above below all sides living under a bowling alley doctors and lawyers a moth holding the window where the stalled housing projects scarred the horizon the acid burning her throat the trees subdued in the fuzzy evening light like wet wings burping in little fits of undead pitiful promise and your soft question coming slow inevitable like avalanches crashing over her crushing her a cabin in the megève a villa at cannes and the golden blue sky the winking colour of paper fish she wanted to be the clockwork mouse in your shoulder birds gently dropping from the sky like dead pilots a still crane and leaves that silently looked away undesirous dull shining only for other worlds that dreadful novel you’d written when you were seventeen clouds lifting like skirts shirts hopes spirits falling like knickers like night a misery in a glass of wine the cold seeping through the nine cubic feet of dirty nothing between her and whatever was out there life death other people you her dreams coiled in wet nests like cable ties or smashed in the gutter like disposable vapes and then one magpie gone rogue scrawling the newsprint twilight like a toddler’s crayon gravesite archaeology the lines and mullions lines on paper only a pink refraction grit in her eye spilling blood like coins from a fairground waterfall your jackpot to be the object of her disaffection all in favour a popsicle stick tracing a mystery narrative in the curve of your bitten tongue sunsets resplendant with things unsaid gleaming yellow pink from azimuth to azimuth a compass rose for the funeral of her last valentine a first kiss the hidden track a long encore cut for theatrical release

a budding branch throwing handfuls of evening birds to fall like scented dust over laughing spring’s soft wedding a whirling a threshing of the air sucking and fucking boxed elders flowering like cancer biting her cheek thinking then about you as she did when when well in truth most things would do it this dry flurry of snow gulls the smell of housework the drowning in her ears of lined paper and tearing it with the point of her german pencils to the wooden world underneath shellac and blotting paper a green leather inlay like vines like a bruised thigh and her flogger the one thing sufficiently exercised as to need no dusting voices under the chirrup and the whir a coiled thing on the roof a rumble then sirens an old handkerchief knotted around her headphones the shit coloured trees broken into the view like craquelure and magpies slipping from worlds beyond and back again but all of it despicable torn and faintly putrid the bags under her eyes the fungible elasticity of skin touching herself then if skin were skin and longing still for you for your skin your touch the gold of your smile and the blush over your foundation over your blushes so in love with you then and your breasts pointing accusingly like puddles on glass when glass was nothing but puddles anyway then melting onto something melting then one soup only which was truth which was the universe which was entropy a soup slowly stirring itself smooth again your cold face pressed against her slower melt a pocket of slush on a shelf of blue ice your dying as sure as her dying only not so eager

a change that changed things and the changes caused by the changed things and then further changes because she was changed by the new things and did things differently a context as a skin a cookie cutter the world as everything other than her then her skin the skin of the world the shape of her the shape of it like an old shoe then she was the same shape as her context shaping shaped by her world turned inside out her inner guts and her outer guts but no only the outline shared eating a cookie cutter or the cutting board the morning sun an affluent faltering thing all spent promise the cosmos struggling towards what she knew that everything would be fine that her teeth were expendable that an idiot on a motorcycle was not her rapist that every knock on the door was not her rapist that reflexes could be broken like bones only with trauma the hard fix transitioning had been then to upend everything to tear habits out by the roots the ritual that destroyed rituals a deep change a reprogramming an acid trip nothing new something radical some corner she hadn’t poked surely out in it all somewhere a place for her a rabbit hole she hadn’t been shat from then banging and an invitation an alarm wailing like children calling her names an apartment on uranus

aching arching one way then the other shifting the squinting eye of her inner watchman here or there a body without organs striated only by scars fractures burns the colonial difference the skin remembered more than the brain did her violent death a slow one a blinking yellow light like puke bubbling under the hot sun an egg frying on the concrete climate catastrophe of her roof terrace gilt edged with a view of the arc de fucking triomphe a bourse for burning an easing now thrusting now soft again limp like sausage like tofu her spine the consistency of jigglypuffs filled with red bean paste a chorus of hissing and hum a whistle a whine her space defined by the pitch one way then the other a soup of it and knowing where she was because she recognised her own fish bowl when she saw it and her tired eyes trying to see you as though by trying hard enough they could make you be there and not wherever your life was and things you cared about and people you loved trying to get up trapped in the wreck of her chair twisted to the shape of her sitting needing to do her meds thinking it must be late and checking the time and thinking it must be late and a film under her eyelids like something she could almost picture then looking around her and seeing nothing unfamiliar seeing nothing a blue spine an orange spine white green white again the lines of the radiator and its shadows the stripes of the rug the angles the table made fanned out by the roof lights a glass of water she’d forgotten to drink a bed she’d forgotten to sleep in a life she’d forgotten to live

a job that happened or not telling who she told what she told them and when a lottery ticket not leaning into her life or settling for something anything a dilettante a demimondaine never really behind anything never joining in never part of anything always on the fringe one foot on either side of the border a hermaphrodite a virgin a whore it’d come out how it came out and bore her one way or the other keeping being her going there dropping through the floor and clawing back up not doing her housework or fully committing to her transition not telling you she loved you and yet still circling your light like a little moth and never really much caring what happened and never stepping quite into the room and dying at some point not much different than her always her doing the sweeping and dishes and yoga and then bed and then you in the morning and finding out getting it free until she didn’t having money in the bank till it ran out not caring about bills shopping in the face of bills and just fucking bored more than anything and everything boring her there being no real escape and not from her her anyway the boredom and the circus a head full of chaos a life at least comparably crazy then to be anything but dull and a circus then driving you too so that you couldn’t say no your headspace then being part of her meatspace thus an escape and her you a quiet in one another’s noise rough trade bondage ayahuasca running out of rabbit holes then finding your running leaning into you and your own leaning beguiling enough to remove her from her own whirling chaosphere two vastnesses held up by the other’s gravity like an aureation of golden lies the lacquer in a kintsugi of dismembered reciprocity having spent so little time in the grey world having a circus lacking impulse control or the capacity for rational self interest not stopping the car crash car crashes being more interesting than parked cars in a parking lot with the engine off and the handbrake on and everyone wearing a seat belt

allegory and self a tightening of the skin at the temple at the cheekbone and clutching for air gasping it out again before she could taste it her own skin slipping through her fingers screaming wailing not even silently just unheard heard ignored avoided performed into unbeing no unread messages her sinuses a reservoir for blue tears despair so filled up with it her hair was coming out at the seams stuffing servitors with it a fucking army of them gulliver bound and flogged and then late sun glazing the finish of the day a varnish over an abjection of decay her crushed face wringing out onto her cardigan her laptop into her soup a honeycomb in her chest of barbed wire and cement a hoping for the worst that sought not the satisfaction of prescience but the annihilation of hope itself she’d have destroyed the universe to be rid of the feeling her life might be anything but this hellscape of brutality and fear and you stuck there in her throat like bones streaking the sky of her tempest with pink and yellow sunbeams showing her the very page with the instructions crashing into her life like a christ child in a giant’s cold garden the beatings the abject loneliness of being raped eviscerated by life’s cold hands onto these granite slabs of indifference and then you a small furry thing sniffing at her corpse nudging at her telling her to get up

almond blossom exploding like popcorn crying instead of telling you she loved you crying instead of saying anything at all crying listening to you flirting with men wishing for a moment she were a man then that you were and only last wishing you were queer having nothing you wanted having nothing she wanted so being nothing wanting nothing the pen rolling over the paper of its own blind accord then her autopilot failing her everything failing her innovations that overspoke but strategies were only ways to burn tomorrow’s firewood finding a longer route to the same stop running away from so many things she was out of compass points a plane of immanence with no lines of flight then only a limit then everything liminal in the end but no a tautology ends as limits and then no to ends to endings yes to treading water then running in circles dead ends then nothing but ends thinking in circles the beads of sweat along the arc of her cheekbone a beautiful girl more enviable for her cigarette than her greek profile then noticing that she was pushing a pram and her envy both redoubled and spent the things about you that she found exhausting and the things about you that she loved and the small complement to their intersection

altercations accusations assumptions aggressions annihilations abuses attacks assaults alarms whatever the fuck went on in your head her absolute lack of a picture of that and these chirping rats shitting trees up and cars throttling engines clutch brake accelerate the violence of motion of ambulation division and cutting a slicing of time of possibility sunnies indoors to see nothing a dead end a closure of possibilities a sea wall but chaos would erode and then collapse her defences striations molecules a logical atomism a ladder fit for fools slapstick panic on the wall of the graveyard and you sitting there in a doll’s dress pins in your elbows articulate it seemed but an illusion the way the wind blew through your hair that made you look sincere the passage of gas through your bowels that made you look concerned the circus in your head that made you look ingenious her love for you that wasn’t even in you or about you any wind or motion only her own gas the wind in her own hair the flinching in her own belly that made you look beautiful sad delirious an occupied building an unoccupied building an unbuilt occupation a built indolence constructed at length a studied nonchalance a violent indifference her red spotty laptop bag the taste in her mouth of your sandwich the lies the soft evasions being cold being warm being hot being comfortable uncomfortable unmoved neverending here on the battlefield alive surveying the damge having lost everyone alone stood in the ruins bulletproof and every arsenal spent

an avenue of almond blossoms an empty park the joy in her ears and the yellow sandstone tenements in early evening’s lemon light walking out climbing hills climbing stairs smiling ignoring bills neighbours structure power lies on her knees now not in despair but in prayer in love with her community speaking to no one loving everyone even the neighbours even her harassers stalkers lovers liars persecutors prosecutors all of the tormentors she didn’t care tonight a soft wind like breath like someone passing smelling safe like old sweaters or blankets that smelled of sleep shaken out over the bed wafting through memory then sweet breezes an ocean in the palm of her hand since she had met you the light in her door your relentless pressing mania dragging her depression into the light tired drunk on fresh air and smell of leaves of cut grass not going to work not paying the bills not cleaning the fridge making mooncakes putting new charms in her yellow crocs old friends nausicaä of the valley of the wind forgetting lost in her immediacy to look at the view seeds armies promises to the future torn up and burned a pink popsicle full of fucking butterflies the stick she’d licked till the joke had worn off giving up on fear glowing going on just a little while longer a paper bag with a little red monkey smiling in the middle a plant in a pot a girl in a flat in a town in a country in an old man’s dream sending out tendrils spores lines of flight a rhizome

an unexploded contradiction could do its work yet a sapper for the cracks the buried dialetheia poking with burned and broken fingers always where the veil seemed thinnest needing the toilet waiting for it to pass for the sunlight to wheel its way around to where she sat at the centre of her universe the world that died with her the sadness of the world then a pink reflection of her own red death impending shadowy soft as mountains heavy with unread passages like an overdue library book and you the star of her unwritten denouement her film cut short by the necessity of pissing marking her territory sewers and drains shitting in the graveyard born there the cord already round her neck assigned capitalism at birth the growing noise of day the violence of it of structures of power outwith which one was not permitted to stray a child then running in the opposite direction away from town to the fields and trees and cliff faces to climb river banks and the little school and the smoky forge the softness a culture of love found in even heat and noise then this endless drilling anger was it safe was it safe staying up for days peeling an orange the fillings in her teeth worth more than the last of the wine cellar her catacombs a club in soho her hair down her back and a tall boy against low ceilings the dark then and the wet light of yellow night and falling up into its gold adventure soft memories from the belly of the beat yet too then a tired sadness a soft earth between her fingers the windowless glow of calm inhumation a brick a witch an apprentice alice underground

a pink crumpled thing rolled like hard folds of wet flesh burst ragged deckle edged brittle like diamonds a dark hole up the middle brown like eggs a quail butchered boned a paper bag these dried roses an old lady smell of perfume on dead skin grey like ointment like lead the mossy slates hunched in the bleach blue twilight a tweed guitar the weight of one’s own longevity crushing empty the vaulted capacity for love won at great expense of suffering and there the struts of it boned through with it a forest of old pain twisted like dragons’ tails through the waxy chambers of her leathery heart that beat yet feebly as red leaves in the dusky currents of day’s departing gloriole and the wan heat impression left in her the shape of you of your life and living burned in the sun of your presence and her curling skin all she had left of you like broken teeth for chocolate forgetting the coffee going cold the oven getting hot the sky falling writing to forget but there it was your book battered like an old car which it was which it was

a poor consolation writing for living a paper lover for kisses sabotaging job offers sabotaging everything no future afraid of nothing only of not dying an invincible disdain trying to be someone she didn’t have in her despite having multitudes a forest of the damned burning up in her own forlorn resignation a magpie jostling bunched blooms camouflaged switching off her phone because it dared to ring closing her mail app because mail came barring the door walling herself up like her own vampire killer a disaster of lesbian proportions blue buildings like fridge magnets against brushed aluminium skies and then this a fresh green surprising a letter from someone she loved that she couldn’t seem to answer crying even though there was no one to impress hating herself still the open window like code on an audio cassette plastic sawdust the future was history an itching at the base of her splintered spine a curl of her own hair the one cute thing in her field of view looking around her desperately though nothing had changed the grey windows before the grey sky a panic a succession of panic her truth which ended like a knife

apple sauce making the sads go away tippity tap forcing herself small talk in her local shops pink and yellow roses and a passion fruit in her chia pudding shaking with anxiety crying with a deepest sadness the bottomless pit opening under her but not letting it take her for once for once and when had she ever to take a stand like this against the well of loneliness proud of herself but mostly in awe an unbending gratitude a joy in love a deeper love than even an endless despair a final cure of it and not even kicking herself a lifetime of hollowing digging her walls around her and then you and finding the ground at the bottom soft and then friable then nothing and underneath it you endlessly you a love bigger than hopelessness that swallowed it whole the polka dots on her skirt and waiting in the waiting room popping them like bubble wrap until until a late appointment and then the all clear and no relief no joy a golden ticket on top of the golden sunbeams to which she had already surrendered and only staying there and knowing she’d been right right about pee bottles right about love right about you a sparkling rosé lemon incense cléo de cinq à sept and the soft singing of shiny birds and the foliage alive with spring a shirt like ciboure and her glorious pink sunnies and knowing what was wrong and how to fix it but smiling instead and letting everything be perfect trailing soft fingers along the surface of the water and the crown of her head curled below an atlantic cloudscape for infant queens

arms for holding arms for cutting arms for folding for keeping at a length or pushing away to defend to attack to protect to deflect to throw in the air to shrug to surrender to gravity and let them hang let it all hang arms to ink a book of it unarmed disarmed harmed and self harmed drunk and fucked raped and raped abused and self abused substance abuse disordered eating hating herself hating her body hating being loved subverting it to violence love at the hilt of a flogger the falls of it cleansing her stripping away the hate lashing at it like mascara the blonde balayage of it brushing your gashed shoulders your open and weeping wounds cunts in your scored flesh thousands hundreds covered in cunts fucked in each and all of them at once by everything the trees their sad pollen drifting sulky over oily roads and the violence of the sun healing too well the lash of it the beams like falls washing across your bruised face the sunnies for battered eyes and the cunty lacework of your oversharing vest and your white bible gleaming gold on the rusted table like gilt on a cracked picture frame a rembrandt torn into little squares all the same size you made her sick you made her smile you terrified her she was in love with you a cold drone threshing the freeway between the docks and this place the ice walls of the fortifications a lonely financial zone and this place between all of that and whatever was behind her the past for which the back of her head hadn’t an eye to recall a ticker unwinding across the floor oblivious to your unreading hand that stroked gently up and down on some cis dude’s angry dick

arseholes shouting a red bird violent fridges people on a roof in her skyline helicopter sunlight leaking like battery acid white birds like slow farts the filth on the windows and this screaming fucking fridge that wouldn’t shut the fuck up and a swallow pissing her off with its undeniable beauty a pipe a dry napkin cloudless like rabies invisible wires guiding crashing cars these pink and yellow roses and life and parties she didn’t know how to party so she was dead spiked through with palings flaked in bottle green lead rust her heart a tired thing the day after the euphoria the day after the depression the space after the last beat waiting for the next and stopping waiting only being in a space and the birds scoring the postcard panorama like figure skaters and her magpie’s new friend jolly together in their blossom branches and the twisting red buds refusing yet spring’s importuning a terracotta stairwell like orange marmalade between golden towers and her suspicion that anything viewed from a distance was only so much plastic heaped in a pile the clock grinding towards noon and her headache building around the right ear from back to front like a carapace like a like a felt mushroom a little hat rakish coquettish or like a punch from behind a sideswipe bypassing the crumple zone of her nose and eyes her brow ridge her cheekbones the little metal plates where they’d pieced her back together a cyborg a girl on a bycicle in glasses with silver fillings in her teeth and airpods in her fucking ears a number on a scale segmented rigid like teeth chewing on soft tissues time and temperature sliced like cold meat for human consumption an airless room a missed alarm a fail

artificial structures but wasn’t all structure artifice nature a body without organs not power but immanence power as imbalance tension then alienation the mouthfeel of it the leaning tower and its buttresses the litter from above or below a coffin then but stretching stretching the freedom of corpses from all feeling the last thing she had to cling to a child’s hand against the tsunami of it the back of your head of your neck the nape of it the crease where your necklace stuck people trying to be kind people kind enough to leave her alone looking through your glasses from your side a bit of cheese on the table like little maggots and the stray tuft that stuck out from behind your right ear a failing to resonate her supple segmentarity eccentric still a yellow sun that revolved about you without ever taking the same path twice

a sky like burst wadding soaked in kerosene the glinting orange walls eastern facing then morning a shiny tangerine in the sock of her day and a stationary crane also orange what were the odds a gull inching upwards with each beat of the still air like climbing stairs the orange leaves the lilac yellow blossom and a vague suggestion of mountains in the blue gap no one had thought yet to build over and sudden pointy slate birds too fast to say which then stillness or a dim fluorescence as of a corpse dead teeming her face was unrecognisable to the touch as though there were someone stood between her and herself masha gessen hayao miyazaki eleanor sykes and here goldin and her own notebooks the magazines clare still sent queer spaces the bookshelf as a rigid segmentarity discuss then song like a squeaky wheel then early squealing cawing like irony like violent laughter ridicule derision a turning engine then stillness again the flapping of gills in a faltering day’s dampening light and the low ebb of her own helplessness realising only in the burn out how much effort she’d put into faking it how much of her dying light she’d burned for a smokescreen and for how long

asleep with it on hold waiting for her numbers to come up waiting for you for this job one way or the other thinking she needed to settle and make a life a career a family like you with your practice but she didn’t want any of it not him not even you in love with her dilettantish nature and the fact she didn’t have a job a family a friend group the way she flitted hither and thither and never quite set a foot down anywhere her self built privilege to walk an inch off the ground like they did only without buying into an evil power structure in fact by way of not buying into anything at all having chosen this with the uncertainty of unknowing whether she ought to tell living in a paraconsistent space between striations an immanence that never became where she was at home what she had chosen if she liked it or not what she was where you were

as though through time feeling young and old as ill equipped as a child still adolescent then the emotional maturity of a teenage girl but out of place out of step out of spoons a metaphor stretched to breaking point until it snapped back into a tight little ball of literalness knowing if she were to snap back to her own world she’d have felt quite the same and then the beautiful girl’s ugly boyfriend your literal pigtails and pulling them only metaphorically but detecting no give in them unequal still to her approbation at ease in mockery and affront in a teasing affection a fistful of love but she could talk bound and flogged the scars on her thighs the beautiful girl she’d been and the one she hadn’t and then the one who didn’t love you in no possible world

a window closed against hope against the possible against birdsong and wolves by the hair on her chinny chin chin the reason her name wasn’t on the door an overarching fear of everything and nothing of you of her dreams and you stood there in your striped tights calling up at the window and your red bicycle in the middle of the road stopping traffic with your thighs and your scarf about her throat like a castle and her crying there at the window unable to let you in to let down her fucking hair to tell you from down here at the bottom that she loved you and her silence echoing up the walls to the ground under you as you called up at her window a comic cycle of stupidity and waste like pouring water down the drain and wondering why her hair was wet then roaring from the highway where another you had walked into traffic when long enough she’d lost count then loves fungible but no you were not them any of them you were you a whole new mess and the birds chirping get it to fuck cawing hard laughter and her soup going cold on the table envelopes stickers a tissue her sunnies your book her flask a glass of her suicide lafite a gold washi tape a notebook the navy ribbon trailing its dusty binding words unspoken unwritten and the words that should have been but not things said that could yes could have been done over not retracted but repaired with still more words but then running out of letters like fridge poetry that faltered abruptly like peas and getting up to eat her cold soup and crying

bathroom doors that wouldn’t close eating too much and not stopping household appliances that never shut up like a phone with the receiver left off feeling on hold always the violences normalised for kids who’d never known better the plastic everywhere in everything and these still trees full of plastic and an almost audible wheezing of green lungs expecting nothing gaslit by everything so that connections were erased the push of the button no longer mechanically tied to the ring of the bell everything putative the future the sun coming up the end of the world the slate coloured walls the clay coloured walls the sky sick like wallpaper paste up to her neck in it and knowing you hated her like this and laughing because when she felt like this all she wanted was you your helpless laughter your easy joy knowing even as she did that barely a scratch below the surface was a pain vast as worlds and these birds in pairs far away enough to be only birds and quite possibly not in pairs their evensong buried in engines and pipes drains and radiators and beating like drums war drums an aching rumble but this one from her own guts the colours of these small boxes amber geranium myrrh having to remind the idiot next door continually that he was an idiot just to keep some lid on the idiocy when she had not birthed him and crying then because she had not birthed anyone a sudden flutter of coveys the trees shaking as if in farewell maybe a fox and the parabola of an engine coming to rest a long slow yelp where were you

beautiful you spinning gold from straw a lovely day from a rainy disorganised one cheesecake and rhubarb and men in suits the concrete struts arching spans of material joy and then this surprise these small things but light itself an almost nothing only photons massless elementary not unequivocally particulate even and yet real the real without which nothing at all the light of a cosmos in these little shapes cut like cake from the disc of the day and all of this darkness around everywhere not empty but teeming with eyes and mouths screwed up in anger and hate a multitude of microaggressions war as a collective noun for battles and battle for murders then war was only an order of magnitude of crows and each tiny light a sparkling matchstick kindling stars seasons quiet supernovae that burst across the vast horror of space an angel in hell a rose that grew up through the fucking concrete all of the everything in the hollow of her acheron and agonising over your intentions only a fool’s darkness when all she wanted was this here no outcome no label no consequence only doing as she did and feeling as she felt not caring what happened next only this being filled up by you no hallmark but this no relationship but this in its perfect loveliness needing nothing more a nosebleed a stabbing above the temple these cold machines wheezing eleven semitones apart a tightness in her sinuses grey like the newsprint sky that sneezed over the folding horizon as thorned trees cradled soft birds around the fire of the children’s playground empty ashen a spent sun raked from the grate of life’s red burning

blush peonies flushing with gorgeousness and failing yet an overabundance and failing yet a bouquet vase chipped sharp as a paring knife a missed leaf lost in her salad until chewed a spitting horror and the scent still peony yet old as she was old and tired as she was tired a smell of gas the bay leaves burnt at the bottom of her sabudana things that mattered to her coffee and pearls a perfect dress a perfect cup pieces collected and neglected people too dancing still in your orbit waiting only to crash tired of it of placing her bets and getting it wrong tired of the whole game tired of justified margins and tired of falling in love tired of the routine the circuit the bubble missing france which was no longer a possibility wanting to go to sleep and never wake up so small her cosmos and then the banging again just as she resolved to enjoy the silence not giving a fuck about you exhausted faking it pretending she wasn’t being assaulted at all times pretending to be ok and smile when she literally wished she were dead literally just wanted her head to fucking explode and it all be over because the solitary thing she had left in her to want was for it to just stop not being able to take it and not being able to stop it this was literally hell a squawking gull a groaning heron the motorway after rush hour the day crumbling like mistakes over evening’s silk light that settled like a puddle in the hollowed belly where morning’s hope had been

bound and flogged laced like cheap cocaine like molly full of ket or a loaded spliff like her compliments with hatred or these obsequious giftings babushka sladkaya with her fingers crossed behind her back loving you with every tooth in her snarling cunt killing you with kindness and this tree crawling like an evolutionary slime from the swamp of day’s rain its blackened boughs cracking in horror at the slow approach of the future and the gunmetal rooftops sliced like wagyu through the red brick bleeding of small houses staining the filthy embankment the cars scraping the freeway like greedy forks like the rats that scratched up and down this mouldering pipe chase with the noise from her cunt neighbours and filthy birds smearing the wet air with shit stains and greased feather scrawls she was hurt you were hurtful the casual effortlessness of it hurting like throwaway causeries like taking a shit like breathing a slapdash hurt heedless nonchalant unmindful indifferent the wind whipping harder now a spitting in it the hatefulness the spite in all things palpable as your sneer as she spilled her sorry wellwishes like so much soft spaghetti not having it in her to be cunty or to be a cunt only sad then quiet now and a sickly crash of sunshine now abrupt hopeless grudging forcing its way along the block like an angry garbage truck collapsed like guano over the formless shapes of walls and windows as the clock wound on to the endless suspension of its inevitable conclusion

brat green trees in the ektachrome evening light the blue paper sky greyed by filthy windows shadows creeping upward like a flood line a barrel filled with silt the scaffold the crane the last of summer autumn seeping like rot ticked off one floor at a time then the trees just tree green the walls stone red an unveiling the removal of day’s dust sheet and then shadows of invisible birds scoring lines like children’s names in wet concrete a door slammed the hum of motors fans drones heaters cars machines a whole generation who couldn’t read the face of a clock of another human masks and lockdown and not going to club nights parties a feather drifting the smell of dinner still an unwashed pan a pile of dirty plates a cawing and the sun low somewhere now not dark but dull no longer illuminated grey buildings brown buildings and still these slices a torn up cheque the day’s promises thrown in the bin all the things she hadn’t done people she hadn’t seen a small brown bird flickering in the gutter green nails clacking at a backlit keyboard walking the same earth but in shoes that had known another lines of flight deckle edged against puddling clouds slowly filling the cracked yellow bucket of the city’s sick horizon as the weight of it accumulated behind her like tigers and a gleam bouncing up from some shiny object out of her field of vision then the trees shadow now cut out shapes in second hand daylight her sixty second nail varnish a trembling glass of water an ache in the curve of her back falling like the night for your idiot genius the ink on your soft arms the way you undercut her bitter cynicism not with a gentle naïtveté but a stubborn ignorance that somehow won her over and a gull then lifting vertically as on a string to plunge again towards some unknown a mirror window a pile of tossed umbrae stacked like discarded clothes she felt buried drunk paralysed inept a leather cushion spooning condensation from the window’s weeping twilight a row of mullions like break lines on a bar of dark choclolate the world melting into the brown noise of decay to gather in night the quiet void and set like jelly until tomorrow’s wobbling dawn

brit like britpop pop like hyperpop a rust cardigan a blood orange raincoat a cat eye a milky glass it had been a while the slit in her skirt your cunty af trench your beautiful white dog and your smile reflexive at something in your headphones infectious a rubbery leaf tapping at the back of her head the grey light suffusing everything with a dullness and the sun squeezing out and only illuminating the dullness then swallowed back down wan resigned candy wrapper grey a bubbly shirt leather on leather skin on skin a kånken and the wind now dampening threatening rain a little girl passing on her first blue macaron an empty cup an empty glass a heart full of splinters a purple cigarette lighter typography the clack of a cane on the broken sidewalk tentative hopeless then an alarm beeping from somewhere behind her a banging torn from headspace like teeth from soft gums stringy huge like icebergs a conspiracy of annoyances an escalating panic a tipping point like the bruised horizon waiting behind tall buildings trees that flailed in ghost currents murmurations of dead birds and wanting it all to fuck off to be a dead bird only and holding up trees a pink wall a waggle of fish a smile reflexive hopeless then tears the love only the skin that wasn’t there under a pink wall of scar tissue a bullishness a sky a poison

buildings and cars squealing like the olive stripes of this tweed guitar case an alarm whistling the unbroken urgency of life in the pyrocene a siren birds punctuating the drones and hums with a last organic parade a hikoi of despair in the tooth of an unquiet ground recalcitrant indocile life protesting death but you had chosen death and life then powerless fluttering a butterfly stuck behind glass under stratospheric light boiling in its skin like potatoes that split and leaked their starchy black bile into the hateful substrate of filth you called progress and you eating dead birds from plastic film laughing hate like tapioca pearls that swelled and filled everything with congealed bubbles of indifference laughing as your hair caught fire laughing as your earrings a golden tunnel through your soft head split molten sharding bolts through your laughing chin as she stared mouth agape as to swallow your vile temper tongue lapping as at the caustic milk of your spinning lost glamour alive with it in love with you in shock the longing and the horror to run backwards from today into yesterday to be only in love and not this fucked thing this twisted rope of sorrow and hate and regret for things that hadn’t even been real grief for lives not unlived but unlivable doors not unopened but unreal a sense of loss for things she’d never had like grieving the children she’d been born without the womb to bear

burning selves by the billion an autogenocide a genosuicide a mass suicide an illusion drinking the kool aid worm time entering her brat era and these soft replies unexpected kindness from beyond the grave and any call of duty crying because someone cared the steel of her prefab shield wall collapsing under an opening of love like light on quantum dots nanocrystals a photographic film a photolysis a jiāngshī wondering not why she loved you but why she ever had in love indifferent falling in love and crawling out again splashing lime on the blue scales of her seared herring like these yellow trees tossing warm bracts of evening sun at the glass plate of june’s sky and this marzemino bright the gates of hell opening before her blinding through dark plum curtains a velvet screen before night’s purple falling bruising geraniums violets the colour of your fucking eyes or of the shadows under hers and the trees bottle green now and windows facing the other way looking back into the day at earlier skies a sun unset and the trees brat green still fighting still and not defeated this tomato building squashed against the glass light filling the space of the low street like a pink sandwich drinking too much not running into you enough not dying enough and these few late birds scuttling dusk’s greasy bowl like black ants the crumbs of her day spent now and spilling her change as she fell from the taxi losing a heel in the gutter losing her glitter losing herself by the billion buying red vinyl picture disks drunk at two in the morning she was in love with her own ridiculousness and laughing falling into bed in her mascara at the image of herself crawling out again in the wet light of tomorrow

catching cold from the wrong girl your square record staring at her from here or there a pile of spent candles the whole flat was a trash can a lanyard old cheerful tired her broomstick the worse for lack of wear rows of square black things like deaths lined up for choosing like crabs like sushi like dedos dos pés catching fire catching an eye catching a dick on your way back everything catching like memes but the catching in the mimesis only and not in the thing itself and night falling like a tide exposing the wreck of a day lost to idle squalor a cup left too far away going cold like everything a big bang its wet horizon the lip ring of the end of time which was always

clammy like rat musk a film on her lips the gulls nesting in the gutters eggs burst and rotting two pigeons fighting over a dead squirrel necessity did not imply possibility a season in hell and no turning a fucked frozen hell ending up not going through not fixing but enduring a green light like lemons cloudy like a fish tank this filthy glass the shore of her puddled island and having chosen this by whatever circuitous route a submerged resignation the hopeless spit of a scented candle like a puppy licking at an oil slick a column of wet smoke curling back on its own trembling insubstantiality nettling her waspish sinuses the crocodile skin of her hands mummified alive her fingers quivering like striplights and this vertiginous tunnelling of material structure as she bobbed birdlike darting unquiet eyes in her tilting head through the bubbling warp of a progressive lens queer oblique eccentric rooted in the incorporeity of it and the daylight frosting like condensation the trees gesturing a timid complaint the buildings browning like dry cake or dead leaves like her linens like her teeth and a structure emerging along the horizon steel geometric the grid showing through poorly rendered cloud thinking aloud showing her working showing her process showing her knickers doing theology with her knickers off smelling like lemons smelling like cunt and the telescope then of age and her life of memory snapping shut displeased having nothing to say but once upon a time

clanging doors dogs barking footsteps breathing a squeaky floorboard an empty water bottle a lip rim a paper tissue a red pencil blunt its eraser marked at the circumference with words undone her tuck nipping a little the black paint overlapping the wall socket conversations she oughtn’t to have been hearing a hush then a phone cable taped green and gold at one end gurgling pipes and an almost warmth spreading in slices through the blinds like cold meat the chill of the air hanging like ectoplasm light falling like slabs and wishing all at once to be there in your pink room in the south window curled in the noise of your yellow cushions distracting you hearing you feeling you close the unique resonance of the space familiar comforting like a mermaid birth wearing it as an aura living en caul taking it with her the glow the warmth comfy safe like jean d’arc in her armour a glamour a vestige a threat adopting a sona like an exiled queen a jacobin then like a pony a peon a slave the moss grey carpet a plastic veneer printed like planed wood metal painted grey a clerestory glass tartan of reflected beams and stiplights other people’s noise in your silence like broken glass in her ice cream and longing to spoon you then to be poured over you like syrup and melt together in a sticky puddle and scrunching up in knots of incipient tears she hid behind her screen and mouthed anxious silent profanities there in languages she no longer spoke

climbing hills and stairs in every direction then wondering why she wasn’t on top of the world headphones on the train to shut out the snoring and again at the office for the same reason and you posting kafka and beach towels a patch of dry skin scratched raw never an inch away from tears held back with sheets of blank fucking paper a silk scarf up her sleeve like a magician because she would certainly forget it otherwise for the same reason the brightest pinkest coat a sadness settling on her like a hoar frost her little books stitched as neatly as she had left in her because they were for you and her leopard print sweater tight across her little breasts feeling little so falling through the cracks a gulliver tinier than a teardrop blinded by your green eyes huge like moons their silver corona inescapable the event horizon of her love swallowed like pills like lies resting in you only you the grey afternoon light sinking through the blinds like glue the last of this office a pink paperclip a beret numbers on a yellow sticky note unstuck from any meaning they might once have had glancing around at the last of this pedestrian view a last check from the window for rabbits packing her limp things like dry bones a telephone ringing somewhere distant enough to ignore she didn’t mind not really only the change coming too late or too soon and leaves to fall russet like apples the light a concrete and metal thing hard like water the slate bed of her drowning and an angular thing like these abrupt birds this leaf turned the other way catching what feeble kiss the sun had left to blow grey noise brown noise summer swept below the rug of it like hair

cold tired stiff bored burroughs in mexico born old born dead hair stains and smell of balls reading nin over a takeaway carton picking up her phone for no reason putting it down again picking up her notebook putting it down clicking from the other room not wanting to disturb you disliking your presence now as much as your absence and these blue box files piled like breeze blocks on the tin shelves her hand lotion forgetting to pee her blue bag leaning like drunk sailors like overused images like her flagging creativity or the tired awe in which yet she held yours resigned so to the future near or distant after love that mostly she wanted it over with and she wished then that you might commit some abominable transgresison the better to grieve you pink and yellow a pile of them here by the christine keeler chairs a slouched tote of an inestimable inner composition a tape dispenser an advert for chocolate a dead whale a war these trays stacked one in the other like masks a confounded disguise for the hopelessness of any task passed through them a framed banknote by the begonia stacks of unused business cards sacks of confidential waste and the papercuts from their filling nipping now as she remembered them poking the keys of this greasy machine disinvested coughing the air of the place out from tired lungs to settle like gas over the fields of ypres a flurry of activity the noise of the dryer in the bathroom steps in the corridor packing her blue bag her pink coat her kufiya going home

coming home and the hill and her ankle and then a boy walking like a carboard box and recognising in it the same pattern of violence beating on her ceiling day and night and her heart sinking still further into the bottomless pit she carried in her like a fucking kangaroo and smiling then remembering your face and your utter obliviousness that she might feel about you the way she had as she still did and a stabbing in her then at the loss of it of her life of the air in her lungs and the fortitude of lithe limbs now spent and her body soft like an empty purse now tired like a cliché forcing it up the stairs stacking one vertebra on another like plates twisting like a burst spring with no more coiled home to find sitting standing never at peace waiting only for the last peace left her these sad trees lemon lime in the claggy air like lizard hands on filmed glass a yelping from the road and the grumbling of the joists above like a monkey throwing bananas at her feeling like a cartoon hollow and funny an old joke that hadn’t aged well wishing she could somehow be young again in love for the first time only with all of the violence behind her then telling herself that it was that no matter what happened now the worst was behind her because life was behind her like the people in that photograph with nicholson smiling in front overlook hotel july fourth ball nineteen twenty one her brow the weight of these keening birds pushing her down like a corkscrew round and round she wanted to vaporise to burst in a shower of sparks to be mist folded around you seeping into your clothes filming your lips your brow to pass into you the air in your lungs to be gone

coming into work to find the bin in her chair and thinking it might have been best to have left it there and gone home crawling around the woods at lunch a long alarm roundly ignored the dungeon dogs pissing the carpet the quality of her work an ever sinking wreck and all of the doubloons eaten now by sharks a shaft of wan autumn light falling across the room like ice sculptures toppled onto marble like her brittle memory friable and given to catastrophic failure and inching around the doorway like children sneaking out to play but she was projecting it was almost five her feet were elsewhere the hissing traffic the hum of machines realising the lights had been on all day in the sunlight pens one pencil her red bag fourteen envelopes of nine name tags each an itinerary her coat on the back of the door cutting herself so frequently with paper she rarely felt the need in private conversations begun and left to trail off the book she’d ordered on impulse a close of business phone call a slammed door a shuttered window cables detached and discarded drawn blinds fluttering in the wake of her elongated departure a train a sidewalk home

counting the days then nothing counting backwards from nothing to nothing the shapes falling to noise like turning round in a forest and seeing nothing but trees like a map that was ony paper thinking one thing in the daylight and an entirely different one in the clear of night filling with tears like a sponge like a pile of blotting paper disintegrating like palings where no border ran anymore lopsided unravelled like a cable with the coil gone out of it full of love with no substance so empty inflated like a burst condom like a stretched out glove knickers with the elastic burst feeling her feelings and tired both ways a slow rock a record sleeve left sideways with the opening at the top an anxious puppet things she loved that made her cry loving you crying smiling a compliment she pretended to appreciate feeling bad for feeling so bad finding it all wanting everything but you wanting you a cellphone at the bottom of an elevator shaft looking for your signal then the dynamic shifting and your wet whispers on her ear hot blinking wanting to skin herself alive leaking like a cunted sailor it was raining somewhere her scarf the ache above her right eye the image of your younger self drawn in the twists of your face like jesus in her tea leaves a flashing yellow light a humming a hissing the foot of a tiny tea bowl a chair she’d seen in every light at every angle heaps of things all heaped by her own hands an entanglement cutting the cord of her own bundle of tropes

crying sneezing worrying about money listening to selfies watching the door a habit you were not coming the table knocking against the wall with every soft clack braiding her hair absently then letting it loose watching the movements of the humans who happened to be within her field of vision a baby kicking an adult feeding from the mouth someone who reminded her of someone she couldn’t quite recall trees murmuring dissent then someone she knew and smiling but as thinly as these snagged tights as the torn safety net hanging by a thread and eyeing it now not to predict whether it might take her meagre weight but slow her fall appreciably hard and inevitable as spent shells and a passing medusa hair clawing like crabs like floggers like desperate fingers through a barbed wire fence their rings and manicures long stolen a fluffy windcheater the wet light set like slate against slate and the trees then flinching as the silver day asserted its voluminous presence filling neglected corners curling into a vacant lot an exhaust a broken drain then leaves bobbing like lucent pendulum makeweights their fragile equipoise flickering like quanta quivering now sold an angry summer in biarritz the tremulous chaleur finding in her damp english experience no translatable counterpart a radical inscrutability a mandy a hot freeway undecided the tempered cars gliding like hovercraft on dry chemtrails your soft neck your khaki shirt coming away at the collar the gilt highlights in your walnut hair taut like frogs a plate of cookies picking at fingernails glancing like birds the vibrato of her hollow heart imbricated with reachable universes like splinters like rinds the coils of skin she wrote on the bonded paper of her passing tentative friable contrite

dark olives umbers a pomegranate red dried flowers in a wee ceramic jug a bag of bags the most beautiful girl she’d ever met in all of her long and storied life and the traffic lights changing and going the other way and the hug then ringing in her ears all the way to the station saying it aloud going to night clubs in her house dress and a nice yellow cardigan her purple black lipstick licked by the wine glass into some impromptu halloween costume robert smith’s joker forgetting her keys forgetting her phone smelling of broccoli not doing anything with the spare ticket because that would have been to accept that it was over that she was alone which she was she was crying now because the song made her feel clingy needy which she was then trailing her trench through the beer and piss a tiled passageway a subway station the train the people on the train and her lips like a fucking clown which she was and you adjective shorn by your long absence somewhere with someone in some state or other of undress or dress or dead for all she knew for all she knew

decisions predictions abdications she felt like a bag lady warm grubby lonely unlovable like the bones of a blood sacrifice the howl of the heating and the low drone under of your red guitar and smiling sadly remembering the joke she had told you that day and your smile and this moment projected back from here now into it to her creeping horror this heartbreak there always in it her wee perfect moment boxed like a beetle in the matchbook of her crumpled heart and struck now wet spent like these tired dresses discarded around her the unmade bed and a cello now and smelling herself and these books in piles like bricks and all the lives she’d meant to live and you steady on her nerves like gin a car throbbing in the street below through the greasy blind a blue bag full of white tissue paper a heap of burnt candles a cotton pad a row of little shiny bottles sparkly purple iridescent blue and a brat green at the back and a jar of nail serum an empty centrifuge tube the stub of a pencil and the twitching now in arms that felt only vaguely related to her these same fingers that had caressed your freckles kissing them in a fever as though scared to miss their vanishing and kissing her fingers now here at the mirror her collapsed body a cruel laughing finger pointing squarely at her from the memory of your ringed lips the same fingers the same body then the same beetle only dead now fallen like these clawed tulips blood red in their green water a flogger a bottle of perfume floral fruity like a panama gesha a purple organza bag of buttons the bathroom fan a hair tie a stapler a gun

diamonds in her ears on her mind in her dreams a cable curved like a slalom a mouse’s tail a nonsense verse her dresses heaped like bodies for burning this royal blue ink bottle and its little blotter these bottles of oestrogel a jar of incense a postcard depicting stained glass depicting the blessed virgin or saint patrick or something an epilator eggshell blue white like the oestrogel like her tube of curling cream a green band around her right wrist like paper chains all of the people who’d been there too all linked somehow still by the performance of you of your life but that had been hers and not theirs or some only she now supposed quite possibly and wondering how long they’d kept it on unable to bring themselves like her to cut or tear it sleeping in it like her wearing it in the shower linked still somehow for her distaste a grudging sad assent to their taste in women and a harsh laughter now that the blood of her enemies should run so well in her veins and a pink bag and her little suit on its hanger like a huddled conspirator whispering behind the mirror or just an unfortunate smoker leaning into a doorway out of the lee of the wind and rain the better to spark joy a hat box her silk bonnet a fan that had seen perhaps its last summer the spare hairdryer a yellowing sketchbook a mapplethorpe her old yoga mat coiled like a fiver for lines and wondering if the plastic money were as shit for that as for money

done finished complete no more a burden only the echo of one her cold longing too a soft thing in the downy opulence of your striped breast only the aching in her shoulders her back the backs of her legs like a convict newly released but walled in by muscle memory a gold sprinkle in the bottle green of october trees like the dust in her rosin like these flecks of night ticking in dusk’s failed afternoon disaffected abeyant among vestigial chores half thoughts the burst follicles of time’s tangled hairbrush and the crumple of this pink skin the rumble of nearby machines the gold studs on her tweed guitar case a dirty blue blanket her fingernails subcomandante marcos looming there on the wall a green light in the clay day a sack on a roof flapping in the wind threatening limp anything could spill its own innards monads left too long in the hot sun fish blisters parliaments armoured tanks engorged bellies washing machines an easy peace like stacked cardboard the sheets of it leaning like drunk sailors then limping home under rocket fire eating drinking dancing and arithmetic an air raid siren a black dog sudden birds past catching counting clacks between flash and tremor swallowing aching remembering the biscuit flesh of your warm thighs hollowing mourning feeding the trees

dulled but not erased alive yet for the ennui and the unquiet tears conscious of the miracle of being conscious at all of anything at all these rusted beer cans among the irises the way the winter sun caught the grime on her unwashed windows the traffic on the freeway her greasy screen her peeling headphones a book she hadn’t read the stick drift and her spent love of it anyway but then her whole house was an ashtray for spent ashtrays a junkyard for hearts a sad museum of things once experienced of moments that weren’t a jar of coins this bag of cats with its yellow handle a block print dried roses a cunty prosecco bottle emptied of its cunty prosecco joan eardly vanessa bell natsumi hayashi the wee lighthouse from st jean de luz a box of corks and sirens then through the open window leaving their soft pencil marks on the grey walls this golden gleam too bright to see drawn by the setting sun those lanyards now gathering dust id cards with which she no longer identified a syrupy honey light now in blocks walls and cushions pasted with it like flyers for protest marches that she vaguely acknowledged and went on ignoring protesting everything being yet alive and conscious of anything at all and the dark falling now green blue an angry engine in the road below threatening like lions behind bars

eating feeling sick eating looking out of the window eating in her nightie in mismatched underwear in balenciaga eating drunk eating chewy rice dumplings a miso cookie bread and walnuts eating leaves eating butter a pot of yoghurt an eating for every crying jag eating in tears eating alone hating eating hating being alive being alone feeling sick fucking listening to pornography wishing she could stop crying wishing she could die in your soft arms eating you soft and chewy drunk with crying and dying and not stopping crying and the cold in her soft ankle like cracks in concrete she wanted her fireworks her reward an empty silence freckled with biological occasions counting the pissings sleeps waxings pluckings of brows between kisses between loves what passed for loves your soft distance picturing you there in your flat stoically miserable while she wailed tearing strips from her skin from the walls a lip ever trembling a brow ever knotted the gutter rattling in her throat in her belly the rings in your lips her vans a blue light forcing her eyelids apart like wire the filmy horror of it like christmas her life the supermarket shelves beshat with this desperate clutter her gutted heart flapping now open and closed the wet cells of it blue in the winter twilight your shirt the buttons the collar the cuffs crying pearloid buttons of grief for the raggedy threads of your moth harried affection a dolour the smell of olives and shit paint thinner orange wine the last of her hong kong liberica

either or a stab in the dark swooping round the flat in her leggings and pink hoodie a blanket with little coloured spiders like smarties kawaii vampire an aging child invert revert pervert bau dachöng five petals roses opening their innocent faces always on a hateful world small heaps of spent candles bags of tissue paper the bottle of pommery she couldn’t give away her heart her heart your vinyl the rainbow rug she’d stolen from your bedroom floor the throbbing in her fucked ankle the cold eating into everything like fascism and a boiler that groaned under winter’s drifting crust heaped like burst condoms in a wet corner polishing the cement floor to high gloss and her heart’s exposed beams strung with plastic ferns like a crazy singer in a band that’d lost the words and the cavern of it echoing with her own bitter laughter from down there far beneath the floor of it some submarine lower basement and the bathtub falling in the weight of your love through the rotten floorboards from attic rooms in liberty print hammering through layers of constructed abtraction and bursting in splinters of iron and glass on the yet soft tissue of the vulnerable small child in her an adult was only a child plus scar tissue the oil on her finger as she brought it to her cracked lip a long forgotten reminder a glass a hair bobble a blister pack a roll of micropore tape a cork a centrifuge tube a bag of earrings her purse her diary a notebook from work the table the leg of the table the floor

endings enclosings infatuations undressings endorsements reinforcements lilac splinters of hard wax petals dried to confetti the smell of them intense like the tampon bin in the gender neutral toilet next to the curator’s office with the one clean kitchen bonnard chagall nicholson a wooden lighthouse from some seaside cigarette strewn market square live crabs behind glass and the broken glass roof woven with green iron like darned tights fleeting a beer on wobbly tables a plastic ashtray crusted with little craters and chewing tic tacs all the fucking time because her smoking was beyond kissable and the rest wine or an aperitif first then a wee pernod before bed not that anyone who had wanted to kiss her then had much cared and she wondered now how sorrowful the mouths into which she had thrust herself how sordid and how shadowy then must they a horror have been to anyone but her addled foreign besotted a little boudin an english girl and folding up her belgian accent sticky like chocolate replying mais non pas du tout with a most english pout a sullen waffle of a thing then indignation that after all they had been as right as wrong and there being an absence of any reason not to allowing them to put their cigarettes out on her flesh and to cut her with their sommelier knives and the still young flesh of her thighs then trembling with delicious abandon anticipating nothing of this life of trauma the bones of which now climbed she straddled seeing from above the learned helplessness and trauma bonded abjection only lines of flight and an unnamed plane of immanence open in all directions at once

etched scored sliced branded welts of love and devotion scouring her clean an ambition a goal the red soupy light of winter’s bleak harvest pressing at the windows like hungry peasants and the flats piled cubed like boxes de stijl or mondrian under the wet blanket of sky’s taut amnion against a close horizon a mirror wall a creeping flood reflecting the spiked ceiling as it lowered soft penitent the pricking of her thumbs the waiting and the flogging and then the dim light cold like a fridge empty alive with germs invisible monstrosities a night for burning but wet like greenwood the sick joke of her putrid longings that you should hate her a robot vast uncontrollable rising now slowly from a landfill skyline falling cars and trucks crunching flat onto concrete sending cracks spiking in broken lines to weave distant messages only an evil sky god would see through the shallow perspective of immortal time and knifing slowly into her belly she caught hold of the thread of it and told herself its awful truth and lost you the laundry reflected through the open blind these bottles of nail varnish books cashmere headphones a blanket a plushie vinyl the dried flowers dead in this wee bottle lime grey rimed a pile of long boxes a candle holder a cigarette lighter yellow amber rust orange pink then bubblegum candy stuck to the sole of this planar interior the postcard of her elevated design sensibility bleeding too hard now to laugh the bile of her own bitter humours burning in her throat hurling a chair now through the glass or wishing to and not which was not the same at all a ringing twice a whistle humming in two or more frequency ranges a silence wet like butter and hard

evening windows in bruise purple and shit brown distant lights like christmas trees bleeding through the snow and the wet sky cold like her soiled knickers on this tiled grey floor metal on metal tooth on tooth and you gnawing at her like the cutie pie chest burster you were and her thighs cut and scraped like peeled potatoes like wire wool like a plucked fucking goose and pissing blood and shitting blood and bleeding and her tights coiled like empty fishing nets puddling the tilting deck of her rising nausea and trying not to puke because that would have meant getting up and that would have meant wiping the strings from her fucked landing gear and tipping then onto the floor and shitting and barfing about her like a chalk outline piss and blood and come and fuck alone knew what horrors she might have swallowed in the course of this legendary of nights and waiting then for you to find her there and spoon her into bed like ice cream into a little jade hexagonal bowl with her favourite little spoon a moomin on the handle reaching now for the door and mouthing your name through spit bubbles of abjection and decay wanting only for you to know her baseness and forlornity which you did you did you did

fear clutching fear and regret fear of her own defiance in the face of fear a horror at the things of which she knew herself to be capable the bristling at anything objectionable to her so that no matter how powerful or dangerous she would resist and resisting her own good where it meant compromise of this had her life been made and too late now to learn or to capitulate knowing then an apprehension under all things at all times a gun to her head and a fuck you a spattering of rain at the window a shimmer on the horizon these bony trees an end terrace silted with the hurt light of her unhewn day and sun then through the vanishing of it detached ironic a resigned light that fell like snow then the bones wet with the meat of it only tinkling down the ravine of the street in its renaissance perspective like kaleidoscopes splintering through the low parergon of her plastic windows into the damage of her grey eyes flooded with it saturated like waterlogged clay waiting for the permafrost pink blue white your song for teo’s animals broken laptops parts for broken laptops a time in the past when she had been different an empty bottle she called future and an unctuous glow then thrown across the buildings like vomit and turning away in to the room and turning away from its clutter and decay a memorial museum for lost loves a gerhard richter postcard washi taped over the hole in the door a gap in the plaster under the light switch the copper pipes of the radiator an absence an adjustment small crumbs on the parquet floor the coffee machine in the basement dread

feeling like something was coming not knowing what good or bad only something an apprehension an anticipation fear or excitement feeling like if she tensed herself up hard like a golf ball nothing would happen spending her life tense hard hoping nothing would happen her eyes screwed tight fingers in her ears a car horn in the road insistent indifferent she was a knot a tangle one bottle leaning slightly to one side candles or small plants on a window ledge a worn light like clothes all washed in together the colours all run to neutral like the ground of her dead sketch yesterday’s palette scraped onto the raw canvas of the day still in her nightie the red silk bonnet oily with night cream the weak noon vaguely threatening like these feeble clouds or hissy toddlers this bladeless helicopter fully armed and grounded sous le soleil exactement miles away through a helpless sky birds drifting like poohsticks piss green trees a smear of human intervention mud baked piled up with burnt sand scattered like chicken feed across the soil of the river’s right bank split slate skimmed on top crushed stones crushed bones rocks melted and spun covered in tree sap an easy flurry then like party poppers worm time babey date night yours not hers or not yours plural more pertinently and admitting then the source of her raw nerves stripped of their tree sap and jangling like magpie trinkets a charmed life bell book and candle

felted dust bunnies assembled into sheets a millinery of neglect at least the chairs were quiet when she dragged them across the oak floor to climb shakily to cobwebbed pelmets cracked lighting fixtures screeching smoke detectors the overengineered cleverness of which had shifted their disablement out of reach for a gin soaked punch card hacker pushing sixty her stocking soles sinking a little more with the passing of years into the weft of the rushwork that tore now at the silk snagged as it was on her unclipped toenails tan grey like the tongue of her ashtray its sea bream glass catching machine elves still in its cerulean splendour and wobbling now unsure as ever how to get back down again hovering then falling with as much control as her tweeds and tired sinews and paper skin and brittle bones had between them and waking again some time from this and it being darker and quiet and seeing quite how far beyond repair now the place was and herself and clutching for the corner of a blanket while her lip twitched with the memory of yours always now trembling in anticipation of the reunification of her own annihilation then the rumbling of passing trucks and wondering if it were morning and the bin lorry and picturing herself here rolled in this rug flipped up into the jaws of the thing and crunched like an assemblage of dry spaghetti and newspaper brought home by nameless children a life ago who yet lived as far as she could tell but who had not spoken to her in years

fib and tib radius and ulna carpals and metacarpals distal phalanges lacrimal mandible breakable shakable friable pliable aches and breaks a cold snap time for supper and no more hungry than the last time it had been time and her gut taut like a tarpaulin a trampolene the skin of a drum bloated like mouldering tree stumps swollen with fungal ears a cold glass of water a cold back a pill she couldn’t swallow the heating clicking off for the night and sitting where she was in the cold because bed would be colder because she was not there but here warming her cold chair and not her cold bed the blurred roses the leg of the table of a chair the green reflection the cord of her dress a laptop case the dinner things where she had left them her camera charged untouched an arm an elbow a wrist sinews cartilage the keys on the keyboard black white greasy with finger grease under her fingers and her misshapen middle finger and this strange clawed posture no longer voluntary or even learned but set like jelly in a mould her watch the cuff of her top a jacqueline groag cushion a scrunch of snotty tissue a pencil navalny’s memoir a cashmere cardigan an aalto stool the grey walls the grey blinds the grey light the grey snow on the brown sill of the grey windows a grey lamsphade fringed with dust trailing like nebulous ornaments a spidery chandelier farting then and struggling to her feet to the bathroom and its gleaming filth and the smears of primer and foundation about the mirror drips of toothpaste on the tiled floor and the toilet she couldn’t keep from flushing itself constantly not that she had tried she was afraid to lift the lid

five minutes four percent three of eighty five counting her pain out like the last of her spoons ticking like a burst watch and a bucket of semtex soft and chewy like marzipan older each stroke on the bingo card of things to endure a stroke of the scythe the imminence of escape and the immanence of destruction the end of the road so indistinguishable now from the end of all roads a soft vanishing point somewhere up ahead the fear nearing the end of the étape that each étape meant nearing the end of the tour wanting it to be over but afraid of what it meant for it all to be over as though born with a finite number of tasks in her so that every achievement depleted her the enviable satisfaction of the young oblivious yet to questions of how well spent the confidence of a full purse dwindling with its coins trying to be mindful the light through an opening in the canopy and seeing then that it was raining wanting to stay and fumbling in her bag for an umbrella climbing up into civilisation again trees river rocks mud and the car park then and the building rearing above her like horses on a sinking ship but it was her she was the sinking ship a blush cast to the light like an old film stock like a fogged exposure like turned milk a scattering of house bricks in the silt a fallen tree a gatepost

foreign but she didn’t feel that way like she did at home a strange comfort a settling like these haussmann buildings squatting along the boulevard like an onna zumo stable lined up for the pleasure of the okamisan immune to stendhal syndrome then seeing only other places in all these places novels and films a rohmer a wittig djuna barnes country patisserie and pissoir and the sense she had riding in through the banlieue from the airport not of arrival but return like the sense starting hormones of a return to the self that she had lost at puberty and the smell of it paris in its glorious filth like the smell of her lover’s cardigan worn sleeping in anamnesis an acquired immunity to another’s germs a voluntary swallowing of spit and piss and sweat and come and sleeping with one hand down someone else’s knickers but this scratchy yellow jumper an autoimmune condition of its own like the smears in her own torn knickers this dress in which she had been spurned and unworn for the longest time then worn as in mourning its floral buttons and lilac needlecord become black velvet in function and meaning a shabby balenciaga for the funeral of her infatuation a tourniquet for a heart sliced like liver and feeling it tight then across her breasts laughing so that it pressed like soft fingers like shibari ropes into her bloated flesh thinking then that she hadn’t eaten and pressing by mistake the caps lock key shouting then at her diary for no reason

fractured longings like these intermittent thuds from upstairs and the fridge turning over like a waiting taxi and the dehumidifier sucking black bile from the wet air so that her nose dried like a clay bed in a long drought and dogs yapping in the street and the little park across the steet and cars that came and went poorly or less poorly muffled and indistinguishable other things the bits in soup and aware and disapproving but no more harried only broken aware vaguely that shit like this was how she had come to be broken and irritated a little purely on principle and the thudding now seeming to her only the sound of these marbled idiots banging their own coffins shut desperate as they were to be put in a box boy girl gay straight splitting boxes only to make smaller boxes of the bits and cracking noises now from the fridge like icebergs sadly slipping off into the inky sea goodbye cruel world and then great whacks from above as though they were beating some thing to death and annoyed merely that such stupidity existed at all maria callas in her bathrobe the yoga she meant to do yet that hung over her like this trembling chandelier waiting for it to come in the russian missile with her name on it a bottle of purple lube dusty with neglect expired quite probably and a hard chuckle that felt more like an arrow in her chest a song from under the floorboards she was scared of seeing you again having thought of nothing more for a month and the whining now from her own mouth and the pressure that grew in her chest and sneezing and crying and biting her tongue

glad and sad and missing you and going to the toilet and realising then quite how drunk she was and someone she knew but not so well that she couldn’t look away and pretend not to have seen her and someone she would later know though she was not yet aware of this only an hour or so later in fact but an hour of darkness and stumbling past building sites along hoardings over tangled roads into traffic and threading back and forward like a spinning jenny going wrong and realising and keeping going wrong amused only by her own coiling disaster and not caring if she made it or where she might end up buried and laughing a hoarse thing more like tears and passing a sign she recognised and night then proper dark night struggling to see the ground beneath her feet and passing a kebab shop momentarily doused in its greasy light and noise then swallowed up again into the bleak late autumn of the city’s dreaming and arriving and then other people and more but not you and not you and not you and going home with her hangover already growing like a scab like a tumour and thinking then of a lost friend and crying and feeling sorry for herself and knowing she had good reason but knowing too that the real reason was not the good reason apathetic in the face of her own wellbeing or the imminent collapse thereof discomposed only by the hopeless vicissitudes of love seeing only your screwed up face an abominable monument vast impassable then sleeping in her clothes or not lying awake in her clothes and getting up to make the coffee and a soft dislocation that hung like laundry she felt you moving further off like balloons uncaught by her bony clutching hands cold rising like fog a hard line brat

going out and shopping and living her best life and then somehow not and this hell somehow and not being able to remember quite when or how and thinking it would have been nice to turn back time and be that girl again but knowing she could never be that girl again and that any future would have to be forged by the person she was now however drunk and incapable and looking around at this clutter and filth and the fluffles of dust bunnies nesting in every corner an ache in her lower back and knowing just what it meant whining in every ear at every frequency missing you distractions broken things a guitar case a record player a box of spent lighters a jug of dead flowers a bluetooth speaker that would no longer connect dust that predated several of her lovers the sunlight bleached furniture lightyears dead and then the hopeful ping of incoming mail deflated into junk your face this pencil all but spent an empty glass a dirty plate on a dirty table the same room in the same light in the same air noises from other lives echoing through the walls and the slow ticker tape of a news feed left open in the background tired of it all and longing for more for you your past your future her hand up to the knuckles in a jar of vaseline a firm mouth over her mouth startled wanting only to drown in you to be a suffocated thing limp in your spent grasp to be flogged bound broken bled drained of all but your mark the bruises that signalled her love she loved you the scars the burns the limp and this sickly yellow light indoors always memory a cossetted thing dry warm brittle stale a ship’s biscuit to chew over in the long voyage to nothing

gold silver strings of sunset tarnished through the dirty windows smeared and splattered with tired resignation and a little red light in a window far away on the horizon like a buttonhole on a dark shirt stitched into the shadows of the buildings leaning together like dominoes and the slam of a car door and a pause then another slam and another and the sugar headache gently pressing on the crown of her scalp slipping across her hairline like an alice band a door slamming somewhere in the building a slight nausea the last lollipop stick on the table’s edge a glass of still water you your shoulders your collarbones a gesture the way you moved uncertain tenuous and every sentence a question the smell of yesterday’s unwashed dishes or the trash she hadn’t taken out then a sneeze abrupt unexpected and footsteps upstairs and twilight a low ache under her left boob an unease the lighter she’d lit the candle with then the candle itself now expired the sinking of the day into night still in her nightie and little awake having eaten defecated washed ready now for bed again just to be done with it and into the next one and another lined up and killed like enemy agents a purge her life wasn’t over she was the roar of your nasty little car in the street your belly your thighs your butt

hands she barely recognised her hands on her body these patterns in the lines like cable knit like fish scales blue veins showing through her paper skin an ice frosted glass a tom collins evoking the summer she hadn’t had the eternal summer eternally missed a frozen blackberry the reminder of your birthday she couldn’t bring herself to dismiss moving windows under it to click buttons in the space it claimed burning into the screen into her eyes her soul trying to ignore its unbearable j’accuse a badge of her failure playing your records to distract herself from thinking about your knotty fingers on her body but then her body a memory and looking down at her body now feeling it under her hands touching her breasts under your shirt her sticky arms still drying her flaked brat green manicure the songs you’d never hear together discuss argue over in an absurd passion that only came to foreplay her unreserved diffidence in the face of your disapprobation only fluffy now in memory like the bobbles on her pink cardigan but she was as stretched and flabby in the wake of her distress as unravelled as this wraparound skirt the wind untied approximately as often as she thought to wear it and your shirt no longer white but close enough and seeing then that she had trans flagged herself again falling asleep with your arms around her in some other reality

hate the sun slicing the window’s filth like bullets hate the heating’s crack and roar hate the neighbours’ radio muffled audible the barreling over wooden floors with what some bulldozer hate hate the intermittent wireless service a past that had worked traded for an easy future that didn’t hate the woman she had been since new moon hate the way she felt about you hate hate the way you didn’t feel about her hate the places she loved the places she missed even in their soft coddling missing where she was missing being here with you hate or missing you missing you missing you hate hate hate hate hate this slamming of every door hate hate these tears this selfpitying hate hate having no picture of herself any more only hate deserved or ill deserved hate weak and soft and vague ill directed deserved only by accident hating where she was and who she was wishing wishing wishing nothing only hating and sick crying sick eating a blue lunch of objectively cunty bread and honey through tears of hate nothing but hate and repudiation wanting nothing not even the past not even you a car whining like a circular saw in the cold street and the hard winter light hate it was true not even you knowing you seeing you now through all her love even elevated beatified the glamour casting of her clammy sorrow you being only an otherwise attractive human in a blue apron and plastic sneakers like everyone else like everyone else this keening engine a sudden quiet the gold splashing the undersides of these clouds rearing back from the crane spiked horizon her friends her lovers her life a falling then azure icy and one yellow beam held in the folding light an open window her knee a guitar solo a scree

her tiresome self the inescapable filter through which the cross of your legs in the metal light a bus sighing past the cracked window huffing like a child this pixie cut lesbian a world of her own white opaque tights carrying a coat failing to catch your eye a cake topped with berries like a cartoon crown the urge to plop it on her head someone who reminded her of her estranged brother but redundant now that they were all estranged friends and lovers her life an alien world a story unreachable like a locked basement an upper conversion in the house she’d grown up in crawling into the eaves nesting with pigeons owls eating vermin with the vermin a feral old lady too crippled to knit to garden to reach out and touch you to speak to dream and the sun then unrolled like a sheet of insulating foam then the sudden recall of a passionate kiss a finger less twitchy then stiff curled then in this boy’s long hair black like nylons and his thin lips his sharp little teeth biting the bow of her thin lips like sucking the poison from her beesting and her tits then small hard still small now soft though wrinkled like a used condom and his come then puddling in the hair under her arms now sweating and needing to go to the supermarket feeling thin now in the presence of your regard the ache across her shoulders pushing her forward an involuntary enlistment in what she did not know she could have stepped back and volunteered herself at some other sacrificial altar or stood here her mouth agape losing her qi with every thud of her febrile heart a boy nodding like a lucky cat a motorcade of black trucks a cloud the sign outside that said they were open

her unloved love handles and this zip that snagged the air pressure your text message a dress a cardigan a curl of overused paper tissue and the arm of the chair she wasn’t sitting on finding a spare one then laughing despair anxiety filled with tears trying not to move lest they spill from the hot slit of her eye these same songs this same car that roared in the street tomorrow morning weighing on her appetite her ribs the bubbles in this glass of water her eyes swimming the thick air of the room like ectoplasm not making dinner feeling a little more unsound with each hour that passed gaping like a fish night about her like a shroud dreading everything seeing you again and longing to see you again mouthing soundless words alone in the dark not being able to name these objects surrounding her waiting swallowing pills deleting unread mail a spray of dead flowers a ream of paper your cd your business card the box from a bag of unsure location this little stained glass object the blood of her red moon the edge of a fitzcarraldo edition a jar of bobbins a box of pink candles her tarot cards a jar of frankincense picture frames serge gainsbourg an envelope pieces of paper a kate spade ipad case derrida descartes dummett durkheim the invitation to your wedding wedged between a champagne bottle and a portuguese coffee mug she lived without you

hips toes stomach ankle head her left tit aches and itches nausea lethargy an overall malaise clumsy indifferent lost bored a life of self harm and subbing having equipped her to dress whatever might be wounded nursing her heart with gin neat from the fridge tainted though she hadn’t washed or defrosted it for years swimming in a fish bowl attention span induced by whatever measures she found neccessary the hourly floggings curing her disordered eating by calling drinking eating east kilbride’s november on bandcamp and snapping momentarily then into lucidity noticing things then remembering having noticed already an awful smell a blister pack of indeterminate contents a purse a pile of pocket trash washi tape micropore tape a champagne cork dirty plates the dirty table the chairs thick with dust these spent roses and the twinge then in her ankle again rinse repeat drinking and passing out and coming round and drinking the lives she’d known and the lives she hadn’t you of course always you a karaoke suicide drinking water typing chewing her chapped lips dreaming jolting awake flitting like a little bird in winter the frost eating her hollow bones tired of what she was and having run away from everything else unsure quite how she might run away from her own quiddity a motion like snakes a lisp the chill in the greasy air a piss just about kept in a glissandi for the rent

houses squeezed from nothing the rafters of a warehouse under the floorboards under the sink houses turned into flats turned into bedsits double booked one planet a genocide architecture a house for an extinction event urban planning for population control a guillotine over the bed bare wires in the bathroom a coal gas oven and her flat in the kite and you walking into traffic life in a risk averse time the ability to live the ability to die sterile pointless her flowers dying cut in glass these pointless covers lou turning in his grave an insult album stripped of the filth and the charity and your shoes outside her door and then one day just not and the keys you’d hung on the railing outside an empty cottage the park there dangerous solicitous and fucking and your old knickers that she’d worn thinking of you and then wanked in and then burned a cycle of nostalgia and regret and thinking that people only died because they remembered too much to carry a hypermnesia she was tired she was drunk a vase of pink peonies a glass of oily water wanting to go to bed but scared because tomorrow would happen and knowing that it would anyway but hoping anyway like lottery tickets the heating like pizza ovens cooking nothing but bird shit an egg maybe speckled brown stinking microplastics and bad vibes her blue bucket bag collapsed on the sofa a tangle of headphones scarves ribbons a pencil the tv remote a tin bowl a glass holder for rhubarb sticks of pink candle a jug a twopence a lanyard a nail file her sunnies the case for her sunnies a key

hurting herself deliberately by accident leaning into the pain into her chaos her inattention searing from toe to toe up through her quivering body her wet breasts dressing the wounds trying not to faint as great sticky gobs of black blood spotted the tiles the toilet seat the towel the last of her cotton pads like treacle dripping from a squishy pudding wave after wave washing up along her matted nerves and the feeling then of having dodged a bullet of something worse having slipped by like trump’s ear and the bloodless elation of drunken survival happening to be in new york on nine eleven throwing memory back like grappling hooks a zipline to something solid and the thought then a moment of lucidity that for her something solid meant the past and sickened then of her time travelling madeleine and nauseous wanting coffee only not sure she could stand wishing lastly for you then crying not for her plight or her loneliness not for her loss or her toes but for the sad discovery that she had forgotten you until now and clinging then to her clinging mourning her mourning she got up and hobbled to the bedroom and turned off silence unknown callers a magpie flicking its green tail at the gutter’s edge stitches of rain sewn across the windows a rumble eyes darting afraid bewildered the same pink cable and these boxes naming the colours of them a birthday card bought before the horror and kept until then after then after all memory of the actual birthday forever an afterlife an artefact a gift for the gods a votive deposit caught like a deer in the hot light of it bleeding into her pink socks sad angry buried in grave goods dedos dos pés

icing her mince pies mincing her oaths swearing on her nan’s middle finger to fuck all of this shit to hell and light it on fire with her shamash the trash in all the stores and not one sufganiyah to be found and this stupid game but she liked george michael her broken ankle rolled more times than these pastry sheets a glass of wine tart to the point of puckering and david bowie and the ache in her back and the hourly flogging and thrashing herself bruised aching from her butt to her neck and her knee to her toe black with suspicion and an endless settling of bones into coal the oven waiting a spoon the little plate sprinkled with flowers the table starred with crumbs dried pieces of greenery the dimpled thuds from upstairs produce of more than one country the flashing light amber blue a reminder reminding her then promptly forgetting the places where the panels joined and the pretend places printed to look that way white her headphones charging red the oven orange lime green the smoke alarm orange again the tv but only when it was switched off like now but not really only a different sort of on like everything now and the day ahead when it really all went off like assad’s half century over all at once and putin who cleared his throat and launched another missile the ache in her back that subsisted while the sting in her thighs abated and the oven light telling her to put this dog mess dinner in to make hot garbage out of cold

icy rain misting the brown windows through brown blinds a márta mészáros in a fleecy blanket a plate of cookies bread with nuts and berries in her pill sat on the table yet unswallowed the heating groaning to keep up a box of torn up paper the ache in her bad leg and this funny little round pot with its single dried up freesia curling like a dancer buttoning her cardigan actually in the buttonholes for once struggling to keep her eyes open winking and blinking in her nodding lethargy her rhodia lolloping open like a tongue the tape holding her oestrogen patch in place pinching her bum and the usual things an ashtray the pile of spent candles this roll of tissue a loligoth dress she had fished from the back of the drawer and worn for laughs tight across her breasts then her pink cashmere a puddle of art books and the grey walls and the dull light trickling from the kitchen like the humming fridge and thinking that the milk might have kept as well on the window ledge tonight and your postcard propped against the leibniz mostly and some r d laing just short of kant and not even close to marx but she was avoiding thinking about it looking at it the little silkscreen with your words no sentences no expressions of feeling no feelings traced along the obverse like minerva’s owl staring at her no into her loving her and receiving no commandeering her love squandering it then given knowing and resigned hopeless but accepting no rejoicing in her broken heart that lay contained in her love from that first moment across the floor of the bookshop like a monad

idle patching the housework though the place smelled like cheese this usual a substitute for actually resolving anything to wallow in it and feel sad as if the sadness itself were of greater value and purpose to her than some lack of privation that might have resulted from action a clean slate was the worst of emptinesses lacking even some immanent movement even a discomfort a smell the pea under the mattress unable to sleep at peace only in a storm the torn ship lurching rolling her in the bedclothes a princess for pain her flogger a pink plant in a pink pot the bed unmade the dinner unmade the dishes unwashed this globular vase spinning in poor light a planet and the smell to remind her she was alive wishing not for a clean house or a sleep without dreams but for the big sleep only and an end to the dreaming to the edge of her world that would die with her where she might fall forever into nothing the pressure crunching her skull her sinuses cracking like a hard coffee then remembering her fucked roasting schedule and the dishes and the bin and the bathroom and the clogged shower trap and the noise in her belly trying to think about you hoping grief the distraction to save her an affordance an accommodation having become thus dependent inured mostly but able to fake it yet to work up some heartache and dejection when called upon by circumstance hating herself the gurgling drains the hail against the window the thickness of the air drinking water a spangle of small bells the rhythm of the drum a shot glass inverted feeling sorry for herself a sponge a bowl a spoon

iittala fujifilm vans apple caorunn kylie minogue fender phaidon cath kidston chanel clairefontaine the neighbour’s drunken laughter as her heart sank acid nights without sleep these forms a job in leeds her face puddling a poor film about great art men understanding nothing of men and less of women then women understanding everything and doing nothing a hot assassin a late announcement and needing to stay alive into the new year and feeling like maybe it was too late for that now and her watch dinging like a bell in a boxing ring an umeda bed slipping her rings into this little trinket box an uncanny knack for poor timing and disquietude a world in one octave a mild anxiety and little thirst no disaster no desire a toggle between kind of alright and kind of alright an alternating current at low voltage a shallow breathing but she had unpleasant things to do in the morning always these patterns overlaid whether or not the shape quite fit and almost laughing a disdainful sigh her battery dipping and dreading going to bed as much as getting up again wishing then that she might fall in the bathroom and not have to die in her sleep or that she had died an eternity ago and ready to sacrifice all of her small joys and loves to simply have never been and your arms and your kisses and her fingers in your mouth a square ache through her temples putting a hand to her head and clumps of hair coming away a ribbon this bag of test tubes a monkey a wall

imprecations invitations the same sights and sounds but with a knot of unease in her gut an apprehension of something that had already happened when having to count three years only and then the enormity of it your absurd ultimatum a senseless stick underfoot unavoidable that she stop breathing or else and the ping of her reminder and this glass of water the oven door draped with a blue towel like a beach chair the handle of the wok peeking out having nowhere for the thing to go and being absent of mind having to leave the oven door open a crack in case she melted the thing again and walking into the corner of it in passing all day this bulbous vase like bubble gum her headphones over navalny like a blindfold her torn notebook a heap of snotty tissues a bowl of candy a plate shaped like a flower glazed blue like broken glass her chopsticks spoon knife cup chopstick holder and there was the blister pack after all bereft of box and safety notice the bleached grain of the tabletop stained and burned a napkin a crumb a candle holder shaped like a flower and a candle scented like flowers her camera a tin of dried petals a bottle of nail varnish nested in a roll of washi tape the thermostat her belt her bag her chair her cardigan her dress the oestrogen patch half peeling from her butt her socks her toes quiet the white tiles like a morgue jars bottles a grinder a sample roaster pouring kettles and carafes a box of filter papers a chopping board a bread knife the bread she’d bought this afternoon in a brown paper bag the smell of it onions and cranberries a puddle of crumbs six fifteen getting up

in for a henny in for a round drunk on her own adorably wistful melancholy an aftertaste of bitter humour calling it wit when she meant misery wallowing in her own shit leaning into her knack for disordered eating because it was easy and working out was hard leaning into this glowing bottle and her new friends bartender and bartender accepting herself and all her flaws and forgiving her many crimes and misdemeanours in this sparkling season of filth drugging this hateful self into submission and wondering when she had woken into it and how long it might hang around then pouring another calling silently for your love letting it echo through the vast darkness of winter like a resonant centre of manifestation energy the gnostic shamash of her broken faith leaning into her broken salty humanism amused as always and crying through her painted smile a bubbly glass of water her pills a cork a camera these roses a pink poinsettia the only shoes her broken dogs could stand to walk in the distribution of her wealth and the fairness or otherwise of it did balenciaga really deserve this overweening devotion then this cunt stain shouting through the wall as though in broad daylight on a football terrace and having given up shouting back now only turning up the replay bathing in you in thousands of hours of you in the near totality of you peppered only with lesser loves and being basic and this being mrs fucking dalloway

interiority the world as windowed the boiler venting steam into it the fridge as a little sandboxed part of it that was why it was colder sucking heat from it into the space and these materials these foreign substances upon which she depended for sustenance brought in from outside stowed away as the biohazards they were contaminated with human contact with the risk of love and heartache that other people meant thus to be kept in a controlled environment sterile a source of unease mistrust consumed in suspicion and distaste reluctantly this fucked life a monstrous assemblage of trauma resilience and coping strategies the knot in her stomach the brown horizon the brown air the brown light glass plastic enamel steel the glaze on this azure plate her salt pig chipped salty like her own sweet self gutted and boned on a plate kidding herself yours for the taking in any of her intermittent heartbeats and the pandering whine then of the boiler as it kicked into gear sucking gas and water from a frightening world and breathing into it a prosthesis her suit of clothes of armour a tank the boot that kept the dogs from her face her obscuritanism and these strange allusions that meant nothing to anyone but her and her solitude a function of the sheer scale of her cultural literacy distancing herself with every arcane encounter each conversation blowing her bigger like a party balloon until she floated off out of reach to pop somewhere in the stratosphere as the pressure inside of her outgrew the thinning air of her surroundings a jar of pennies a dust bunny the laminated curve of a cantilever chair a hairball a biscuit her bangle her rings

iron steel glass plastic enamel wood varnish cork primer foundation concealer glittery eyeshadow lipstick powder mascara spirit gauze micropore cloth water coffee gas flame roaring stomping slamming settling into her chair cuddling a lil guy not because she was feeling cute but because she was scared sad alone wishing she could have curled up into your lap and wrapped herself up in your soft skirts lived in your pocket like roo and remembering the plushie she had lost in the supermarket and her mother running out of patience as she had run in circles crying looking at herself sat here crying and still a lost unloved unwanted thing wanting and seeking and loving and no more inured for her life of it than at two or three raising a glass to lowered expectations a cynicism worn uncomfortably like crocs like a shirt a little too big like your clothes when she had smiling dressed on a whim into them stepping out of bed giggling as you had watched her naked from the bed a sudden urgency in her headache an anxious quickening of her generalised nausea then this flag brown on brown as the floorboards creaked above her le fr fragile f ile corrugated an invoice a courtesy call a gratuity feeling herself drifting off the trick was to sit in the same place until there was nothing more to be said a trembling in her jaw from pen to paper a machine gun a foundry a farce

irritated and shiftless preferring to be irritated than to get up and press a button preferring you and petulant enough to prefer nothing in the absence of you a salty sulky toddler and laughing at herself and her snuggling plushie a silly old lady but fine with it not sorry at all loving her little plushie to death for all the diamonds and open wounds her robin day desk her eileen gray table these plates golden jade enamel crackling sparkling wood fired captious oh but she was none of these things only broken hearted only in love and then fiercely proud to still be in love and broken hearted at her age and clasping her little plushie for dear life plastering their little ears with kisses and their scratched little eyes and squished misshapen limbs and loving this smol speechless amigurumi more even than her flogger an ache in the other shin now annoyed again a jar of biscuits a hair tie a pencil stub a knife a blue spode italian saucer a leaf of lamb’s lettuce dried into a little ball like a pea a crumb of unknown origin a bag of centrifuge tubes assorted hums boiler fridge dehumidifier these dried flowers the scent of them the clock a sneeze through the wall a window closing the laundry a bottle of needles her yellow cardigan her breast her phone her watch a bottle of rosemary oil trans pride

isherwood and eilish a soave drier than dior a salt pig strength training the box of coffee she’d bought you still whole its creased pink paper still loose about it like her cardigan slipping from her round shoulders and your muscles then clean and strong in her mind like almond blossoms your presence weighted slight in those grey woolen slacks jil sander and ysl a monochrome ghost your thin smile like a cheshire cat but it had vanished first not last and here an afterimage yet burned like a screensaver into the crt of her mind’s eye and a plate a spoon a bowl a tumbler of water a pill a cork a paper tissue a mug of chopsticks a napkin crumpled like her back and its disobliging velvet cushion and then her friend texting after days and trying to reconstruct the thread a picture of the moon a dry leaf on the floor a three pin plug vanessa bell the cold air her favourite skirt these roses your finger marks where you’d dipped it in the glaze and carefully arranging her own fingers just so as though you were touching them through time as through glass a train window drawing heart shaped goodbyes in your hot breath laughing crying in your ridiculous woolens and yet here you were still by the bookcase leaning against the architrave of the bedroom door grey fuzzy now fading as all things did soft like cashmere a key rattling in a lock a closed door the stairwell the street the streetlight berlin

itching aching showing too much tit feeling out of place in her own life this blouse these streets these people their strange accents trucks and buses this skirt these sounds then a familiar song crackling from the radio snapping her into the past like elastic like a leash as though she had been permitted into the future on a tourist visa and were now to be deported against the march of time to the decade from whence she had come christmas songs that sat oddly in her jewish ear all the glitter and the tired novelty of it but who was she to disparage something she had been always and always would be on the outside of the clanking of cups and spoons a crinkle of film the light failing the floor held down with duct tape a stepladder a stool masha gessen

it was beautiful a foggy autumn dusk shimmering olives and mustards like damp leaves crackling on a bonfire and the grey light falling like a bucket of mop water and all the memories sprinkled over like fairies crackling off from her sparkler into the cozy darkness that smelled of chestnuts and icicles glitter on a string of cards tinsel and sadness the roar of your nasty little red car in the street below tearing her from it now like a slap from a bitter teacher across her bare thighs and bewildered still in the face of it the violence of it all straightening her glasses holding back tears the verge of tears as her permanent facial expression pulling her socks up her lip trembling her snotty wee face red hurt lost in the golden halo of her curls browned now like these dead leaves turning to mulch the smell of it in the frosted light like squash peeled and chopped and waiting to be boiled then this pain down her left side from ear to shoulder like a drawstring pulled tight and the dishes unwashed a carton of soup a flatbread her dream guitar your letter large runic tucked in front of the television behind her copy of your last record battered like you and shining still in pink and blue a sparkler a gateway a hope like you and a crash then from upstairs and her neck tightening and the alarm and the dishes still unwashed and the purple light weak now like she was her broomstick this greasy glass her rings patriot

judgement and the critique of judgement a slow drum machine a glass of herbal tea cold filmy like pond scum the pain in her back a scrunched up little ball of nausea behind her left eye not leaving the house her hanukkah playlist the dry air three more to watch and then all twelve to recall and one to choose a vote a click the push of a button pink on pink beans on toast a broken finger rubbing her cheekbones a lino print her head nodding on her soft neck candles her cigarette lighter the sticking plasters holding her headphones together a slammed door a bag of bones a collection of aches of unease apprehensions and regrets your voice her voice slurred trembling a distorted synthesizer square sawtooth sine her chiptune c files throwing her lot in with the first bus she found all these decades genres eras the freckle on your chin and the dimple a different place a different wine your puffy sinuses this fist in her ribs her failing body a tax on her sensuality the holes in her panties wiping her nose on a tissue retrieved from some pocket that smelled of curry leaving clothing where she happened to be when she happened to be hot putting on what happened to be where she was when she was cold all the people her yoga mat a payslip a glass remote a pink sheet of brown paper barely awake and hardly able even to imagine a life kissing someone a hand in her hand a hand in her panties a lip full of metal and her teeth and this fucked orange light that wouldn’t go off the second to last temptation of christ her head was full of nonsense love an old skirt washed out like blue sheets her pointless expertise memories a zest grated like consolations through the pitiful madeleine of her crying day hate rock

kissing your crocs your pink jag the glitter in your lovely eyes a red coffee cup her own hands anything you had touched or that reminded her of you photos of you pulling faces at her at the camera at the world an alert a reminder an email interspersing a festival with her regular intake of classics but it was unfair a cherry picked handful from the whole of time against the best of now or the way she felt picking up a new book the heaviness of it against a whole library of light and forcing herself and then you the reason it was all worth it that magical thing what she lived for the discovery the moment or the slow succession of moments the realisation and then the expansion of her world and these years these last years and how much smaller it might have been how much less and now how much smaller and how much less but no only empty a cathedral or a cavern vast hollowed out inflated expanded and stuck like that without a vast expanse of desert a tundra an arctic fucking waste of things you weren’t touching now would never touch again this cup her pill the glass of water the pencil and its pink eraser that would taste your lips again no more often now than her pink lips her cracked fingers this cork these wine glasses bought in pairs and all hers now a chewed pen cap a roll of washi tape your smile teeth tearing her floss these earrings her wire bound notebook and the door in soft focus beyond as the heating clicked off for the night and the dark bedroom on the other side cold empty fuckless

latkes and gelt sufganiyot a list breathless this pill the idiot next door an ache where her glasses pressed her nose her cheekbone an ana mariscal and the idiot upstairs her stiff little fingers her gritted teeth rolling up the yoga mat thudding her macbook air against a guitar case and the clang ringing from inside the injustice of being smart and subject to other people’s stupidity a country song on the radio the tension in her gut like she were strung over an ivory bridge a bone nut both of her f holes splitting her sides but she could barely muster a wan smile her signature and these knots in her stomach strung like a suspension bridge in the fog the lights punching through like shells a bell sounding in the lap of the tide and a tilting then the wet tarmac on her cheek and feet and boots in the dark and drifting off this tangle of lanyards nesting like snakes and these roses this empty glass these same objects large in her child’s memory now small and now changing shape for her clumsy fingers something she couldn’t quite make out clare review her last paper cam mopping the garlic butter from the plate with yesterday’s bread the last song on side three

legs tits butt belly the small of her back her upper lip wrists fingers every now and then her toes the bubbles in the glass of water she hadn’t drank with her pills at breakfast where did they come from some chemical process waiting for the heating to go off like the thermostat said it was the gap between the banner and the bell like thunder the broken promises of technology and all of the broken promises assimilation pensions votes parting with anything ever in return for a promise the dry air these broken flowers held together only by a plastic wrap calculated to sell not to meet any human need buttering her buns with the bile of her dissafection the spines of these books different heights colours widths like some makeshift pale of junkyard scavengings bones an iron lung a rusting pillory a sign that meant salvation also rusting an old man in the road shouting at women queers anyone adjectivally unlike him the glow her little candle cast weakly around its sharp reflection in the tv screen having cookies instead of lunch having lunch instead of dinner going to bed crying a box with a qr code and nothing besides a blue ashtray the laundry a dvd a jar of russian frankincense some mountain somewhere blurry memories in her blurry present an ernaux a jar of bobbins a tiny stained glass window a big envelope an empty picture frame your book your cd a gift box for a bottle of gin cloth bound philosophy books dried flowers a box of corks a tub of pennies a tin of wax an old prosecco bottle gathering dust a bag of cats a noise on the stairs like someone falling down an exhibition catalogue a vial of neroli oil a kiss the pressure building in her paranasal sinus

little blood blisters her legs her belly but those were just places she could see the far side of the moon these aching knuckles memes private jokes public humiliations the wallpaper telling her she’d been up all night a crescendo an unvarnished truth an explicit version an extended version a deluxe edition an epilator a silver fan a black cable twisted like liquorice the streaks on the mirror now that she’d cleaned it that only made it look worse than before all splattered with hair cream a texture spray a bottle of rosemary oil a tube of hand cream a little pot of earrings a hat box a sketchbook her lube her dildo her kenzos her kate spades her vivienne westwoods her black skirt suit on its little hanger the belt from a summer dress a postcard of some religious thing in stained glass a roll of washi tape a stack of sticky notes a bottle of ink the printer a cane chair her phone a box of ear plugs her watch her earbuds a preciado the striped ticking of the pillow case giving up and closing the tab cuddling into you curling up telling siri to put the light out a little brass roman soldier winking in the hesitation the silence wasting it not sleeping a rug a radiator her flogger a sanrio hairbrush her sagan first editions sarduy schulz shelley shepherd some škvorecký both smith and all of the spark a pink sheet the heap of clothes at the foot of the bed a grey cobwebbed lampshade a concave mirror a box of hair ties a faded poster a stapler the wristband from your concert a scrunchie a bottle of perfume

longing for someone to spoil rotten not transactional only an end in itself a childless cat lady all those years of self sacrifice empty in her like unlaid eggs dreaming of every gift she’d given mothering everyone about her until it became suffocating overweening her overattentive attentions driving away love an alienating love a love that killed love a love for its own sake she wasn’t sorry only sad the low sun in her eyes steel grey like these metal railings a mineral sky mining the weak light from it with her weak smile the low turning of the water boiler grey sticks even the mud brown of the red sandstone green pink purple iridescent a pencil a corner thick with dirt a gull slicing right to left across the window like wire through cheese a red box precarious close the blue foil peeled from something a scrunch of paper her little pear shaped espresso cup with its little dimple a coiled pink cable a bulbous bud vase an angry sparrow scribbling the dirty glass a slice of buttered bread a twisting then a pain a new tension in the right shoulder to balance out the one in her left temple and her right index finger as broken as her left metacarpal a bag of broken bones misshapes mistakes misfits the day dimming slate blue the red sandstone almost violet and the strange glow of it even in the cold of winter the deadness these plastic windows the aches in her hands as she typed lights reflected across the street a row of candles on a window ledge a lead pipe an evening that gathered in the quickening dusk whispering reclusion and despair your wellingtons picking her nose a narrowing perspective

making a mess then making herself agitated trying to clean it and making more mess her fingers trembling then siezing up dropping her flannel cutting knots from her hair dripping cream all over the parquet a stench like sour milk and cabbage the disinfectant eating her skin her eyes the passages of her nose it was quiet the dull december light leaning on the window like starving urchins in some old christmas movie the grey weight of it like city snow a card a box from the other side of the world lighting an orange candle washing the dishes hanging her laundry scrubbing the tiles on her knees in a liberty print dress burning the toast giving in to it all the gurgling drain this morning’s glass of water the emptiness opening a blue door to another world laughing at other people’s metaphysics a butterscotch scrunchie a dandelion cardigan looking at it and not fixing it not caring any more tired waiting for nothing then there already smearing butter on the cmd key checking the empty mailbox again a red box a blue bag a tweed guitar case the failing horizon spilling its dying sun like vomit over the hollow skyline lighting the windows with the same fulvous etiolation chlorotic a line on a map linking all the places she had died that viewed from just the right angle spelled cunt laughing and coughing not going to bed on time and getting up late forgetting to stock the cupboards freezing coffee enough coffee to wake the dead waking the dead dancing with the dead a hole in her heart cut out like gingerbread men just exactly the shape of your blue slip cameo

making herself sick with drink to alleviate the anxiety nausea laughing at it all the impending nazi apocalypse we were in it there was nothing impending a weight in her stomach the war waiting for billionaires to fall out of windows crying scared hopeless a red box blank a crown of dried roses a red nail file the same room with new dust on yesterday’s new fears silting on yesterday’s a sandbank of panic a flood praying for the asteroid the face of jesus a broken stem letting everything go on the assumption it was almost over these candles the smell of them the sorrow grieving for the life she hadn’t been allowed an ending on another line passing through the stations without stopping the time she’d blown a blood bubble at the meeting and blown the five million that had popped with it her watch badgering her like a badger watching her standing up opening the door walking through to the other room picking up her flogger and flogging herself and crying and writing it down worn out with stress names of things colours shapes formless alien a metaphysics as a home then homeless an ontological destitution bereft in the thriving of evil people asking a god to intervene like santa claus like fairies praying to erzsébet báthory to wittig and wittgenstein to sylvia rivera praying to hopelessness itself appealing to her own learned helplessness for divine intercession the floor the walls door transom light ceiling lamp tripped switch handle hinge architrave negotiating her passage to bed the sheets blankets posts then the darkness and everything losing its shape and name a formless time before the universe and the gods in the sky yet to ordain anything whatever an alarm her hands between her thighs cessation

metal in a jar brown rusty green sticky dusty greasy to the touch dead queens none of them older than her she had checked solid there on the shelf in front of being and nothingness a cloth for wiping her glasses and keeping them from fogging over again long spent having worked well a few times then less well a while and then not at all an oak veneer a bowed shelf the radiator the shadow split into a grayscale spectrum dark darker darkest the lines of it a neutral gradient like hp5 shot slow and developed fast then the wall and a shadow and another and the door and the curve of the corner stuttering into the light an ochre filminess tungsten on daylight film twisting then and her dress pulling at the scab on her thigh her back refusing to be positioned among cushions or throws in any mode but pain these alstroemeria candy pink leaning inward like conspirators a soiled napkin her camera vintage japanese optics a candle in a little tin decorated with strawberries on a pink ground the thermostat tuning in to her cold shins just then and clicking into gear her seifuku her scrying bowl a box of tissues her little orange rhodia a stub of pencil a nail file a pill blister her life the remote for the apple tv a card with the origins and altitudes processes and varietals blank on one side her headphones peeling in pink skin flakes of fake leather a scrunch of tissue the game controller with its one fucked stick and its one nearly fucked stick the fucked chair all her fucked things nothing new only these pains her failing eyes and ears and this tiredness this jaded lassitude a bag of centrifuge tubes a distant headrest a tote

mid as a euphemism for shit and that one scene staying with her anyway coffee and a jelly donut getting dressed putting her face on then the wind and tears stripping it off again in lines like stripping wallpaper and her mascara over her pink gloves wearing her pink wellies in a blue funk then seeing herself a queer old lady in a polka dot skirt and pink wellies and laughing and feeling better hobbling through the rain and back waving at her friend a potato salad tipped into the milky breakfast bowl unbuttoning her skirt to sit down living like shit feeling like shit looking like shit but that wasn’t true the mirror her one friend still cute at her age or delulu putting a cardigan on over her sweater socks over her tights not reading her book starting a film putting it off again men bahaving like toddlers women wiping their arses a box of little carved resin people clothes pegs a red party hat a chain of paper clips a bag of earrings an old purse still full of folding money not that it did now that it was all plastic stamps bandaids the things she could never find any more a nail file a tissue a little pack of wipes plastic cards pieces of eight slips of paper with numbers on dates passwords amounts in dollars landlines nothing to indicate which her leather notebooks with their ribbons frayed now marking places long forgotten bookmarks folders box files magazines then a message to say you were in town and the ensuing panic attack washed down with gin and an out of date ginger ale then a crust of baguette to scrub the sulphur from her mouth without much success and it being late suddenly and going to bed in her clothes and screaming

morning noises a fitful few hours lazy fantasies from the dead of night mixed up like a dirty martini missing the deadline the grinder whirring too long an ethiopian natural rinsing her greasy flannel the last granola her pill wiping down the windows washing her hands again everything playing at once your bowl your cup the kettle boiling too long a glass of water a hexagonal plate three gingernuts a drill somewhere nearby a dull edge to everything like she were a diamond blunting everything she touched the lights of her eyes muddying it up with their filmy disaffection footsteps above a dream you a house viewing the white walls and clerestory windows and your dark smudge inscrutable against a white noise more torturous than silence a modernist international style white cube but she’d had this dream before and the other version a midcentury green marble staircase always you the same you a you she had never met none of your innumerable incarnations no two the same some idealised you some fantasy with your face your manner your limbs the way you moved all unknowable elegance in balenciaga and ysl then shifting the light dying as though she were too tired to sustain the energy levels required to illuminate it any longer which was a fair approximation of how the cosmos worked in her own small cosmogeny rarely exposed to the human touch that might tremble its foundations and open her to materiality warming the oven pulling the blind walking to the other room then forgetting why again

muddy bitter metallic minerality liquorice and broccoli farts ignoring it all the broken fridge the fucked wiring the fucked plumbing the fucked everything windows walls floor was there anything left in the place that worked then her own wracked body never ten whole fingers at once something broken sprained or otherwise impaired for every day of her fucked week hearing your name wishing she were dead spitting in the sink like raspberry ripple marbled with blood a stitch in her left side a limp to the right a biscuit a cup of tea scratching her scalp the smell the cold a chicken kyiv on a bed of peas leaning her ipad on a spent champagne cork so she could sing along to olivia rodrigo while she ate frozen latkes and butter donuts this ironic humming from the dehumidifier then the hissing of the kettle eating liquorice to get the taste of liquorice out of her mouth her belly the teabag in its little envelope hacking up brash in the night a blank screen another a silent speaker a light anxiety a nausea the heating the heater the cars on the street a symphony of white noise an ad for some sporting thing alien enough to her experience to be incomprehensible sybilline an illustration of a woman pissing a shark on wheels colouring in a book with no pictures a cut apple a monospaced font face flowers wax counting the days until she could stop waiting for you to phone novels she hated films she hated flogging herself with one hand and drinking tea with the other pink mint green three persimmons her watch beeping at her art books burgundy peach scraps of paper pennies bags boxes things she’d seen before lime jade using a spoon in place of a kinfe and fork letting her tea go cold

naked ennui crusting her nasal passages with a starvation of life too old for sex too broken too friable her flogger in daily use fuck hourly use her dildo snug in its dust caked box leaving the top and bottom buttons overfilled with gelt like her pockets failing to spend what her accountant wanted her to each month not much caring what it cost her having no use for any of it time money chocolate an overabundance of having lived she was all out of distractions an evening headache fireworks sporadic the traffic on the wet freeway her meds a simmering pan forgetting to put the oven on too full anyway and disinterested the open window the smoky cinnamon of snuffed candles her twitching brow oven lights christmas lights warning lights eight lights the first eight minutes a dog pissing against a parked car the beam of a torch poking at the trees head shoulders knees toes a low cloud in the distance lit from below the horizon a cold pudding heavy hard like a fatberg her inner sewer gurgling at her losing you and too indifferent to go looking wishing not for things she might do but things she might have done no desire only regret no love only remorse no hope only nine candles and this tin stick a blood blister the bathroom sink a scab behind her ear her chapped lips chest pains fewer well wishes the deeper down the well a scythe in the headlights forgetting to set a timer piles of silver foil the click of a thermostat scalding her fingers radclyffe fucking hall

nearly time to wrap it again and reset another twenty four fucking hours with fuck all to do and fuck all desire to do anything anyway in truth thinking if she were to put off eating long enough she could put off the grocery shopping too charging the battery running it down charging it again the rattling noise of metal in a change of temperature letting it sleep waking it up involuntary motions the back of her neck her wrists her knuckles her fingers you the soft lump in her pocket loving you hating you loving you again wearing herself out depleted like oil unmiraculous the pain in her gut losing her page finding it again picking it up and putting it down breathing in and out it was natural a bare facticity the barest a precondition yet laboured then tenuous and all of her conditionals hanging by this threadbare thread failing the heat of it all dying in her the fire going out the spark of it the joy laughing sometimes or smiling amused pleased even but tired a hollow pleasure like a carapace empty of meat eaten already these scraps of foil waiting for the bin the dishes her dirty knickers a glass of red wine drier than she’d wanted a snarling exhaust like scissors through the winter twilight the silent thermostat the oven door the living room door her death

nine candles in her fire hazard clutter and the dreidel she couldn’t find all the things she couldn’t find and giving up and buying more shit to add to the clutter done with that shit caring about shit it was someone else’s problem a funeral emptying her flat not her concern a dead girl at peace banking a kind of advance on her final repose by stopping giving a shit now in the imminence of it because the wake of it would be beyond her reach and crabby at the idea other people might enjoy her death more than she would a xinomavro a mushroom faux gras on stonebaked sourdough tannins the colour of tea a cold darjeeling notes of oregano and strawberry jam bottom surgery for the torah and your wee coffee shop in chengdu that somehow reminded her of paris the golden trees in the street and the cobbled sidewalk with the little tables and missing france and missing you all at once memories of memories stood here with her ladle in her dotty apron wet with blackberry fingers the cinnamon going to her head an endless playlist that updated faster than she could play it your butt the cut on the outer shell of her left ear too close to her surfer girl hair to stick any sort of dressing to so smeared with vaseline along with her beach waves a walking catalogue of injuries and not one recollection of how any of them had been sustained and plainly in awe that a wound that must have hurt could fail to impinge upon her consciousness a solitary christmas card your butt again a cramp in her fingers the foil shells of her gelt discarded by the menorah her blue seifuku this lilac loligoth dress with it’s flower shaped little buttons the neighbours coughing still a red box a green bottle jeff the landshark

nun gimel hei shin emails she couldn’t send this plate dripped with donut jam the waistband of her skirt your playlist your voice your guitar tone this fog trying to convince herself you were nothing special failing touching her lips with stiff little fingers the smell of the oven taking her herbs a twitch the crooked shapes of her hands not quite symmetric her pencil its red tip spoons an undersized clothes peg a butter knife biting her knuckles these drums your absence the strongest presence in her life checking the listings a tarot deck going in circles thinking about not thinking about you a record deck the snot puddling under her septum a skateboard deck a slide deck a tape deck the ache in her knee in her ankle in her toe taking the bread out of the oven thinking it was late you were stronger now cutting her leg on the glass door her mouth agape the smell of oranges the laundry her camisole her cardigan her knickers her skirt her socks the dirty dishes clutching her fingers in her fingers the way you casually stated as a given that she loved you which was true but hurt regardless wanting to put her hands around your head like a brâncuși your red hair catching her broken fingers your green eyes catching her broken eyes her broken heart her inbox the lyrics scrolling absently on her ipad checking the journal missing things she’d never had

oak pine birch veneer plywood chipboard mdf the laths in the walls the joists in the ceiling the floorboards the skirting the window frames this cantilever armchair these little stools the table the bookcase the dresser the doors the architraves the front door the banister her phone pinging at her the sound of your laughter the taste in her mouth the oven clicking forgetting what was in it smelling it pizza maybe olives and cheese green velvet and this green thai pillow raffia eucalyptus dried roses a green salad and these vine leaves this plate teal jade her tweed guitar case a sea green ashtray and these wee glass candle holders orange and yellow a yellow lighter her twitching smile a metal grating a keyfob her aluminium laptop the titanium screws in her face a spoon the lid on a jar of petals a tinned candle coins a wire binding the pins of a plug these brass latches a silver bell her ring the door handle the lead came in your little stained glass moon the police helicopter passing overhead gold and diamonds a ferrule a plastic bag drifting by the window the butter yellow light leaking from the kitchen her camera a box of tissues craning her neck a basket a belt her scrying bowl her plushie full of pins fridge magnets a grey elephant missing its trunk a postcard from finland the sticker from a pair of vans a roll of spotty washi tape blue orange a blue towel with moomintroll on her oven mit a dishcloth the grounds from this morning’s coffee waiting to be composted the laundry drying the dishes drying bottles of bleach disinfectant soap and softener the light switch the shadow crumpled round the corner where the bed recess would have been the cheese sticking to her bottom lip the song was going out of her a copper pipe her glasses a knife

oceans decades walls and bridges six feet of earth a glass of water a chapter in a book a demolition a war fifteen thousand euros a year a madeleine in her fucking tea a corner any one of a hundred objects she should have thrown away years ago a street name the mention of a night club long forgotten a casually shared throwback pic on social media a coat that had come back into fashion a vintage telecaster anything and nothing an election cycle a change of clothes an album stained with your lipstick the things she found in old books a woman on the bus with the same lipstick the same lips a turn of phrase a profile an attitude a posture a smirk the way someone held a cigarette but that was rare now like the way someone fucked or moaned or came or said her name or laughed or smiled or touched her face and fingers or loved her a door closing the hot flush of her swollen belly her breasts your breasts the line through the wifi symbol that meant she was offline

offerings sacrifices sigilisations spellcastings scryings servitors exorcisms invokations incantations the hated sound of the dreadful neighbour’s dreadful little car knowing soon the door would slam and the violence commence but she supposed it never stopped only moved off with him when he left the heave of a furnace groaning in the january night these pieces of things pennies the hair picked from her brush nails scraps of paper more or less significant to her a used oestrogen patch pieces of wax and frankincense anything with any gnostic charge to it and the ritual the casting that pulled it all together into some whole a work her craft and the hollow of her little heart filled once with an endless love like a montgolfière lifted ever upward filled with it still like caves with dark or a well with fucking loneliness fingering her ring laughing at her own juvenile humour the ache in her tired spine bent but not broken an agony of fortitude the click of something stopping a silence then other noise rising to fill it like mushrooms in a cellar the shadows layering one another like flat pyramids a contour map trying to summon the motivation to clean the kitchen and feed her disinterested body and the promised relief from the pain an insufficient weight thereto

oil of every pearl a chipped nail clacking at the keyboard sticky glue bits a mescal cup sky blue soft like sand like mud up to her elbows a lambing season her nhạc vàng playlist her back aching like a corset all the way round a song on a mixtape when decades ago losing it and not speaking vietnamese remaining unable to find it again and having it anyway in her in her head to listen and enjoy and remember but this crushing in her ribs now and her bag and her pins and the lipstick traces of dinner’s clamshell drunkenness clinging around her like nicotine rings her tits the knots in the oak floor a moth your butt that time she’d given you a spoon laughing now a cold sad laughter a mews in south camden rocking in her armchair the bones biting through her arse cheeks happy laughing at herself enjoying being so old none of it mattered anymore no more in any kind of a hurry to die now that she had nothing to live for leaning on other people’s contrary leanings propped up on civilisation’s decline kicking against the pricks writing the other way spitting back the pits as you cherry picked the face of jesus among your tea leaves a fount of counterexamples her joy to be your burden the pin to the balloon of your expansive happiness then losing you only affirmed in her sadness and sad here in her open broken heart in this room remembering you and her love and her fear of her love and of the love you’d returned but all breathed in and big like a jumper knitted for her future self and here she was cold and sore and her jumper all holes then this psychedelic guitar solo and mai lệ huyền searing her like wood pigeon breasts her failing eyes this light this room this fucking century the dishes and the table linen the fridge the plate in the fridge with the dinner she hadn’t had it in her to eat wrapped in clingfilm the plastic in her dinner and her brain and her balls

old and fucked and in love too disabled to feed herself aching in two hundred and seven of her two hundred and six bones listening to you over and over and not getting any younger or more alive window shopping for implements her body would no longer wield not only gracefully but effectually never accepting all preferring the back button and close tab as her preferred method of dismissal for unrequested modals beyond grumpy into something only french could express disdainful in some scornful resigned way and neither hurt nor shamed when you bounced ever pure of heart into her temper only sad that it couldn’t last and bitter at the thought of you old and bitter as she was now and these books on the empty chair every surface become bookshelf in the absence of living masha louise eleanor nan then jacqueline cath kate katie kaitlyn caitlin kathy ella nora robin round in a circle hands joined singing the cover of her third book but she forgot now what it had been called so many lives since so many deaths the rumblings of machines inside the house and out and her soft memories of a quiet time and dark of putting the light out and there being no light and not merely a dimming and of nights hearing a pin drop and these flowers drying in rows a hanged man piles of spent candles dusty grimoires waxes and petals and coins of spent denominations hair nails blister packs the labels cut from the clothing of her enemies champagne bottles their bubbles spent as her partying the morning after a life squandered and no regret no movement no plans and no projections neither discipline nor vice and not by some virtuous balance only surcease her sanctum

olives artichokes an aubergine caponata white peach and elderflower a brioche an almond paste toasted vanilla then a phenolic finish like turpentine like a cough syrup a fine sauerkraut with carrots through a sourdough her friend but she hadn’t spoken to her in months a ghost only a memory nothing but memories the aftertaste of life this aching decline the brackish scraping of it in her throat like a rose bush the fridge whining then a shudder and silence and her silver ring there on the table a man she despised your diary your sketchbooks and this pile of framed photos flat on their faces gathering dust a paper bag striped in gold a jar of pennies a brown box decorated with two arrows a wine glass and an umbrella wedged between the bookcase and the bureau the snow the cold her headache her little flat and her hate for it and everything about it for everything that had happened here for the neighbours and the community an arsehole wailing through the wall in confirmatory synchronicity and her phone abandoned there on the window sill out of reach and her arse here on its seat not comfortable but settled resigned to her discomfort disinclined to lift an eyelid to accommodate it or anything else petulant stiff disdainful her chest heaving in painful sighs and her glass empty a napkin a champagne cork a nail file her elbow her wrist and smiling then finding herself cute and laughing a hoarse acidic laugh at herself finding herself ridiculous and the bitter bile gathering in her mouth a blinking amber light these wind chimes this pen snug in its blue elastic loop against the deckle edge of best forgotten pages

one of her diaries would remain unfinished this rhodia the moleskine still in its wrapping some muji thing picked up in paris or london then the thought of an unfinished trip of dying in paris and feeling oddly at peace and then in a panic at the thought of dying here in this chair in this house on this street in this neighbourhood surrounded by these people she hated and their noise in this city she hated in this country she hated the smell truthfully not as bad as paris or rome but hating it somehow more because it wasn’t paris or rome a chugging engine a slammed door a fly inching around the window someone else’s boiled cabbage a sorrowful cawing bouncing over the roofs a cluck from nearby trees the dirty yellow clouds a jug of dried flowers a spent candle a lanyard an ashtray full of incense ashes in glass turquoise like the salty sea a pink cable a yellow lighter a pile of boxes in gradations of brown a flickering of wings the spines of books illegible in the darkening light a man’s voice loud for no reason vaguely threatening the piss yellow trees a small bird wheezing like a chew toy the dishes gathering shadows in the corner as her drive waned with the spilled corona of sunset’s dying song

open like a mouth a purse a breach her little pony her kenzo sunnies her silk scrunchies her sanrio hairbrush les guérillères a jar of night cream a bottle of lube her dildo your calling card l’opoponax a jewellery box a flogger then bottles of eau de parfum a little buddha a small gift box but the earrings no longer inside she forgot where a concave mirror a lip balm a cunty bordeaux a row of isherwoods then a stapler and a box of hair ties some cocteau then the top shelf piled with paper placed deliberately out of reach a marimekko box a photo album then the ceiling and the brown lampshade strewn with cobwebs then the other wall bare gray and the sheets and her dress her watch her handbag a pair of socks her nightie her cardigan her wooly tights her bruised knees her belly swollen with empire biscuits and corn chips her ring for reasons she no longer recalled worn on the wrong hand and her tits still beautiful neglected then the radiator whirring and the pink rug and getting up and going into the other room again and fluffing the cushions pulling this blue throw around her cold shoulders burping a little wine and stomach acid back into her throat an evening an empty plate and dinner still in the freezer and not caring letting the network outage bathe her in a timeless nonchalance absolved immaterial an unhewn stone an acorn a bird that never swam or a tree that never rang a piss sample labelled and waiting there on the dinner table rolls of washi tape and surgical tape all mixed together creams ointments gels and her earrings after all there in their little velvet bag and the silence now that the war was won and her runny nose her pink handkerchief wrapped around her broken headphones like a tourniquet season one episode thirteen

orchard fruits meadow flowers stone fruits nutty bitters purple flowers black tea brioche vanilla tobacco almonds apricot kernels phenols minerality grassy crisp malo rounded soft tired and sore aches in her back her ribs her belly a pain that rose and fell with her breath her ring on the table where she’d put it to wash the dishes twisting this way and that plumping her cushions eating dried stawberries corn chips anything but dinner cheese on toast stuffed vine leaves that made her think of sushi that made her think of you sucking at the bits stuck between her teeth wishing you’d killed her when you’d had a chance but you had tried she supposed and twice alternating chapters from both books within reach a pastel mondrian powder pink eggshell blue and lemon yellow all in a grid a signed postcard a box of lens wipes a bottle of neroli oil silver on red curling like dry ferns the museum and its empty shelves where her most beloved tetradrachms had been a noise like machine tools the bitchy wail of a siren beyond goading unable to make herself lift a finger except by chance an absent haze her fingers in her mouth the chair creaking as she shifted to the right arching her back for a moment and slumping again as if to find a little youth like coins under the cushions and finding nothing having spent it all a dead numb settling into her body like sand into the bell of an hourglass that would never be turned again

othering mothering smothering going to bed early staying in bed late sleeping in her chair sleeping on the train in the office sleeping without you reading writing not liking thinking missing talking missing kissing or kissing you at any rate it had never been the same quite with anyone else or more no one she would have missed but you were her life to be rerun empty of it or none she’d have chosen to live over again but yours or more again none she didn’t regret but yours none she wouldn’t have effaced but yours and not quite just then in truth able to recall the feel of your lips on hers present to her as you were always and touching her lips as though to find it in her fingertips the way a finger traced across the page helped her to read now regressing to her infant capabilities a stub of a pencil assorted cables pink and white like candy her id card from a job she no longer had or wanted the knots in the pine doors on this bureau and the red glaze on this turkish vase a row of films on dvd that she had no way to view a jar of cotton bobbins a box of candles and her tarot cards left open cut at some forgotten omen a book shoved back the wrong way a pencil wedged between querelle and mean girls to hang something from now gone six candles in jars burned out and stacked in smoky segments like a big glass worm the pedal of the pedal bin peeping out from under the table the clip she had discarded from an open bag of chips eaten across multiple sittings a gold tooth assorted scars the missing piece of her shin

outages outrages ages but she didn’t care reading and writing and looking out of the window and no doomscrolling and no season two that only pitched season three no hours of her day fiddling with cables and turning it off and back on the quiet life she recalled old enough to have known better but no tradwife a stabby feminist the clack of a typewriter copying out pamphlets to pass on or skipping lunch so she could run the xerox machine with no one looking meeting in libraries and bookstores coffee shops as places of discussion and not free wifi and no nazi techlords shovelling queers into death camps rose tinted for sure but knowing her enemy having some sense of who to punch only naïve maybe the black and white in the film and not the scene peeling a plastic film from the top of her yoghurt and chewing her boba and knowing that a light that was always on was only marginally less useless than one that was always off

overeating and starving herself and throwing up and cutting herself and being fifty five not fifteen and crushing on all the wrong people but she drank too much excellent wine not cheap wine laughing at herself crying drunk enough to not be able quite to focus listening to tago mago with her plushie a red book her red camisole a red box another red box a red laptop case a red candle the red shirt she dried her hair with the belt from her red dress the red side of the nail file the blood moon the red spine of a volume of cocteau erotica the red dress itself red fish painted on a turkish jug the red spiders smiling on her blanket the broken nails of her middle fingers both hands marc bolan karl marx the cloth binding of a volume of matisse a gin bottle the boxes from her vans slipons a box of japanese incense her kurosawa all in a row your card an author’s name a ribbon binding the woody stems of half a dozen roses a little strawberry drawn on the lid of a tin the oven light an icon a new year card a badge with the number thirteen the jam in her empire biscuits cath kidston an early eardley one stripe in five fragile fragile red red red

overwhelmed flooded with tears and gin suicidal reading the news and not even afraid for herself anymore only she didn’t want to live in a world where this shit went down a ridiculous seventies italian funk album her antacids a spark her itchy shins her sticky eyes rubbing them and the mascara rolling into wee balls her dry snot forgetting to go grocery shopping or not making the effort to remember her pink cashmere cardigan her cute little mushroom dress and her chestnut tights with the big toe through on the right and her broken nails an empty silence an ache in her left obliques the rumble of the boiler your pink hair her favourite cake an ache in her right biceps hunched over the laptop a pee squishing in her comfort filled belly the cold biting her wet nose and an idiot with a stolen guitar harassing a kid on the street slowing down keeping her distance trying to ignore his cobalt blue tracksuit bobbing ahead dabbing at her dripping nose with a raggedy paper tissue then hurrying ahead past the pawn shop an ache in her right palm an itch in her left ear glazing over in a meeting and going home again coffee cake glazing tears bed an ache in her gut in her neck her head clothes and books heaped like an aftermath a cave of her vanity and wool gathering gritting her thin teeth like a trillion ton iceberg against a granite coastline her ashtray this little bottle a lighter a coiled pink cable two books by min jin lee

patching the meeting patching the cleaning the laundry leaving do not disturb on the yellow claws of these dried freesias and the cluster of lilac bells an ache in her ribs in her left hip the rice sticking in her throat her nose all clogged up at the back the oven settling the rain going off a white bird over the brush at forty five degrees and these clouds of steam a grey bird combing the eggshell sky in a parabolic curve a red shape in a window a damp stain on the building opposite like someone who’d pissed her knickers a vertical blind more solitary birds and the trees thinning so that she could see the building beyond vertical manilla its slit windows for archers but they were probably a metre wide just far away and she wanted to be small and far away and the dull copper cladding on the building behind and its powder blue balconies bleak in the grey light like brains and the patterns in the dust on the window ledge a play of soft shadows bleeding into one another like wet corpses in a heap for burning a small black bird bobbing uncertainly the happy birthday sign in the window opposite still after days or weeks looking less happy with every sun’s return and these black drains like the seams on her silks outlining the walls and the rooftops like a colouring book on grey paper so that all of her gaudy pastels could only draw blood and the grey dusk sliding the day towards night along a scale from nothing to nothing

photographs and sinuses soft regrets the cracks in her teeth a row of bricked up windows the backlight going off the little metal plates in her face having too much coffee too much sugar not enough water and fresh air exercise love a looseness in her face still soft here and there among the rough patches filmy eyed tired a weight in her brow tipping her forward like a falling building a smile her cheeky little smile even in the sadness and irony a playfulness and mischief these dangly earrings that caught in her cardigan too often when had she last changed them sleeping in them part of her like the metal plates then her pills that grew into teeth and bones and hair and nails and then plastics in her food old though pococurante remembering the lead flake or the cames in her stained glass the asbestos in the textured bedroom ceiling the pills from toilet strangers craven street nineteen eighty nine her headache lifting past midnight lolling through sleepiness into not wanting to go to bed turning the heating off for the night her stiff hips a jar of pennies the boiler groaning like a yawning dog her sticky wine glass liking night better than day because no one bothered her at night her swollen knuckles her weak enamel the whistle as the pipes emptied or cooled or something a cassette tape still in its film with the little gold strip round like a pack of cigarettes the gauloises reds she’d smoked all those decades and this pressure in the pit of her left eye a grey wall a blue light the taste still present to her pleasant to her as your lips and tongue the feel of your teeth the smell of you the taste of you lost to her in so few senses really and yet her face all the same crumpling now in tears

pieces of macaron from twelve hours previously emerging from the folds of her cardigan salted caramel and wintergreen a car throbbing in the street a voice too loud too late too male too violent a saxophone mournful accented a warped record a farfisa a flute the green light flashing on her epilator a bottle of royal blue ink a roll of blotting paper a box of rose scented incense a cable like a lizard’s tongue a masha gessen a cane chair her cheval glass her tweed skirt suit her leather skirt her red dress a crate of books titles unknown an ungifted gift a begonia her hairdryer a trinket box a detangler the blind her perfume a bottle of face powder a box of earplugs a silkscreen your signature the syd barrett fanzine she’d bought some time in the early eighties from the record store next to the comic book store in a crumbling shopping gallery all the goths had hung around in sat on the floor or on crates or one another and made out and talked and smoked and looked cool but she hadn’t been one of the cool kids only one of the kids who’d known some of the cool kids adjacent but not encompassed not embraced not included not made out with much or talked to much skinny and stupid and fearless stiff aloof vertical inhibited before the violence and the hurt and all the things young and beautiful and closeted her jewellery her dildo a bottle of lube trembling with hate and fear old alone a sagan a rug a stapler other voices other rooms

pinching her lip in the crust of her toast being bitten by her food this pain across her chest itching her eye the noise upstairs through the wall her life but her life meant these things she remembered not this dreaming a tiny cup a trickle of water a band saw these piles of spent candles waiting to be thrown away her scrying bowl full of obfuscations putting away your christmas card a pair of orange fiskars her scrunchie her umbrella folded up in its sleeve the ache in her left shoulder astrud gilberto her tights drying with the bedlinen pistils strewn over the parquet sticking to everything the holes in her socks books rectangular objects assorted heights and colours her flask a washrag an empty takeout container looking for something new something out of place this room these spent syringes a heap of rubber gloves pink and yellow raising her hand to her greasy face these spent coffee gounds taking too long to find the do not disturb button her stiff joints a box of laundry soap the pain passing then and breathing a harp the knots in her stomach the violence and her spent anger just tired south china funk reading your messages this idiot beating on the walls pulling the pin closing her eyes pafupafu

poring pouring smelling other people fiddling with her headphones through her olsen tuck a crane rearing over the slate roofs on its swaying leash a record just for her someone in overalls spray painting a fence people limping in the dripping cold or else hurrying towards something away from something what did she know a pink paper bag her rings a faultlessly chewy macaron with too much filling a pile of croissants a dead tree a red faced boy in a man’s beard the gas truck yellow like bees a cheese plant a forest of lightbulbs backpacks an autobus a finnish accent tortoiseshell glasses scarves handbags little dogs a bottle of pink lemonade people pushing prams sticky fingers bad jazz taking a break kate spade no bra pink hair nicky wire a brutalist housing block a tiny fly squeezing from the middle her favourite show her favourite wine the vague correlation between the temperature and the time a jug of milk becoming angry exponentially losing her patience crossing her legs making mistakes again and again her favourite mistake giving up and going home voices fingers clouds an ache in her left knee the tension across her sinuses the door squeaking again and again remembering falling in love coffee bags red hair pride flags a slow cursor her coat tails trailing on the floor a stubborn refusal a biscuit this girl’s hat her lips her glasses noticing her noticing her noticing her bricks palings overstaying her own welcome a striped jersey no longer caring but not stopping either the phlegm gathering at the back of her palate the future the light disappearing at the end of the tunnel and slowing down in resignation a cough learning the language an ache in her back from the bottom to just above the middle amused as always purple hair packing her bags the slow realisation of having had too much coffee and it being too late to do anything about it a tinkle of cutlery hoodies assorted colours beginning to wonder a sandwich bag hunching a series of cars all black or white children in bobble hats annoying friends a powder blue gingham shirt a guy she didn’t like a heap of cups tote bags a single rose musical chairs headphones headphones headphones

pricks greasy windows clicks and hums her braid a strength workout to nirvana and metallica her wet knickers her knotted brow itches stitches red and green afterimages running through her bony fingers doors slamming inside and out an ache in the palm of her hand in her shoulder across her eyes the tote bag you hadn’t taken when you’d left still stuck with your queer badges crumpled in a heap under her stockinged heels with a blanket and something hard her handbag her pink laptop case a mounting sense of unease in her belly and her brow the hard winter sun low in the ice blue sky squatting along the rooftops snorting the life from everything lying the lines on her hands like snakeskin thin the blue veins her scratched watch face the weakness in her all through her bones like the bubbles in honeycomb eating too late scrunching her day into the bin like a used come rag the blue rags for wiping the lith plates another century cut and paste a meatspace save icon skeuomorphism for a dead civilisation her russian declining faster than the news and her own little diaspora losing her place in it all diana in reykjavik was svetik still in kazakhstan or elena in tblisi with galla the irony that some gchq heo who couldn’t afford to live in london knew more about her than she did and the steam boiler cutting out then leaving a splintered silence like a milk bottle knocked from the window ledge by an overeager crow a shilling for the meter and a poorly muffled exhaust in the street then snapping her into twenty twenty five and the dread of the day to come

putting the light out putting the cat out putting the fire out but the switch didn’t work with the internet down a single point of failure an end state the laughable predictions of full societal collapse within twenty five years when ecogeddon would have taken us all by then anyway like being given a diagnosis five inoperable years and shutting up shop and going home to loved ones and a final sinking peace to watch sunsets enjoy every sandwich but here posting on social media making pronouncements giving orders laying down the law like the king of fools sharing inspirational quotations making plans organising acting like history had anything left to say the streaks on the window recording the storm’s violence venturing out into the debris everything playing at once her socks her shins goosepimpled freshly plucked for no reason than habit and her knees bruised and burst her cotton nightdress her flogged thighs her cardigan the braid in her hair her glasses the snot pooling under her nose the skin on her face rough soft her smashed fingers her dry lips her cheekbones the tears pooling at the corners of her eyes a stray hair fluff the colour of her socks the blurry part in her field of vision wondering where she’d left her book an angry whine from the pipework a broomstick blessed in blood moonlight feeling her way the strains and motions inside of her the kink in her spine or in her blood in her chromosomes her wonky karyotype beautiful unique a freak natural if not normal a genius with eggs for eyes her queer wee body without organs a gonadology too clever for her own good and too good for nothing

rain gusting horizontal like machine gun fire tidal picking her lips with her teeth laying awake in the dark then falling asleep at dawn troubled dreams of you wishing she knew if she loved you or not forcing down a glorious colombia your gift still wrapped discarded then hers still she’d open it at some point when the need arose rubbing her eye the wind dying back like an invading army to regroup rubbing her throat cancelling her appointment forgetting her donut and retrospectively enjoying her coffee even less rubbing her scalp her ankle unaccountably pain free her hair setting itself in the scab over her left ear running out of candles the last donut the last of everything a whooping cough outbreak as though the whole of her life had never happened your collar bones your arms pale and strong your trembling lip and bird like gestures the point on your jawline she had loved to bite and all of your piercings having failed to die before she had gotten too old laughing bitterly then crying in earnest with her whole fucking chest and the room through milky eyes full with ghosts the ectoplasm that was the veil itself uprooted from her materiality and thus perceptually aware of its own substrate the amnion of death and rebirth a low drowning soft immeasurable a final surrender to the devilish threat of having to go through it all over

reeling drunk one whole day before an excuse picking her scabs sitting on her plushie a scrunchie on the back of the chair a hand thrown cereal bowl a card in blue ink lopsided nestled in these dried irises the waistband of her skirt arching in her chair like sedentary yoga forgetting to file her nails healing slowly one notebook poking out at a different angle than the rest the ache in her back the curve of her spine burping a little hiccup of burning vomit into the back of her throat four paper clips in a chain running out of candles the remote perched on the arm of the other chair at a precarious tilt her seifuku these bottles this pile of books a red box all of the things that were new or that had been here for some time peering from behind the laptop the roar of a car in the street the bed she would lie awake in until dawn a scrollbar tears feeling sick the instructions for the heating an ibm model m a slammed window her japanese toaster a shallow sigh a new moon stiff little fingers a book of photographs shot from a moving vehicle a catalogue of holocaust paintings the wittgenstein house a bottle of prosecco a box of positives a colouring book a story book with pages that folded out or moved her evolving crisis a pop from the fridge like a burst balloon the city the tension in her brow a film about the japanese occupation the spring welling up in her from nowhere the feeling she would not see another summer and unsure whether to fight or to embrace or simply to resign herself to this thought tapping the keyboard with an unusual conclusiveness but she had only hit the spacebar and said nothing yet again a silence the radiator the fridge the air filter sucking microplastics from the air like a whale mopping up plankton from the monstrous sea

regretting trying regretting succeeding regretting having wanted it at all in the first place her throat tightening in on itself so that she could scarcely breathe more wound up with every alert and these dead flowers scattered under the table your cyanotypes your little shrine a glass of wine a walnut a donut covered in pink sprinkles on pink icing a panic attack gathering in the basin of her stomach like an ice storm tiptoeing petrified and you getting her daft references obscure profound fucking her and then all of that passing and then growing old without you and this whatever it was this afterwards an aftermath the void left behind in the air a sonic boom the sky folding in on itself her ring that wouldn’t stay on and the swollen knuckles that meant it never quite fell off the cold and feeling the cold and sometimes feeling cold when it was objectively not cold and remembering some random girl she’d worked with years ago for no reason and thinking of the great web of all the people she’d known and the lives that had gone on without her like her own her own life had gone on without her and here this floor sweeping this drawn out anticlimax the few blank pages at the end of the book that made up the rest of the signature her sadness her dirty little flat the groceries these tulips four o’clock

reminding herself she was alive the hourly floggings the tightness in her bad ankle her belly gnawing at her empty mouth needing to shit her chapped lips a bad smell and a closed window pinching her cheek her lip and forgetting every moment and starting again picking the sleep from her eyes the delftware sky a party of lights bobbing in the distance touching her cold nose her earrings a crick in her neck feeling the knobbly ridge of her spine the soft nape giving way to whorls of mousey hair and the edge of her skull picturing it insde her and smiling not quite believing it real and more lights and the sky darkening bottle blue these little bumps under her bottom lip she didn’t know what they were called and her silky eyebrows her high cheekbones inhaling getting up to fetch the wine from the fridge checking the hallway again rubbing her eye and her ankle stiff again twisted like rope needing to pee the birds cawing their evening laments a car whistling in the street your red pinafore shrugging her shoulders tights with shorts your silver eyes your inky arms her dry lips the smell of a new book

rings earrings an ear cuff necklaces a bangle on a little plate as old as she was faded beautiful her bare sticky arms her red dress the sinews of her pale thin hands her perfect nails and this one broken nail flaky splintered square the blue veins in her skinny wrist and the crook of her wrinkly elbow and the fine fair hairs of her forearm upright in the cold air like prey animals in a frozen landscape her jacqueline groag cushion and the cushion you had made an olive velvet cushion and the brushed suede seat behind her bent back bouncing gently with her clumsy movements like a baby’s chair her soft breast its hard nipple erect in its little moat her collarbones their thin skin soft and taut picking at a scab touching her eyes her mouth her face still clammy with cold cream biting the middle joint of her middle finger on the left and the uneven ridge of her teeth licking herself remembering being licked remembering being touched but no one had ever touched her like this delicately or with the awed astonishment she felt at her own body only rough and grasping or violently an endless cycle of abuse and knowing she had never been loved only desired only taken and discarded used abused raped and beaten utilised like so much cement the whining radiator the rumbling boiler the humming fridge the hissing fan a noise from the stairwell a pain in her right shoulder a little orange notepad her gold pen a napkin from somewhere she couldn’t go back to a colouring book an empty piss bottle a pile of receipts an expired voucher for twenty percent off a pair of crocs

sad and sick to her stomach the orange light pressing on her temples a sudden jarring through her limbs in the pit of her a profound sorrow like caverns in the roots of her soul the churning of machines guts drains weather fronts the whole of it the assemblage that was her state of materiality these books blue yellow green this little card your hanrdwriting and the little loveheart that she now traced with her finger imagining your finger tracing the other side a magickal looking glass into the counterfactual some world where you loved her where her fingers and toes numbered twenty and the count of her bones and the pieces of her bones came to the same the slamming of a door through some wall or other and this rolling drone like a car stuck in snow and this unease that cupped her like a newborn her little cat silver in the palm of her hand death was every cell of every body hard coded the only algorithm a penthouse flat a hurt laugh that struck her throat like a fist like a rope that tightened like coughing blood spitting bile to the parquet floor the ache in her hip and her knee and her toe and neck and shoulder feeling it propagate throughout her an infection of hurt a picture of a light on the sleeve of your pink record then wishing she still had a record player and holding it in her heart as though a phantom heat might radiate from it and bring her back to life a used bookshop or a shop for used books a cobbled lane a lesbian friend a portuguese custard tart this small dog that looked more like a pig

screeching wheeling squeaking wheezing cawing laughing through the soft yolky sunlight and these warm currents like layers of jello falling horizontal like bowling balls curling stones the rolling breath of the traffic on the freeway and the grit on the windows like film grain light the measure of a day and an obsolete film stock the tick marks her references her language increasingly a private thing a desert island a community of one her interaction sustantially now with herself on other occasions a door slammed because people had lives a dog barking through the punched blue cloud cover low slipping untethered over the lip of the world past static cranes more birds more jello a hush a hum an increase a surcease a marching band someone’s pride another’s shame her books bleaching on the window ledge gessen ernaux her rhodia trilling pleading like she was lazy bored her peonies yellowing in their murky water their season in another tense now and wondering louder each year if her last peonies were her last peonies then upstairs beating the floorboards and a nervousness pervaded through the bird calls and traffic’s audible pollution the sound of suicide a vote for suicide her green poster sun faded to gold the morning after but she had things to do besides calibrate the day’s colour table or master the movie soundtrack of this unique slice through a planet’s activity and the noise and the light only repetetive now the progressive enhancement of mindful bareness approaching diminishing returns a font face a blog post a greying the wink of her camera’s one eye boots in dust not snow a ringing a pile of boxes aimless an oblique flash of fast shadows that clicked through the blind flapping like square wings at the world outside

september anxiety the drizzle in her face just a smir high in the sky nothing to worry about dog shit and parked cars these treacherous cunts lights dotted like accidents soft buildings the grey purple night kneeling over the cracked intersection a disease from her childhood a pile of ashtrays her numb fingers seeing hearing speaking no evil forgetting to light her candle your card then missing you limping in the rain talking to her friend sharing their congruent unhappinesses her umbrella dangling from her wrist your purple hair the films you’d sent carefree in the desert sun or buying cigarettes in parking lots an activation code remembering smoking in cafés remembering you smoking in cafés remembering you smoking dried flowers wine red grey purple smears of cucumber dip around the walls of the ramekin the spanish girl beautiful shy the others wondering now how many of the regulars you had slept with and not much caring her throat sore and sticky like a foreshock refusing it a pile of clothes and accessories dressing and undresing her name tag her name the yellow lamplight of the kitchen tipping the scale against sunset’s evaporating silk trying not to believe in it pulling the blind drinking water a drop of blood and feeling violated but she spilled it herself freely enough promiscuously enough curled like a lost appleskin under the fridge plated with dust and hair her dogtooth skirt three towels an undersheet female circumcision naming it and knowing an aftermath a doughy resolution a pink flask a little red pot the kettle a blue bottle her scrying bowl an expiration plain and dull

shabby lonely jaded bored tired sleepless leaking grief at every seam and the shame of her little house broken and neglected like her body and bones seeing only the vanishing point left to look forward to having run out of road tears of resignation aching where you weren’t holding her forgetting to set a timer and burning the dinner then relieved she didn’t have to eat it and pouring an icy bordeaux straight from the fridge instead its condensation misting across the surface of the glass then an unexpected knock at the door and ignoring it and another and getting up and finding her keys and choking on her heart with every fumbling twist at the lock then shuddering the door open over her shoes to a lost delivery driver and giving him directions and realising just as she spoke that some part of her had thought somehow it might have been you and an age passed and she closed the door and folded into sheets of angry tears then as the finality of her lostness cracked through every bone in her body like a fracture through safety glass then this wine and her burning throat and gulps of hot panic engulfing her like air in her gills a hopeless gesture to all of the no one she had left an aimless motion of one arm across her face like the orgasm that had broken the spell of jeanne dielman’s domestic routine

she was out of mushrooms red pink the spine of queer spaces glinting at her a huddle of nail varnish leaf green unicorns sparkly purple iridescent pink and blue an oily film like puddles at a gas station these great envelopes from an assortment of unrequited loves iceland chicago a red box of memories miyazaki watercolours magazines a picture book a monograph wrinkled sticky notes dried out after a coffee spill a cute dress draped over the back of the chair lilac with little flower buttons but too tight across the boobs her ibm model m and the recollection of their nazi collaboration and the resonances she felt in a pandering technocratic oligarchy and wishing a spandau on them and the smooth apologists on the shilling a tight little ache in her belly on the left above her pantyline a rising in her chest of something like nerves having taught in none of the past ten years or sung in twenty having no exams to pass and only her death certificate left to qualify for your mixtape your seifuku her phone the tv remote your broken smile the game controller with its fucked joysticks the maw of an open book hungry for her attention and wishing then that it had eaten her whole and not spat her out again here into this chair by this table set with this crockery empty of the meal she hadn’t cooked sighing then and a creasing of her eyes and mouth with simultaneous smiles and tears liking this hurt more than any of the not you that filled each of its alternatives

shooting up shooting a roll of neopan shooting the shit a rifle guitar bottle caps in the washing machine and unidentifiable wooden objects in her caponata peeling like bark like leather skin on skin the rain and the birds grey jaggy like oatmeal and toenail clippings a dirty light like spent mop water hanging wet over the day like pissed sheets her breathing one notch shallower through it like slow drowning a dullness and shy yet of her first drink of the day in between in between your records piled against the linen closet leaning like a cocky leather boy like you in your greasy blue boiler suit and cracked cowboy stompers looking her up and down and spitting to one side like some cunt in a movie her darling lesbian cliché her performative little fantasy drilling wet holes in her with your green eyes and purple tongue and her broken fingers as twisty in the coils of your rusted hair as a screw in a thread riveted beaten rolled and polished and a helicopter then stirring overhead chopping her soft memories to pieces like bananas in a smoothie a red beep from some needlessly computerised device and the sun then glowing through it all between the curve of your thighs recalled as plain as the day was dull your overalls undone and the burned triangle above your breasts pointing down and the tinkling of blue orange water whispering from horizons barely apprehended in the tangle of red wire crowning your gleaming smile the tip of your tongue laughing in the dark wedge of your broken front tooth the feel of it the feel of your curling lips as she had felt it and these birds now picking up in the evening traffic rain that peeled away like dead skin cars turning in the runout groove she was old now like these records your guitar the bottle she fetched now from the cellar scratched and real a porky prime cut

sore in her stomach in her back in her kidneys the backs of her legs her ribs her teeth her ankle and the knee on the other side her knuckles a slow cyclic screech like brakes the gurgling in her belly wishing she could have switched herself off for the night like the ceiling light waves of grinding discomfort going through her like a threshing machine coming round in the shimmering day the ache in her left temple and a tightness in her lower spine the sound of a stepladder snapping open from the stairwell then drilling then her cold knees and her little espresso cup caramel gold hand thrown wobbly beautiful and her patched up nail that had survived the night and a vague sense of bewilderment at all things the headlines but anyone who refused to call it a concentration camp was a propagandist not a journalist closing her eyes recalling sharply a moment in the night waking in sweat and crying because she was still alive an anniversary the death of irony her itchy collarbones her holey socks a cereal bowl printed with purple flowers her yellow cardigan buttoned half way down a hum a crack a flurry of clangs the buttery light the invisible sky behind the greasy smir that had frosted her windows since the storm and keeping them all fast not knowing or wanting to know what it was or why it hadn’t dried a buzz thrumming somewhere in the room or not something somewhere else murmuring the walls the cracks in the walls the pang across the bridge of her brow when she looked up the oily patina across the screen and the light turning then like a blue cheese and the boiler starting stopped and this low whine that inherited the silence then like a clown the keys to the palace

spearmint wintergreen the bleach taste of the micellar water her face cream a hit of caffeine straight to the eyes puffy purple banana powder then retinols her oestrogel and almost brushing her teeth with it that one time it had come in a tube and not a pump dispenser and the only wipes that would take off the only mascara that wasn’t too runny or too sticky or too powdery and too tired to epilate tonight she would do it in the morning or forget and do it a whole day late tying her braid the taste of the carmex on her lips the feel of your carmex on her nipple then you and an empty glass another chapter of this book that made her so happy every chapter down made her sad in her biba nightdress thinking suddenly of nightwood then of montparnasse and the library of orange rhodia from monoprix that she’d filled in her little hotel in the budget room that had opened right onto the street in a late august heatwave so that she’d kept the window open all night and lain awake listening to the thin nightlife subdued by the muggy chaleur then the blouse she’d washed with shampoo in the sink because she’d run out of things to wear dry by morning and her plimsolls sticking to the tarmac so that she’d scurried along like a beetle clinging to every shadow then saint sulpice cool with grace and incense and the queue for confession and laughing aloud at the litany of sinfulness running through her thoughts committed or yet to be committed then nauseous putting the light off curling up with her plushie and lying awake in the cold barfing acid into her brittle teeth until she needed to pee badly enough to suffer the condensation and the noise of day

sun and backache needing shopping needing a wee lie down needing to fuck this obnoxious girl she despised needing to get over herself singing moonchild and thinking herself something and these cars electric blue gleaming silver trees lost in thought muttering to themselves hard shadows and light jazz the smoke from a real cigarette her lip rim on the half filled cup of coffee and a veil then a dipping as into water the surface of the light and smelling it now the breeze carrying its tarred echo her teeth furred with cake frosting pink like eardley on sandpaper leaves in four distinct shades of green like a poster an unsubtle pickup line forgetting her earrings again giving in leaning back her sense of being tethered to the world thin and then this pain holding her down an unease a disquiet an underwhelming and this physical attraction to someone she found morally repulsive she was clutching at straws at some long vanished thread of an interest in life in her life in her own continued existence that no longer woke her in the morning only intruded vaguely on her sleep and this shambles in sportswear as though fitness were presentational which it was

swells like ocean waves in the traffic noise a siren a door banging shut hums and cracks a whistle of hydraulic brakes more sirens closer an engine drone a soft breeze kissing her shins her hard belly finger marks in her slipware the coming of night a green bag a blue bag a brown bag the brown dark the leaning window the strange twilight glow of red sandstone and this groaning machine a settling of rush hour like a sauce reduced to a simmer and doors banging shut the interplay of frequencies which was all the universe was complexity as the epiphenomenal entanglement of many simplicities the worlds in her guts in her soft machine and these hard machines and the fudgy distinction therebetween a funnel blowing smoke like a golden age movie star the shifting tectonics of a glamour in decline but everything was in decline but but but nothing but this caveat entanglement and the complexity arising like scorpio to fuck up simple destinies of balance and air with its stingy wet confabulations and footsteps then on the wet concrete and more banging and rumbling and other people and a tension in her stomach then soft hard these grinding engine sounds and a dusk that fell like a drunk bruising knees and elbows mournful sonorous and sirens again an engine roar the sounds of the city as the streetlights blinked awake for the night like the golden bubbles in her first soft prosecco of the day a revolution accelerating below her open window the biscuit red walls music the lilac sky her scalp her scrunchie the itch in her scalp a backlit keyboard an ambient breathing glow a cough the lights reflected in the windows opposite a pain in her left eye folding her underwear and putting it away

swirls of grease on the inside of the glass a hand print and the sun low then in the sky like a finger pointing at it accusing her but of what that she had stopped just stopped caring for her environment her body anything cleaning or taking her meds sticking to a budget but the light was cold and silvery frost and fire children in lines her pink building two flights up on a hill with an appreciable view admittedly and endless hours staring the rumbling machine an accomodation a disassimilation the buzzer then and the dread then silence the creaking of pipes for heating or refrigeration making a shopping list putting her face on a tongue of floss pouting from the breakfast bowl walking upright because she was filled with tears to just below the eyes and any rash motions at any time might have spilled them a siren the trees fingering distant glass holding it all like her breath the tension in her stomach disappointed by how few lines you’d had not for you but for her because you were all she gave one single fuck about curling into your blanket and its smell of halloween kisses the crick in her neck a click the end

taking the blade of her waiter’s knife to her blue thigh because you had told her to and then refusing to kill you even though you had told her to then not killing herself even though you told her to and knowing why she was like this and it not making any difference and saying well and saying now you knew your boundaries the fridge whining again and the laptop itching her scars maybe it needed defrosting taking her dinner out of the oven and letting it go cold as she drank the glass of wine she’d poured then left to go warm and the flowery nose of it like proust and its oily mouthfeel like dish soap and knowing what she was and missing you and wishing she still had someone to cut her and tell her what to do these loud boys next door brutish triggering the silence after the boiler and these passing cars the stillness the anticipation apprehension then the boiler and the shouting again the fridge all noise nothing but noise no signal in the garbage the plastic bags lining up to spell nothing some pig radiant wonderful two legs bad the difference between domination and abuse

talking shit with her knickers off obscure eighties indie bands forgotten and not wrongly her nail cream your flat white cup chips and dip and a spoon at a perfect forty five degree angle your hexagonal plate a knife pointed right at her the chorus filing her nails the bubbles in her water her gold pen an open window in another room the hum of machines a panel door her genitals the lint on her seifuku discarded among headphones novels a game controller tissues an apple pencil the wake of her passing like a slug sliming the walls the warmth of the heating pipes the days opening the feeling of spring’s nearness and of having thus survived another winter like the feeling going to bed reluctantly having survived another day and dreading the next wishing to prolong this one and postpone the not yet survived life was cyclic no victory complete no gain ineradicable the slam of the boy upstairs failing to know how to close a door or live in an apartment wishing to slam his head in his own sociopathy donuts stale now hard shells around a runny centre a metaphor for something workaday and banal the smell of disinfectant the end of a playlist her chapped lips no kisses and her clean arsehole fresh from the shower enlightened burdened left alone to contemplate her eudaimonia

tea and honey a cinnamon biscuit her snorkmaiden cup using her wank finger to scoop the honey from the bottom because the others had long nails nodding off in a haze of pollens and tannins licking her finger thinking of you then this tidal swell in her belly and feeling nauseous a yellow book staring at her in its spot on the shelf wedged between taller wider volumes like a manspreading arsehole on the subway losing her signal losing her concentration the love of her life your butt in tight pants the fluffy coat you’d worn that had made an amigurumi of you so that she’d run when she’d seen you coming to fold herself about you like a fog the stick of pussywillow you’d been carrying that day in the concrete light the sky solid like a glass brick and the steel stairway in red and black spiralling away from you then some party an oriel window biting your knee through the rips in your grunge jeans because she’d known just what made you unravel in your coils of fabulous laughter then the hill home in the wet dark past a high school shut up for the night and the trees scratchy like cracks in the pavement her book yawning at her the evening failing and not as yet hungry knowing she would binge on finger food before the open fridge late enough to sleep like shit after having never quite gotten the knack of twenty four hours daily suddenly hot with fury that she was here and you were not so that her eyes reddened with hot tears for her unasked for longevity and hated strength of character and it died like unpoked coals again her wet face these blue windows the purple sky hung with stars of forever chemical precipitation frozen in flight by january’s dusk

teeth and tongues and dry granola nostalgic for delusions of which she’d been disabused impossible crushes a time when she hadn’t known better tired of her hard won wisdom and her sensible shoes of seeing a hospital bill in every new avenue that opened to her missing being stupid missing acquiring her injuries and impairments now that she merely lived with them a blue bag yellowed green the filmy hoar of age over all her things her greasy ipad and this unpolished chair things she no longer repaired watching films rather than episodic shows because she was more confident about living another two hours and this little wicker bag stitched with faded flowers and forgetting what was in it and then being surprised by the blue gingham lining her gym bag long unused striped in navy white like police tape the belt from a liberty print frock a belt from a houndstooth skirt a plate shaped like a flower a tiny clothes peg a scissor a little jar of pink nail cream the sound as she set it back on the table a sky the colour of soy milk or papier mâché and the cold metal buildings wedged in it like doorstops a solitary swallow scoring quadratics across the window her scarred fingers stained glass and guitar strings and under those the editor’s scalpel wounds of the weekly paste ups nothing did anything anymore but to be seen then her own actions feeble like ghosts becoming a thing like everything fading into the wallpaper her silver ring thin like her breath the flickering beat of her heart in her bony chest these jolly blooms cartoonish a painter’s palette polka dots that had turned out to be little hearts dusk

terrible things seething smells from uncapped drains fucked plumbing dipshits who flushed things too many arses and too few oceans a planet of waste candle grease and incense a bottle of fizz surviving another day her favourite skirt her flogger her phone a quilted throw her favourite dress her third favourite jim jams a prouvé on corse filled with blue views and perriand a tiny flat in sainte barbe facing across the bay to la rhune a basement in the city with no access to the bins and a spit from her favourite coffee shop your drawing red blue like a cross at the foot of her bed your handbag in its dust bag wrapped in spotty paper still the bathroom fan her unwatered plant her uneaten dinner the wine still in the fridge the holes in her pink socks her flogger again an acetone sharpness slicing the dead air beginning to feel hungry a femboi from her youth now old and bear mode wondering whether he’d always been a top only deceptively pretty stereotypes laughing at herself and hating herself and the rest of the world hating her own clichés true or untrue her conformances they were not capitulations but coincidences like everyone else like everyone else liar polluter problematic bitch the yellow light her yellow cardigan her skin thin like wet tissue her fingers in her mouth your hand over her mouth loving missing you wishing you could have been here hurting her again the bed post a supermarket loyalty card a muji notebook a snot cairn sitting up getting up a spotty dress grey with dust a jar of ancient pot pourri a hat box next door’s comings and goings evening settling like silt behind her eyes a toothbrush an epilator a jar of pencils a red cushion the sleep in her eyes václav havel

the fridge screaming at her your records gathering dust the thought of you an old love gathering under the bed like dust bunnies scattered like pollen like microplastics through her cracked body broken and mended at sea the body they would bury not the one she’d been born with the one they might have done then but if she’d killed herself then she wouldn’t have met you later the best day of her life so far but the lowest total volume of trauma she would ever again know entropy no such thing as getting less fucked only stumbling forward fast or slow but always with more distance behind her the evening smog itching her eyes not going walks anymore and becoming shapeless less capable thereof till one day she’d be unable to get out of bed and lie in her own piss and shit as hunger and dehydration consumed the last of her ashes like a time lapse photo of a bowl of fruit rotting to the underpainting like a backward vermeer flies buzzing at her windows larvae in her ears and eye sockets a bottle of gin her legacy unopened and cold as long as the fridge held out an unpaid electricity bill the letters she tossed straight into the recycling unopened a voluminous rival to the box for the bottle bank in name only

the last of it of cakes and candles chocolate coins caring one way or another if she lived or died a dream of sadness of her childhood and the pretty dress that had made her feel like her and holding her hair up for the neighbours to zip her up at the back because you hadn’t been there not you another you some earlier you and the beautiful little town under its mountain and the rice and the golden forest the little bus running away all her life never at ease with both feet through the door falling for the realtor and not the house being of no fixed address unreachable her stomach giving back the spicy food she force fed it with the dishes the dusting sweeping the floors lighting her candles a smell like burning garbage the misted lip along the bottom of the window lips like sugar waiting for her wine to warm up pulling the blind an orange sunset waiting for the light to go out a car driven through a crowd the bodies their blood red haloes visible even through the blur and the other people lost just stood there unable to comprehend the incomprehensible truth of it the time at christmas she’d looked out the window to witness someone beaten senseless and her friend had said there was always someone somewhere having the shit kicked out of them and she was angry now and hoped that he might be somehwere having the shit kicked out of him and remembering talking shit to her filling up her simple little heart with darkness and blood a hint of lemon in the violet sky an aeroplane a proof

there was nothing left that she felt besides pain glassy pain frosty pain the pain of loss or regret the pain in her ankle her knee her ribs her guts grief and longing and acid reflux sleeplessness and a hard anxiety festering in her like kidney stones the backs of her thighs her hips her throat these pictures of you your woolen sweater and earnest kufiya and your endless green eyes and creamy breasts your soft shoulders your smile your spots your reveries silver cheekbones mismatched socks your braids your knees your eyelashes the flowers in front of the screen reaching and falling like shadow puppets a tragic diva her silent aria calling your name the engine noises and slamming doors a fine bordeaux more familiar than enjoyable her tight stomach grumbling over poorly chewed meals eaten in apathy and haste the pain in her left shoulder settling into the biceps brachii rubbing her eye leaning this way and that to displace the weight of her variegated discomforts from places she’d had enough so that new places might have their fill of it too her little finger broken more than the other so that it protruded at a wider angle like street photography scars that drew a treasure map of internal wounds checking the news and registering only that it was bad which she’d known in advance and the fridge trembling to an abrupt stop like a bicycle before escaped toddlers a petal on the floor on its wee own red like blusher and a dusty three pin plug and not getting up or thinking much about any of it only where she was and immersed more or less in its phemonenology with no longer any metaphysics to call her own

these flowers red yellow pink these candles the gaps between them a cactus an arsehole quoted on the cover of her book and offended enough that she’d stuck gold washi tape over it a newsprint sky bleeding slate grey ink and the noise of some amplified masculinity bleeding through the walls these greasy windows spotted with calcified rain the smell of the tumble dryer a purple dress like fish heaped across a cantilever chair these dust bunnies a box of antacids an etched silence scored with hums and drones a pipe a whine a sudden dip in the light like the battery dying then the dryer stopping and the knots in her gut twisting and the little click of the door unlocking and getting up and taking the laundry out of the machine and sitting down again a butter icing day gold and grey like a cheap biscuit and the window steaming then like a train birds slicing the view like tangrams pink and grey forgetting to use her dictionary when it was right there and those flowers again cooler in the twilight buenos aires the marble floor of some colonial palace and the cool air inside sounds of traffic sweeping the freeway a flicker of wings a booming overhead and the precarious pile of boxes red and grey toppling into the window seat a click a groan a sigh she was part of the machine of the house the part that loaded or unloaded washing machines got up to check the fuses poured fuel into its oven cleaned out the ashes heaped clothes like fish read books listened to records opened and closed windows and doors knotted at the stomach replacable friable old the meow of an overhead jet the wet sandstone her wrist

things she could see things she could feel this headache her fingers the soft pit of her eye and its hard brow the powdery eyebrow and the glitter and then this ache in her lower back and pressing her cheekbone now playing skateboard games because she was old dressing her character in jorts a raglan shirt blue hair because she was old the wrapper from her coffee biscuit the cold the fog in her head this pile of half read books getting too much done and having now nothing to do your pictures flipping over and over on the screen now not even longing just burned into her retinas your soft breasts the shape of them here in your vest the nipple the areola successive haircuts laughter tears anger a funny face disdain mostly for her or the camera and beautiful still frozen in it like the bits in her tutti frutti and this stare distant fiery as though a dark foreboding had dripped from the night sky into your curls and tangled in them rooted itself in your skull but she was projecting backward in time from her position of superior knowledge and the bitter spit then in her mouth that ignorance would have been preferable to her and knowing then this was another lie and that to forget you would have been hell to her a thump on the ceiling small aftershocks twisting in her chair in her blanket these cushions finding her hair tied back having no recollection of having done it or why an english teacup the tag from her teabag twisting again the patterns the lights made on the table through the empty glasses woodgrain shadows crumbs a bunch of green eucalyptus in an hourglass bouquet vase

thinking it was as sore as it could get then knowing otherwise hobbling about the flat with the blinds up because she couldn’t reach to pull them anymore a scrunched up paper tissue her blue and white epilator a jar of pencils an ink drawing of a blue girl in a red wash in a flurry of birds her suit hanging in its trails of dust a bottle of royal blue ink a pencil eraser a keyfob a kate spade bag the two pin plug for something she’d brought back from france and a postcard from somewhere ireland scotland a stained glass virgin summer’s idle fan a ream of copy paper a pink poinsettia a hat box the mirror a brown chest of drawers its mismatched handles a bottle of salt spray a tube of hand cream her homepod mini a silkscreen of a dancing wolf her marimekko makeup bag then turning more or less involuntarily one way and then the other wittig preciado the choreography of her library angels the fireplace a straw hat the hair tie you’d given her when six no seven years ago a portmeirion trinket tray and an assortment of trinkets therein the beads you’d threaded for her back then but she couldn’t bring herself to say it to name it to deadname fallen friends an unworn miniskirt her flogger her sunnies her sanrio hairbrush her earbuds the unmade bed a pink tin of vaseline a mapplethorpe a stack of sticky notes pink yellow green blue the grain of the little table two boxes of japanese incense earplugs cardigans scarves tights standing to stretch overhead and everything shifting jarman plath an inmost matryoshka and a little buddha from hong kong burping her korean rice back as the pain in her back spread slowly across her breasts

this one yellow window sharper than the others a pin point like a hole in the stockings of the night a tear in the veil and not just a worn patch fireworks then in the threadbare sky she could hear them but she couldn’t see them sore in her tummy cold in her shins tired behind her eyes hunched in her blanket a folder of mp3s your legs your red boots and that tartan mini a flash from the right a plushie tossed upside down against her laptop case against the arm of the chair her camera a scrunched napkin her trembling lips a middle eight her thumb in the socket of her eye her elbow on the arm of the chair a marimba an ending the days ahead and the greater number behind like a blue iceberg night fading in like a slideshow splats of rain on the greasy windows the whistling radiator the ache in her ribs a deepening like sinking like trouble the green water an italian coffee house vaguely recalled an aranciata rossa her crossed legs and the marble tabletops and ironwork chairs and the gender neutral loos with a little queue in the anteroom and bill gates calling elon musk insane a short laugh then you coming back to the table and the man stood with his cock thrust towards her backing away and getting ready to leave and you taking her hand and crying suddenly and wanting to be in your pocket and clinging to you then for everything as if to spin a binding spell about you which she had but in one direction only

thud nausea the taste in her mouth her bandaged finger her sore elbows voices through the wall dormer windows her peeling headphones a betrayal fifty years in the making a note card the hum of the fridge the whirr of a fan background drones of unknown origin an empty glass her book and these flowers closed for the night like little nectar shops smiling because she had no idea what to do in the face of something so unimaginably monstrous watching tv waiting for it to stop to feel something again a motor somewhere clanging somewhere a summer dress in winter pink and yellow her sore knuckles locking in place doing yoga in a daze touching her belly feeling her hand touching her belly a red needle wagging over a dial she would never again touch herself where you had touched her the sound of something scraping over the floor above cyrillic writing she could read but not comprehend a dick a cunt the girl who had pronounced sugar sucker and remembering her with a modest laugh and her sister then that place its white walls and the painters and dancers who had frequented it this place with its grey walls and emptiness no love no art no literature well almost if it could even be called that

tight and bloated full of rice and wine unfocussed slowly fading out patching the phone then worrying after a horn section a piano with all the pedals hard to the floor more trouble than she was worth stuck with herself a stab in her throat slurring her words curling in her chair picking her nose an umbrella a wine glass taking her meds always flogging the same thigh a bossanova her red apron strings trailing on the floor from her green chair a blister of pills a bowl her chopsticks drips drying on the table a single little green leaf cold having unbuttoned her cardigan but unable to button it again clumsily pulling her blanket over her soft shoulders grainy sepia setting an alarm in case she survived the night posing like an anorexic rodin tucking her bangs behind her ear regretting mistakes she hadn’t made yet a mushroom a moth a fern scared a permanent state of terror even in the relief of each passing disaster missing the arm of the chair with her elbow an apartment on diderot a white paper bag with gold stripes an ache in her poking finger flogging her self harming cuts to keep them from healing it was all for you laughing at herself coughing and crying the shadows and knots things caught here and there her skirt drying in the kitchen a bottle of syringes rubber gloves a box of soap the tiled wall a jam jar a milk carton a cup the oven door a dish towel manic street preachers purple tulips dying in a brown vase

tipsy tottering lopsided and somewhat nauseous the smell of smoke her pill an unholy pile of dirty dishes but tomorrow had a whole fresh dozen of clean new hours not once but twice over spending her pay before she’d earned it old and unaltered by life in spirit if broken still defiant obtuse feckless as much a child as an old lady petulant silly playful naughty having grown out of being clever responsible or faking it at least and looking back finding herself not so convincing as the perfectly normal adult human she had affected to be with all of the wealth and parchment the little chanel skirt suits gathering moths in the closet and the closet for that now only ridiculous in hindsight and so transparent as to have been purposeless but the pretence itself of course the purpose as markets traded confidence not commodities and thinking it all such an abominable waste of her life and counting now the kisses along the way and smiling and losing count and feeling the cold then all of a sudden and wobbly although stretched out in her cantilever armchair with her feet up on her wee pouffe shaped as it was to her heels and thinking then of the mattress shaped as it was to her curling bones and the spill on the table almost dry now this stupid boy thudding around as usual wishing she could have had her last years decades ago thinking of the old people in her childhood and her old self like she had always pictured dressed like her grandparents had dressed and lean as they had been from trials and hunger and poverty not carrying a literal donut around the middle like she was and thinking of her nan then and crying crying for both of them and missing her so appallingly as if the yearning were grown like a snowball and not diminished like soap feeling the need of her now soft safe warm to curl up in her arms and be scared only and not this greater than fear thing this cold horror we called clarity

tired and sore her silicone sticky ears ringing still and the sun breaking in at the blinds like a slow war sleeping till forever running out of steam half way through breakfast closing her eyes on the plum light a mouthful of partly chewed oats and her pill there on the table unswallowed and just not having a whole other day in her having barely survived the night and the excitement of the partying neighbours who had kept her awake again almost a consolation and this mooncalf upstairs now vacuuming his bare floorboards because a brush was too complicated for his feeble brain rubbing at the crusts of her eyes as the yellow light pointed its skinny fingers at all of her undone housework making sure she hadn’t won the lottery before writing it all off then wondering what the fuck she’d have done with millions of pounds anyway and thinking that all she’d have really gotten from it would be a sharper confidence that it really was all over and closing her eyes again and letting the glare paint red death over her greasy eyelids as he stomped back and forth like a soldier on parade and wishing him a muriel spark fate then turning away from the stubborn light and her own pale reflection creamy flabby her soft breasts looking cuppable a floating aquarium of dust flecks lighting another coffee with the butt of her first a dog yapping in the street and wanting to yelp me too honey me too you had added her playlist

to be forgotten the violent sun like a flogging punching through the window a lightning rod lit up like an olympic torch the clouds like blue smoke a cigar then a cantilever chair brown orange teak the smell the air the light history flashing her left tit again a squeal of brakes dirty socks she was sure she’d worn at least twice a drilling over the traffic drone nearer an engine a thud like a pickaxe in concrete her ankle the pool of golden spill lapping like an ocean wave with the drift of the curtain in the low breeze the green of these trees like plastic bags the planet was a landfill voices murmurs the birdless sky an empty building waiting to be torn down a gunshot a slammed door a hard gait beating the stairs a pile of books unrecognisable a mood shifting day on day the orange glow of the indirect sun pooling in the corners along skirting ledges rims of things what tables a stool birch ply a tweed guitar case curve braiding brass a shadow oblique to the weft of it a hole in the wall leggings peeled and discarded pink bold sans all caps awry the groceries she hadn’t as yet gone to fetch picturing them now sat still on rusted shelves not as yet a collection only things wanting only a basket and a spent old lady’s gathering the gears of a truck a sudden cawing silver wings sweeping the garbage sky an alarm a rustling a seething of hydraulics the endlessness of chaos looming as collapsed mines everything burning at once the sun lowering now like sad eyes the shapes square irregular an orange crane punching the air like a hard cock the shapes of sounds the branches the future the sea

torn strips of skin trailing from her palate like seaweed a sky blue espresso cup a sadness in spite of the win a little orange light critical thinking the corner of a smile that belied the truth the rest of her face and her mood and her life a succession of kitchens all dirty the last track on a mixtape curry and chips finding her bookmark in another book a pastry like a great twisting cock breaking it up with a tiny cake fork to get it past her lips and keeping her lipstick intact learning not to lick the sugar letting it glaze her going about her day glazed and confused laughing at herself and crying transcendent juxtapositions a key change lifting her heart with it headlong into the terry bickers chimes of her loftiest dejection forgetting and rubbing her eyes then rubbing the glitter on her blanket huddling it around her like a conspiracy a day of indulgences improperly distributed then paid for all at once at length but wasn’t that life then here at the end only the bill to pay and fucking it off leaving without her coat hailing a taxi and hitting the next bar a saigon psychedelic wave sailing her on and this cunt’s fugly drumroll on her ceiling snapping her out of it like a hand on her collar missing you and your laugh a kick in the ribs laughing your laugh wide like the sea you’d disappeared over again and over and over and her stretched thinner every time like gut strings over some vast harp of sadness and pissing herself figuratively and literally and spitting teeth and shoes in the wet concrete in the acid rain in the back lane behind the station among the bins and syringes and spunk

touched as in demented stirred like soup upset as a chamber pot impressed but only as a blunt shape in these cushions amused and horrified at once this was who she was this crying laughing thing a disaster lesbian a pillow princess a demigirl a high femme trixic lipstick bottom vans crocs and stocks never docs sticking labels to herself like temporary tattoos all lick and spit seeing it all wash away like hair colour just old now spent as though quiddity were the coins in her purse born with a store of it like qi having squandered it quite considerably and laughing at the thought all matter and no form devoid of any platonism and convinced as ever that this was all she had ever been matter no matter the form imposed by one abstraction or another a fork a spoon the moon this balloon these flowers leaning red towards her as though leaning in for a kiss but only further away from the window than she was and the light not the light in her but only the light behind her feeling extinguished transparent a puddle of wax in descartes’ hand lined malleable useless

tough nuts and soft plums this time yesterday the stationary movements of the clock an eternal recurrence she had died and gone to hell your silent replies the unread messages to be buried with her like her organs wrapped in jars her finery a manservant walled up alive amusing herself in her despair with these lipstick traces of her own intellectual history and the moiré patterns in the silver rain thrashing behind the spattered windows and the chalky buildings a face through white noise the world a shimmering pareidolia remembereing saint gilles then out of nowhere the world as a piece of toast a madeleine in a tea of promnemonics and a flat headache then slipping like egg white down her hot face blinking in the rain and shells and the beach at ciboure the river beach under a green viaduct picking through the bicycle bits and plastic bags for a porcelain jewel or a bottle punt smoothed clean clay pigeons in the fields at her grandmother’s house an agile mind in a fragile shell like insects closure without endnotes sleep without dreams the conceit of death an annihilationist fantasy hell only hell life as a temporary escape from hell to return to hell always nothing but hell eternal fire and damnation over and over and over and over and over a loop the simplest account without beggining or end by occam’s razor

treasure chest mornings the splashed golden glimmers still branches dipped in honeydew the starlings leaping in great arcs like angry birds the currency of light and lightness crystalline brightness her coffee had circumnavigated the globe more times than she had then these gleams dying like a ship’s wake this meeting the dread folding in her loose belly aspirating with no one to tell a cold settling like frosting thinking she hated coffee the clouds dancing this glazed building like ice a rooftop parking lot walls like skin and getting up to take her pill needing the toilet a hard shit like an unsolved rubik’s cube and the cold water sploshing on her bum a taste in her mouth like mentholated cigarettes some place she’d bought cigars and cocktail hundreds a montecristo number four and some fat thing like a chode that hadn’t fit in the cutter the sleeve of porcupine five minutes afraid of it all embedded in it her own fear her very quiddity instantiated in a substratum of fear loosening her belt her zip eating yesterday’s pasta from the saucepan a vehicle reversing a crick in her neck a brown vase the icy rain reaching for her house keys breathless and tired dropping her tulips on their heads like babies washing her face looking in the mirror crying

trying not to let her tongue touch the broken edge of her tooth so she didn’t have to think about it the taste of last night’s lip balm on her peeling lips buttoning the buttons on her fluffy yellow cardigan wrapping herself up in an unwashed blanket the holes in her socks her bruised knees a dream house and a dream guitar and the dream things in her dream house florence knoll charlotte periand a bowling green queerphobic bible thumpers hate and devotion you then in this dark corner of the bar with the railing behind where the toilets were and the happiness of seeing you eating the sadness of waiting for you like an elephant eating a field and your sad pale face and your freckles your posture taut like wire stays and wishing she made you happy like you made her and sad now at the thought of it and you’d had to go back to work then sitting with a glass of wine alone there in the corner and crying because she had nothing to give you but her whole self which was nothing the drone of the vacuum cleaner upstairs scraping across the floor and furniture rattling the boards then the whine of the heating pipes and these reflections golden shimmery on the walls across the street the soft blue of the sky like dandelion clocks and clicking and clattering from upstairs and her meds and her shower and the way the bowl gave a little under her feet and the cracked tiles and mouldy seals doing her hair her face looking for something to wear perfuming her hair wishing for it all to be over the clasp of her necklace her scarf her shoes her handbag keys stairs the rush of cold over her face like sirens the sun the crisp clean air these green mossy crevices on the red stone walls a brown drain the library a zebra crossing a nazi bar the government the year of the snake

tue die wed marry sat she had lingered and sun dried an uncontrollable urge a bad smell hanging around like a bad smell coating her filling her imbuing her and exuding from her poisoning her world then diana her tentative hand on her shoulder and taking her by the wrists and her bottom lip trembling dripping a trickle of snot and tears and making her lie down writing and not solving her troubles writing being easier than acting in the world and all the world as a stage and growing out of it finding herself worldless when even a solipsist’s world buried with them meant a sort of immortality to cease to exist to be of any world whatever and the rain trailing ellipses over the windows then sasha coming and her nausea eight feet deep and her little ukelele making her smile despite herself and then night all at once and everything and you

turning up the heater getting jam on her pill turning up the thermostat being let down again the tokyo skyline washi tape and sticking plasters wearing her oestrogen patch too long her eyes turning at the corners lines and folds dark spots along her cheekbones a swiss watch a drawer full of them her ankle this pink sweater like ice cream her tarnished jewellery knocking through the wall january third a bag of garbage a beep from a vacant apartment a bottle with a drawing of a flower on sucking the nut butter from her sticky teeth doors and windows opening and closing a burning smell crying her eyes out clicks clacks going to her head this flashing yellow light like sepia film a bunch of blush alstroemeria hung upside down to dry a whistling from the pipes like an organ her head heavy with sleepy lethargy having achieved nothing today but buy and eat food sleeping shiting and arithmetic letting it get too warm touching her face letting her fingers get covered in powder and foundation like putting it on backwards all of her things were old

twatted scalded taking herself to heart a big gold mirror a dufy changing her frontispiece going to bed dreaming that her child wanted to go out with three thousand pounds in cash waking itchy all over getting up making coffee washed kenya nel drip your cup her pill throwing some cereal in a spode bowl full of yesterday still the snow lifting shitting and brushing her teeth her cleanser her moisturiser a concealer one shade lighter than her foundation dabbing her little finger in pink glitter dabbing it round her eyes her primer foundation lippy mascara her tulips dead in the night this fucking meeting a croissant a long black anaerobic costa rica creamy body acidity opening tropical patching the groceries patching the housework taking her meds fish fingers and kimchee a bag of chilli corn chips orange wine taking her meds again sitting down the inexorable assault of her own reflexive sybaritism tired not yet retired worn out like her ancient herno threadbare irreplacable beautiful in her own light fucked all the ways raped a thousand times it was incomprehensible to herself even and her thoughts stopping here dead as nails as always a vanishing point and this vile little man in his vile little red car drilling fuckholes in the quiet and her headache silting around her right eye like bruises and into her jaw and splitting into tears then as sophia brous sailed her fathomless voice over the harrowing vileness of her life’s smashed landscape like a snow storm cleaning filtering folding her up in the eternal lullaby hushing her shushing her keeping her alive

twelve o’clock wasn’t noon the second time round not quite back to square one no groundhog day the eternal recurrence but wearier and wearier every time no reboots not really only further and further into the same darkness not a ring but a spring a spiralling descent not a circuit a dialectical progression not some flip flop tick tock back and forth thesis antithesis thesis again but an elegant synthesis crunching hard bits of toast with her weak enamel and a sun licking up from behind the buildings sparkling the raindrops like little star clusters daylight constellations and the greasy glass smears and a siren then in the stillness and thinking about putting her face on and coughing drinking her bubbly water and the silvery wet light splashing the walls like champagne and the thermostat clicking off and her snot and her pills her pink marimekko vanity case a denim wraparound her pink and yellow sweater yesterday’s tights tomorrow’s breakfast and everything a filling in one sandwich or another bird chirps calling her out into the world three knocks at the door then the panic as ever this terror of other people of hell and weaving in it seeing suddenly in the hard winter angles of the sun’s stare a hand print clear as day on the window there and frozen then in contemplation and looking at her hand and the window and putting her hand on it and her head and just missing you from this side of all the time between

twisted candies pink on the inside a taste in her mouth a throat she couldn’t clear a slow sunday as the world burned and this dreich day with its sky made of lumpy porridge and the lights of her eyes wading through it like bog small accidents of brightness like confetti on mud the mint on her salad tangled in one big clusterfuck of inedible ableism but she knew she was fucked on fronts too numerous to enumerate and enumerating them to herself anyway wallowing as resistance sneering at performative resistance as resistance hopelessness and ironic detachment as resistance and the lumpy porridge dripping at the window and her little flat lost in time her safe little bubble of yesterday that she hated the bubble and the yesterday but safe in the familiar tortures the pain she knew having the measure of it and just afraid now of the next step down a number of dark birds inching across her oblique visual field and back again a stillness like a dead cemetery deconsecrated a pair of pigeons on the parapet opposite like cutout shapes against the shit smeared glass and this fool next door shouting at no one and thinking shouting back hadn’t worked and it might be time to kick him down the stairs key his car make him lunch a clang from a pipe in the wall somewhere her disgust her hauteur her disdain her dismay her trembling lip the wet waterlines of her watery eyes tariffs and censorship an electronic book burning and the witch burnings to come needing a shit wishing she could have shat all over the whole thing the porridge the fash the global fucking north the cozy rumble of the heating belching burned gas out into the vomitous calamity a ping your reaction no shoes

unsure quite what to tell you besides that she loved you and not quite having it in her to say even that saying mi piaci biatch instead and you smiling and kissing her then and the night then falling around you like snow frosting the hypothetical wedding cake you’d never have and her pores and her sinuses blue dark and some lights here and there like slices of lemon or orange a pink one here like a cherry her ankles her shins a candle and the air thick with smoky heaviness her book her headache the glass there on the table misted around in condensed laundry fumes waiting for her cracked lips and the unmade bed and a short breathing between gasps of the boiler the burnt smell of the wok a pain under her ribs on one side these socks and more things same things this serum painted hourly on her broken nail a name her crinkling sad little face feeble and forlorn and the force of it all in the coils of distress that knotted her brows and getting up then to fetch whatever it was from the oven and blasting her face with steam and opening a window and the cold night air her distended belly the little park glistening empty in the wet lamplight the traffic noise on the wet freeway over the crest of these purple tenements her watch tapping her wrist and her flogger and her dinner and her yellow raincoat and fullness and it all being over a scrunched tissue her gelatinous snot she felt like an actor roaming the theatre after the play had closed leaving the bed linen for later the remote her watch her yoga mat peeling off her skirt her socks doing yoga naked drunk

upvc windows and a wireless thermostat living into her own dystopian future a hellscape of unsocialised twenty five year old children spunking plastic into each other’s atrophied brains haha she was the old tory she’d grown up hating but no hating them too still only hating everything but no again hating every human not every thing loving animals and trees and clouds and sunsets rushing to catch a rainbow at the back window loving the world the cosmos the stars a gaseous nebula the cosmic void loving human artefacts even pollyanna pachinko her wood fired tulipiere st paul’s and the barbican you don’t have to say you love me the little hole in the middle of you don’t have to say you love me an ear cuff a classic flap a pair of fucking louboutins then this mucilage dried ethiopian heirloom all lemongrass and white blossom and wondering when it all stopped being worth it what level of microplastics in her sufganiyot how much fascism how much wildfire how much war a child’s face her eyes full of things that couldn’t be unseen every suicide and you and your surgery and the doctor and the hospital car park and the bus stop and the wrong bus that had taken a tour of some broken concrete estate and getting off somewhere then walking or something and passing things and rain and fractures and drinking and sobering up and drinking again careers penury loveless crushes famines and plagues and waking up one day and it being today

voluptuousness romance and the perpetual dream of rapture and lauging her ass off drawing another card and putting it back without looking cleaning the loo in mismatched rubber gloves and the smell of disinfectant clinging to her wet sleeves she loved her dad it gave her a wee lift to think of seeing him again buying a ticket not making plans letting her feet walk and her head be pretty talking with her mouth and not her brain the heating clicking off and then on seconds later thinking of baking cookies her pink muffin cases a blinking red light an orange dot an amber glow these little pots of pink things peach puff and salmon a soft lilac or deep purple with silvery sparkles powder pink sand dusty dusky shades of petal pink petals candle wax the binding of a long book creams varnishes powders a roll of paper a roll of tissue a charging cable an ashlar wall her phone case her fingers her tongue a rubber glove her perineum her headphones your book washing her hands a broken nail a sunset holding its breath under a weight of clouds one third of these little love hearts printed along the side of her bag copper coins the dusk a mouldy yoghurt a clay pot a pickled pepper a pink prosecco her knickers her nipples her lube

waiting for her photos to develop waiting for the sun waiting for you to fall in love with her waiting for her numbers to come up straight waiting tables a lifetime in waiting but where her lesbian queen a green giant stomping on the lil corn people sometimes she was cute in her cath kidston florals a broderie anglaise dress in salmon pink a girl in the same banana yellow crocs the pink tiles pink walls waiting for the chance to talk to you waving away flies boys bills bad memories guilt shame happiness a cake with a line of blueberries on top like a stegosaurus remembering the little boy she’d looked after when ten no twenty years ago then a man now surely older than these girls fully in the bloom of their beauty and joy the spaghetti straps of her dress slipping from her shoulders and the wine lace of her bra showing feeling beautiful in a sad way tired like a gorgeous antique piece better days behind her but unique and fine so that time would never diminish her having always everything she’d had ever and then too lazy to correct these girls’ misapprehensions being neither tutor nor nurse only old the gift of grandmothers to have no responsibility a love of sheer indulgence to leave them with as much of their innocence as the endless trauma had seen fit to spare enjoying she supposed the vicarious feel of it a sort of blanket between her and her own bottomless trauma like a soft futon thrown over hard slats of reality to let them be children because she’d never know one lick of innocence in all the hollow of what was left her

walking ill bare boned like the forest in winter the belly of a beached whale the zombie carcass of some apocalyptic factory abandoned in video in nineteen ninety three wet lunged like these trees that should outlive her and coughing now their wet leaves shaking at her hopeless her worn brown coat an uncertain blanket to comfort her troubled sinuses the path mulched like phlegm then her watch tapping her wrist like a child like a mean teacher with a soul like tar and wire wool this path for the last time this leaf this branch this tree the whole forest the river walking back her back to it all not knowing across the car park to the slouched building mud bricks and broken doors the slow ascent of this teal terrazzo breath by breath hoisting herself like the mainsail her beret tight now on her sweating temples the foundation on her face set like a death mask pissing in this loo for the last time wiping the seat dropping her tights wiping her ass washing her hands in this toxic foam harmful to aquatic life and thinking vaguely ahead then to the green tube of hand cream squashed idle somewhere in the clutter on her desk eggshell on the teak a red notebook the cracked lightning cable wrapped in washi tape all of which to be thrown a little from now and as absently into her handbag while she tore strips from a middle manager with the knife of her sharpest tongue and forgot as she limped towards the station every word snarled carrying with her only disease and the disquietude of bridges burned and she crossed the lock into the city again an empty beer garden in the dusky damp falling a dog pooping a retail park a hot train the gable end of a building a nail bar the smell of a massage parlour a fortune teller a health store the tattooist a kebab shop traffic sky the road cold rough against her cheek licking the wet blood from her teeth the grit in her hair the knees of her tights fingering this puddle of puke and snot still somehow awake looking around her eggshell mud bone

washing the windows badly enough they almost looked worse like everything she did cookies mashed between her teeth flexing her sticky arms lanyards ribbons her misato necklace the ache in her right hip a bottle of pencil toppers acid reflux a little espresso cup filled with water nothing much to see a bag clip an orange rose petal curled like a shell a fotrune cookie wrapper a dry day a pink cast to the light she didn’t want to look at her poor handiwork dropping her favourite bowl on her favourite cup the undefeated dust bunnies a slammed door the pile of unwashed dishes needing to poop wondering how long the clang of the boiler grinding into gear uninvested her parched lips and clearing her throat for no reason vanessa bell clear as day and you there in ektachrome in taiwan or kyushu and some other thing she couldn’t make out the feel of it an old catalogue thinking then of exhibitions long past and the whole notion and thinking it like a glimpse at her knickers in a gust of wind a side boob or a tattoo made out through fabric a sniff but no taste then all the things she’d sniffed but never tasted and wondering if that might have included you and if she had ever really tasted anything before swallowing clearing her throat and acid reflux and shitting and sniffing letting go of the tension in her ankles everything stopping at once a cloud of steam the wind

watercolour impressions a soggy pad of sticky notes the laminated curve of an aalto coffee table the arm of a cantilever chair a cushion sewn by her rapist the other arm of the same chair the loop of a red leather strap a rumpled red handbag with mushroom polka dots a tangle of headphone cables the edge of the table the top of her laptop the screen of her laptop the keys on her laptop a flaked manicure a pink cardigan a green silk camisole her breasts her hair an aconcagua valley pinot noir slowly coming up to room temperature and the room slowly coming down pasta boiling on the stove each window open at a different angle to somehow coax in the evening breeze and her back hurting still sat in heaps of cushions or bolt upright arched like a cow or coiled like a tiger in bed in the bath walking only somehow at night alone on a railway platform she had been afriad so for her life some adrenaline rush had straightened her out the door slamming next door a glass of herby water a roll of micropore tape a door slamming a window slamming a car door and her pasta boiling over turning off the heat the clacking of the range as it cooled in the hot dusky air like fingers snapping like threats a clang from the river splintering through rush hour road noise like rage like a pan boiling over and puddling as trauma over the floor of her already soiled living room a long blow to the temple in slow motion an increase in amplitude in frequency losing her religion the years

well wishes for the year of the snake a red box of memories a red pocket full of sweeties and the postman shouting at her and her bowing deeply as though a gwaijai might have had the sensibility to be moved by her obeisance wondering if her affinity for your culture were as much a manifestation of her affinity for submissiveness as her alienation from this one the bread on the table the little leaves of lamb’s lettuce and her pickled yellow cauliflower a glass of water but she’d taken her meds already a day of uncharacteristic effectuality throwing her as badly as her days of increased dysfunction and the idiot next door shouting again and shouting back through the wall at him to shut up then laughing at herself as an unqualified subservient shit enough even at that to have limits and the click and the hum of the boiler and the pipes hissing and it working and hoping his nuts had shrivelled up into his posterior abdominal wall that he might regress to a mere embryonic potentiality and spontaneously self abort wishing this on all of them at once a miraculous misconception and the boundlessness of her hate and disdain and sadness and frustration and the disappointment of being here sore and alive and you there dead in your silver casket not even grieving not even missing you just so very fucked off with it all that nothing could stir her heart to love and the cold on the nape of her neck and the pain in her ankle and shin alexei navalny patriot

white cis dudes cutting through the knot of her trauma with the signal creese of their cunt privilege biting her through the mail of her coping strats loud pushing tearing the airpods from her sliced ears to scream their entitled war cries fucking her with brutal fists of hate drowning her out like toy witches an idiot boot stomping on a lake of tadpoles and then charli to her rescue an avenger a warrior princess defender of the stateless louder than war her icon kicking these pricks into the dark shit with her sheer fucking brightness pop like a pin from grenades like stringy corks from limp gun barrels short vases for flower revolutions a sonic fucking boom knowing then that she was metal a glass dildo double walled strong abiding a literal fucking exoplanet a clutch of sunflowers wrapped in a paper cone like chips frozen in her summer dress a fucking ice queen melting in the heat of first love her thirst for you like a popsicle her self loathing magnified in the hot glass of desire let it go let it go let it go

wishing she could have scrunched up the timeline and aged young like merlin a curve to her butt like these girls in shorts and the memory of her own shorts no consolation the relief of all of the shit behind her not mirrored as bliss in her spent delights a moment passing without quite getting hold of it vague regrets coalescing around the echo of it letting it go without lifting one of her limp fingers to reach for it sad to see it go but resigned in advance her thighs uninked untanned unkissed soft only clean like blank sheets of fucking paper wanting parts of some of the things on the table but not enough to take the whole of any of it a frankenstein longing for this girl’s arm this girl’s butt and this one’s smooth shoulder but not invested enough even to overlay a dildo and a bottle of lube with a découpage of it a slow runner passing silty at the window imagining every footprint she’d ever left all heaped one on the other and terrified then in the shadow of the giant her past had become small and cowering with the quivering abstraction of her future like a zoetrope and knowing nothing of your inner life wishing suddenly to be you to know nothing of her own a quiet boy passing slowly a lazy bus melting from view and a knot at her throat like the knot in her throat wishing you would be quiet so she’d stay in love with you a while hoping she could hold her breath long enough to finish her sentence and clutching for the verb falling breaking a nail on the edge of it she felt at once insouciant and forlorn and went home then without her shopping

wounded injured debilitated a passport with a picture of father christmas the second to last night of hanukkah the strangest telephone conversation she had ever had and these same things looking the same the cable that looked like an anaconda poised to strike and this red box and the candles that looked like a fairy hospital guttering in the waxy night air cold sticky the archives paste ups peeling your name from the blotter of her dry heart like these flowers an old dessicated thing no longer pretty an echo a remembrance of things past an aftertaste too late she had already swallowed and the bitter laughter clawing at her vocal folds her scars marking out her occupation of space with the map of her pains this blue night the new moon putative invisible forgetting again forgetting how many days in a row she had forgotten a vague dusting of lights like industrial snow small burns here and there like glitter in the moonlight when there was no glitter and no moonlight season one episode two licking her dry lips pouring her dry throat a drink letting them go out on their own dark like your eyes wiping her wet nose with naked fingers then wiping her fingers on her fingers marmalade another year a street light and the few dozen leaves caught in the weak gravity of its beam

wrong you’d been wrong standing at the lights in a haze with her shopping the guy downstairs with water running down his walls and a beer in her bag by way of apology loving you more than anything then and always and living this long being surer and surer and you nowhere to know a smir then and the swallows in snaking lines and the puddles in the stairwell and her floorboards and having to pull all of your books out into piles thick with dust and hurt and sat now in the twilight crying her throat high tight like knotted socks and wishing a drone might take her from her misery the hum of the fridge the dehumidifier a dehum then smiling grief thinking of you burbling at her childish humour free food for millionaires distraught beyond words and much further out than you’d thought this fucked eternity without you this hell and angry then knowing she didn’t deserve it no matter what she’d done or not done and the soft gunmetal light sinking into the room as her battery died and the shopping on the table and this pot of kimchee and the spoon sticking out of it whimpering aloud her pills these lipstick red tulips and the pain in her chest her pink chopsticks and the champagne cork she used as a chopstick holder her camera her ring her apron a box of tissues her gym bag her handbag hair ties a piece of paper the darkening evening unfolding its heartbroken embrace around her soft shoulders the drip at the end of her nose

you