass and the little screws amongst it all and her head still ringing and her apron a ticket with a hole in the beating of the sky against land and sea and having it all figured out collapsing into a sea of darkness a black brown blue bruise a glare of electric light the colour of sick and the chipped pieces catching at her tongue the ribbons flapping at the open window the train pulling away and a straw hat Pollyanna on her way to hospital a reformatory for habitual drunkards a beaten glow at the horizon like a blood blister and a small questioning of her worth and place in the universe the thin stretched fabric taut like skin almost transparent the sinewy light a lampshade a nightshade a shattered pink flowerpot a lemonade stand the smell of the bonfire carrots for peonies a frozen skate a slow refogado like pennies ever poised a frozen waterfall green thick scales of parmesan crusting congealed on yesterday’s risotto and the moon sleekit behind a crust of yellow cloud a spit like a trail of come the hem of her dress the way her fingers clawed at the canvas like she were scraping the picture up out of the ground a piece of cotton or lint a dust bunny a dead life brought to life the effervescing acids that kept her awake as the helicopters chalked the night sky biting her fingers in the dark a patchwork shawl an antimacassar a switchblade it was nineteen eighty two she was thirteen she was speeding with a mouthful of come it was dark she was in a tunnel it was dark outside she was lying in the road

she missed her unhappy childhood

A headache full of incipient tears the sky pressing against her brow the blue clouds a bag of stones a frozen moment of violent contact the eking out of being not yet quite dead and the burning of tomorrow’s breakfast for warmth in the now and eating her return ticket for sustenance bleeding herself of any more pain the lines wouldn’t decide how far apart to be the purple in the blue in the gold the light in it picked out by the light pricked from the surface incipient the light in everything that let it be the love in it the soul of it

Quell the silence a bird still like a weathervane a threat a tangle of lines like a fur ball a vocoder the cell next but one being okay feeling okay with nothing to do just slow and easy the setting sky like oil a burned glow the last beat of a bossa nova the shimmering trees like fat purring cats waving the day goodbye and trembling with incipient night a boudoir a pissoir the end of a rainbow a sea of darkness boiling with life like a good man’s potatoes Joan Eardley asleep on the couch a screaming peace the night was a dirty watercolour the cracked varnish on an old master the dust on a stuffed parrot a bloom on an old duffel coat a hoar frost the climbing fissures in her root canal five days in twenty eight and a mouthful of acid in her knickers then smashing the buildings aside like tetris piling days on days compacted like landfill a poesy a prophecy a pose

A square building to the south a rooftop nestled in billowing trees licking smoke through the canopy like a finger tracing the outline of something she couldn’t see a low flat headache like the circle of cabbage leaf at the top of her sauerkraut a glass box and two dark birds against the lint horizon the one circling the other a living orrery and a great swallow bracketing tangents talking to her insides and hearing echoes for replies starved like a fire with no one to ignite painting in a vacuum writing in chalk on sheets of blank fucking paper a sky like bleach like piss nauseating leaking blue like a biro in the washing machine the cistern of her dreams and the birds floating dead like cigarette ends a slamming of doors a piston pushing needles in and out pumping filth across the warped glass of her aimless gaze so much so that she couldn’t see coming and falling and turning like a top like a dream machine a flickering day of all things a pushy wind a violent sun punched and kicked by things in general a soft biscuit for hard water her nails her skin her teeth her hair four Finnish girls in a Nissan Micra the wax and wane of the tumbling years she wasn’t falling the rabbit hole had collapsed around her like a telescope and time only the light of a guttering candle a thud of cake to the head like the first hour sirens bangs trickling laughter an accent a turn of phrase a twist of the knife splinters and shards the bones in her soft tissues the shrapnel hell that was other people

the glow of a cake in her face like she’d won the lottery the smell of it blowing away all anticipated regret a pleroma of accents like a café years ago decades another world newspapers and cigarettes and this nostalgia only a treacly joy on top of her buttercream softness like sprinkles on her flat white like the foam of it or these concentric hearts swirled in it into which her pink lips kissed as a sleepy head into a cool pillow the hazy breeze of the time between after summer before winter the heaven of a waiting room places of transit a window seat then limbo her heaven a lesbian bar and this cake was her manastabal and now only a sticky aftertaste a lilac shirt her breasts cupped like jigglypuffs her soft protection clinging this gentleness about her in stretches and folds the grain of the floor slow tree puddles a cozy day like a silk veil caressing her loose limbs a whisper a label a shroud she was happy

unpleasant white cis men authoritative in ignorance no signal Saturday rains people who thought they were normal because they didn’t know anyone not peculiar in just the same way they were a sour washcloth a cold damp the forced laughter of someone less securely privileged than the speaker the way we supported our own disprivilege by cowering in the insecurity of theirs like humouring the gaoler by pretending the door were locked for fear of reprisals should he witness his own impotence the unbroken stream of this man’s vile ego did he breathe through his arse she wanted to smash his face just to see the look on it but of course she didn’t only kept pretending as though the door were locked and freedom any more than one broken coffee mug away

cold she was cold and clammy like a damp rag in a corner of the cellar floor left forgotten peed on by rats or a mulch the death from which life or just a poorly tended tombstone clung with lichen and slugs a poisonous centipede a motheaten greatcoat a flat half submerged in the water table a drain a grey mop head the wool of her teenage sweater after crossing the heath the violence even echo is your love could not drown she was cold she had slept well the rain was easing the future was over they had won their prize was the same as ours they were dead

a fluffy sweater that vanished her boobs a twirl of wired headphones and a knot of hair like a cinnamon bun her life was perfect her life was perfect a German accent an earring like a curl of telephone cable her metaphors were all retro today well summer was over it was time to kick through the dead leaves of her year a splintered hubcap reflected in the bubble tiles of a pink wall a bandaged fist the glistening stickiness after coffee cake and wallowing in the aftermath rut knowing thankful from forgivable the way spaces collapsed and others unfolded an origami of community heaving a sigh then a pink silk scarf a moment of still a stack of milk crates in the colours of a pride flag yet to be claimed the beautiful pleroma of all of our queernesses and then of course her always the corner of tears threatening her eye like rain and just then a dandelion wish and foolish impetuous she laughed and wished to pee the bed and laughed again at her own spontaneous joy and once more to show her hands to the thought of its rarity for any amount of perfection was all of it and each awfulness averted was the totality of awfulness averted each success every smile enjoy every sandwich

Supermarket beckonings in the marbled paperwhite sky the shapes of people their clothes and hair an open lid a puddle of salt it was fiction after all and we were not constrained a favour returned with a dirty look and clutching at the necklace she hadn’t worn invoking it from afar upon her night table that was always the thing with fiction we let it run away from us so that all things were possible a blue curse an evil eye and then a sugar crash all the gnostic energy required a portal to hell a mall grab for sinners eternal debt eternal damnation waiting for the automatic door waiting till her numbers came up straight waiting for prince fucking charming then not waiting for anything just stood there since there was nothing only to be stood here or there forever a pattern of dots meant to indicate the heat and then the sun obliging from behind a cloud and hearing the voice that went with the look knowing she’d been right and damning the integrity of the narrative she closed the book and tossed her pen into the bucket of her bag succumbing to beckonings as to repulsions her life was perfect her life was perfect and her smile not sad at all no matter what her eyes might seem to imply

all she wrote about was cake because she wrote in cafés so that cake had become part of her journalling experience thus of her mental landscape and her sentences had grown more assertorial less subjunctive less descriptive she was doing and not just seeing or seeing in her mind’s eye what might have been she was making it be what it was and not just watching like a film what was or what was not and it was quiet and she could think and what she thought was that she had no need to think only to be and the privilege of freedom to think was freedom not to because peace was a condition of thoughts that were at peace

Nephilim and Seraphim and a glorious silhouette like a caramel cutout a cookie pressed from human flesh a gingerbread girl inverted typography the same space from outside and in the same life every word in a patriarchal language then don’t speak every act of self-abasement but eating breathing nothing was free only surviving it the music and the source of the music the conversations tumbling through one another like chewing gum in hair the incremental assault an army of secondary perpetrators and she imagined a war of gentle support everyone breathing love and walking on air but all against all we chose this she hated us we deserved it strutting shouting forcing themselves on us it wasn’t ignorance they knew her panic attack was why they walked like that in the first place and it started to rain then harder heavier but it would stop it would stop she would heal and scar and someone else would come to cut her again it was her yoga mat soiled and washed and dried and soiled the circle of life but it was stopping a hand on her shoulder her download was done she could go

living and sleeping eating and breathing drawing taking pictures walking listening to music missing the opera missing life missing sleep they were actually normal and not weird at all and the fuck of being normal in her weirdness had only been her being weird a sticky puddle of jam the colour of bruises a cake fork a beautiful necklace of handmade beads a tote with boobs all over screaming me too to be told except you but it wasn’t me too at all it was me especially and no one wanted to hear that their own oppression was privilege and what they had was at other people’s expense but so was hers so was hers her fingers were sticky a collage of coffee bags a drawing in felt pens shadows and reflections a silk scarf a red button checking her privilege checking her rings a bus with livery in enby pride with enough flags we could reclaim everything gender as a construct she had the scars to prove it

a cheeseplant the colour of cheese a hot sausage roll eaten right out of the tinfoil inter it was a word she was not a word

She was not ashamed

it was neither here nor there

drawing lines borders incisions divisions planes a point in the visual field a dog barking a curly head of bleached hair a gilet a coat peg her world would die with her it was so immeasurably sad a whole life rich in intellectual gifts she could no more bequeath than the millions she never had and she was sadder still now for this than for death itself a life in ideation it was only a peace of it but her thoughts and feelings mined and minted at such expense well it had killed her and for what to be vaguely recalled by a few for a conversation a point of contact an intersecting of worlds another world then a hermeneusis then sealed also from that from her scattered meetings touching from a distance sad sad sad sad a thousand fucks not given a bus in nazi livery every time she passed Drancy on the train a union flag faded in the sun to trans pride colours a bus the colour of shit a shit the colour of shit if we drew lines we could erase them lines of flight every escape was a prison

Zurbarán

There wouldn’t be anything besides for an age nothing else to talk about we could have described the colours of the tiles or the reflections of the cherry trees but we’d have been describing how they looked now under just these circumstances and it wouldn’t mean a thing in a year besides the most notable thing about anything right now was right now itself so what was there to say anyone here right now to hear us was here with us and could see for themselves a singularity of shared experience what did that do to diversity to cognitive diversity

eating with her face on and her hair down learning over it was like coming out of a coma learning to walk learning to talk like moving to a new country a new culture

she felt naked without her mask on

the one-hour limit wasn’t going to get a look the memory of reading she didn’t know when she’d last touched a paper book maybe we wrote differently on paper tactile maybe we wrote different things maybe the magic was different maybe we wrote differently in cafés maybe the magic was different

the crumbs still made patterns on the plate an owl swooping in for the kill a chocolate dragon a cured flounder in the foam of our flat white actually forgetting ourself for a moment maybe we’d get used to it again faster than we thought

Splitting belly grown to the navel and why not let it go a while sloshing like sick in a bag the fluids filling her skull and blue thin like veins and small flickerings like dust on film the mote of her unseeing eye controller connected controller disconnected filth on the window on the world on her glasses in the sky in her eye or living things moving and unmoving and dead now the knives in her back it was only a poster in a shop window tired of her eyes the sticky furred residue of a peeled plaster the softness of waterlogged skin and subcutaneous protestations awake and shitting acid again

Or else it just didn’t or not like we thought it would and we had to go the other way with our eyes and mascara in our fringe writing the same song over and over and not really being sure if it was green or blue and painting cups and cutlery with our purple lips and the lights hanging and the blossoms through the cut glass soft like our knees never fall down

Picking at our scalp a cake fork black sneakers a blueberry a blackberry it wasn’t about how easy it was it was about the way it felt

Some of the time it followed us and some of the time it followed us at a distance an hour half an hour the sizzle and smoke for someone else painting with the lights on the cold the blossom the bloom if it wasn’t Harry styles it wasn’t

The last time and the time before that a simple construction an elegant chaos a simplicity in repetition of what well of anything darling a pink ponytail a monster truck enviable curls enviable curves enviable shoes wait they were ours the wobbly outline of a thrown plate like a fried egg the dark side of the sun flies and mosquitos a bad harmony a shit fuck a bottle of wine for which we’d killed a man and which now on the palate underwhelmed our own jokes our own laughter our own hard judgement and lack of understanding our similarity to the rest spitting teeth like a tommy gun or swallowing at the mouth of the barrack walls which nine and which five Dolly us working girls had to stick together a unitary embodiment a shared pronoun it was to die for even knowing that we would

the time had come and gone the circle was a lie it wasn’t a clock it was a drill boring through the possibilities and casting them off like slag until there was a hole we could fall down and hit the bottom somewhere where there was nothing left

Hungry and wired with a slow headache like a new moon eating her hair new mascara over yesterday’s crust writing in the wrong diary eating at both sides of our mouth a hot guy in a tight shirt

No one who’d care a sticky cold like milkshake like the lees of our insomnia settled in blooms over the clogged sinus that ruddered the passage of our days lost with no Circe and no Calypso only shipwrecks and monsters only a depthless Inferno and the curse of our bleeding eyes and the rules and proscriptions for us alone and no longer feeling sorry for ourselves or even angry only tired

she wanted it to stop only to stop and just as the lights changed the engine failed people who thought they were cool and who everyone else thought were cool and who were not cool people who were that no one could see people who were people people who weren’t not being able to stop it a slow decline and oil on the wheels the end of the beginning of the end just the end not the end of the end just yet only the end the endless thick of it the frozen hell of it the quality of it the lived materiality of nothing before the nothing itself forever

Cut heels in heels in fishnets in chucks oat milk flat white pointelle tights lemon and blueberry tasting notes of the day a qr code read queer the blue pink tint a figure to die for no really she wanted to die but she was happy today she was happy a shirt a jacket his table was an old packing crate rosie’s new record things to live for a scrunch of potato chips an oversized hairpin a rusty sign seven three five three one it was diesel it read diesel sideways it might have been raining or the buildings were sweating pressing so hard we cracked the counter top grinding our teeth to ashes and dust in shambles a shambles a rolled up sheet of paper complexities a cake fork the holy glow between the headache and the cause of the headache the point size the norms the cultural contingency the living and the dream a tiny macaroon with ears it was a teddy bear a child’s dilemma to eat our cake and have it a bunhead early but not too early late but not too late a normal thing a cup of tea in the desert slow aging like a tiled wall dirty was only the midpoint between artifice and nature

Paris streets flaky railings the heat thick like a wet blanket a spotty banana a burst pill blister if it needed dusted we didn’t need it

she didn’t read any more it bored her no one who wrote had anything to say men being men women being men the burning of the feminaries

the cold rain on her legs calling it the ladies’ facility the blue wind filling her yellow hood chewing her thin lips a shirt she’d bought in Paris dripping in a heatwave the sober dismantled trees gesturing at the flaked road signs the angles of the buildings even parked the cars insisted lines drawn across the city out to the airport where small masked avatars jostled at a distance a plastic napkin the lee of it a bus a truck pebbles in the current shattered reflexions folding worlds together the veil tangled torn or folded mothballed in cedar drawers a dresser handed down a coffin

the glitter of the coffee grinder tinkling through beeps and sirens a world that obliged a blue flash turning a corner into something that rhymed telling ourselves we were anywhere but in our own heads alone and in poor company the splash of cutlery a point light source a blue circle a blueberry the guts of it drawn across the plate still an incident board a mortuary stab the filament of words end on a sentence driven by the line break verbal leading the landfill of her mind’s landscape life we used up what was good for us and accumulated what was bad living as mortality by definition

a wireframe a cold hat a peeling poster things that looked like other things but not so as to be mistaken closing her eyes on a bad smell then the badness coming into view take it head on her trauma the barbed wire around her motorcycle emptiness never fall down hit first hit hardest

small strong sticky the shadow the oblique your overloaded stare a dark cast across the palate the syrupy sun falling like lava the knit of your astonished face the foam and the spotty interior a soul in a doll in a bag in a box and the rising anxiety dappled like lesions a marble fish water without oxygen a map of her day sweating across her back the blue lining of her dress fringed at the frontier of intimacy and restraint a microscopic illumination the tiny white hairs the pink pores open breathing the muggy exhalations of their teeming proximity and the veins fine as saltpeter filaments a rhizome the gulf and the soft fragment of it too far she’d gone too far by a molecule by an atom but an atom past the point of no return

A thin warmth a nip to prick her scars and sun to heal and then the shade peeling like skin like centuries over the barrow of her buried secrets the mystery of her long preservation the bones of what she believed in a jar at her feet jewellery and beer a party of the fallen she forked away another mouthful of cake tasting nothing the feel of it dry in her mouth and throat and swallowed feeling then the absence of her friends and the halftone focus of the days ahead coming into view and she pushed it away like puke knowing it was there but knowing she could keep pushing it away as it murmured threatening ever to break into the present the cracks of it and the peeling paper like skin the set of all things she was winning she was winning and she didn’t care

A whining like a squeaking wheel but it was a small dog she knew it was and someone passing with a drill and a gesture that always came out wrong so that now it only meant that and she was saying things she didn’t mean

a plastic napkin fighting its own crinkle the cold milk of the day spilling along the road tired metaphors still cutting ignorance to pieces only blunted now against the edges the splinters like great ice shelves breaking into the sea the hands of the clock that never managed to keep time with her feet a soft blanket of privilege woven from prisoners’ skins a biscuit in a plastic sleeve and the slow filling of every living thing and the sun then giving up on it all threw off her poncho and her beaten tin plate and laying down for the kill gobbled everything in one unhappy cup

sticky pistachio custard bomb demolish the plate not our face and feeling naked alone without you crying leaving the house a single embodiment didn’t make a relationship any less confusing an unexpected rain smelling it first squinting as though not being able to see it would mean not being able to feel it like taking a bath with your knickers on and then sad eyes as though a different seeing could make a different being but it could of course it could oestrogen eyes saw a deeper world eyes of hope eyes of despair green eyes champagne eyes she felt sick like feeling her way in the dark she was changing her mind like changing her knickers she was changing

everything was always changing because everything that changed changed everything

she didn’t know if it was the sweater or the way she wore the sweater and she thought we might walk forever in someone’s shoes and never know their feet

the doorway framing her silhouette her ankles the profile of her pink mask then knowing dark meant light and she looked and there was a sprinkle of lemon sun like weak tea like pistachio custard a white apron a blue shirt pink hair she wasn’t losing track of time she was letting it go

Well then here was one melt and a small infringement of a rule no one else observed a bleary mouth a marble cookie an inverted cliché a renversement and truth be told it was exquisite for the moment of our surviving it but none of it meant a thing

and of course in the instant of thinking it she thought that nothing did or that only to care one way or another about anything a plastic cup an unfortunate colour combination and then just in proportion so that nothing was ever disproportionate or meaningless that meant something to someone and she was sad now and barely there and already ready to go

her thighs were sticking together the foreign hollow of her swamped underarms the buttery stillness of it

reflected inversions reversals promises and lies a sugar bowl with a lid like a toilet seat a strutting clamour of peacocks the colour of hate and the bed linen blue of the open sky impossibly far away leaking like a hedonic calculus marked scored striated for once her knickers were the driest thing she had on

Slightly but not so very much as to much care but then not so very little as to be able to forget a vagueness a paraconsistency then a thinness of the veil but she was the veil then it wasn’t a question of where to go but of what came through and magic then a question of what we invited and not what we were invited to and we weren’t the sailor any longer but the sea she missed you she wanted to run back and get you and take you with her but you hadn’t wanted to come and missing you was hers not ours

fumbling speech acts a slip of the tongue a spillway a red paper bag a bucket hat the sickliness and the bitterness like bad prosecco like grapefruit and custard yellow socks with cats on making a fool of herself by treating monsters as though they were human and still being better off a fool than a monster she was not weird this culture was weird she was not appalling she was appalled

she was fed up crying she was tired she had no trembling left in her only stillness and joy the patterns in the plastic floor a plastic bottle of plastic she was sad and missing you again stillness and joy in some other place she could feel but not see

collapsible stories an unflattering curve the shattered drying residue of a brown liquid the split of a skirt like a wedge of cake a slice of pizza the stop in her door in her mouth why hers and not these gaping yawning swallowing sharks but she was the stop and it was just her ability to stop them that made their bite so sharp

Fingers for spilling a talk for other people an exclusion of tongues a cigarette pack her splintered reflection unevenly distributed across the squabbling tiles a wall was a floor for the horizontally inclined if all we could see was what there was then how we saw it was how it was a failed swallow a greasy tote bag the gleaming violence of a stationary vehicle these people were more like her than they knew or cared to know and she was horrified in just the measure she imagined them in the imagined light of the same reflection the burr of a small grinding a flutter a lilt a nervous laugh so persistent as to be infectiously unsettling anxiety as contagion she was leaning too hard biting too hard clenching her teeth fists arse her gait accent demeanour was all a bloodless blue forbearance survival as vocational as occupational as the orientation of her very existing survival as an end in itself was death

trundling not rumbling cloudy not overcast threatening but without menace not quite anything but without being nothing a balcony silver in the mud-blue sky hung like a promise in the falling evening a baby not quite crying passersby of indeterminate age walking slowly but not so much as to mean anything forgetting which year it was and which year was in but still crying because someone else had prettier legs than hers a hair caught in the setting of her ring a cake she buried like the last of her enemies missing you then remembering you with a shudder of relief leaning too hard again eyes wide and frowning and leaning in close to a whispering tree hearing only not yet not yet and then the baby crying and the rain and the future and her battery died and she got up to leave a yellow cushion a paper cup red hair red bricks a passing resemblance a sword in a stone a ripple in the grey that now settled again like garbage to primordial seamless sludge