Nonsense is a fugitive presence.
—FRED MOTEN
The fruits of my recovery are fresh
with sterile seeds I spit them on
concrete steps they melt in the sun.
My gut is a worm eating my brain
the weather gets up so damn close
and I sow the grass with pollicitations.
I waited for you by the kissing gate
foraged for fresh sorrel tired of opening
my veins with a fan, trichotillomaniacal.
. . . .
At a poetry reading a white boy is on stage
telling us how the border and the empire
prevented him from going to a music festival.
I groan and generously overshare
brilliant facial contortions
there are no excuses to be quiet.
Old friends say don’t think too much
about those things that make me mad
that way it would be easier to breathe.
She accidentally quotes a Troy proverb
clothes in every corner I look to lie down
at sunset when the sky just does that.
Everything is in motion. We all tilt
at strange angles to the earth
nothing is firm in my hands anymore.
. . . .
I tried to be calm in the public house
with pints of cordial, citrus and ice
listening for assonance and epiphany.
The rich never really worked a day
that is why I want to eat them all
you didn’t understand my laughter.
Non-alcoholic beers for non-alcoholics
it escapes us as the tape plays forward.
I’d be drinking for eternity everlasting.
Queasy enough to retch a whole earth
my miraculous weapon against reason
now reduced to anxiety’s dropped grin.
. . . .
Azure light overcasts to downpour
the poetry wilts yesterday’s orchids
I’m a serf amongst serifs in new
feudalism that burns close to home.
It was meant to be rock and roll
and I think, which is a terrible thing
oh no you’ve been thinking again
is this it? is this the dying world?
They are oblivious to my convulsions
just how beautiful I could be in ending.
. . . .
When I stopped self-harming
they stopped inviting me out
I travel through the brickwork
surfing realism’s highest road
I’m nonplussed, a closed circle,
no penguinization or autotheory
or cryptocurrency mysticism—;
I’m unable to feel the Sunday breeze.
I am not that fazed by a boring death.
. . . .
I had the desire to make art that could walk
out of a building onto a quiet suburban road
and be loud enough to start.
The road’s privatised and full of bunting;
it has no style. I’m questioning
what community is if not forced togetherness.
Vladimir Mayakovsky fell in love
with his prison cell’s keyhole—
I see through the same eyelet to ecology
in catastrophe. O I’m tired of being nuanced;
calls for resignations and general elections
don’t provide me with hope in the Void.
The jungle came up through the carpet’s
humid living room song of redemption
cloistered me in its riff to all day music.
Concomitantly, boomer generations love
to say we will all go from Marx and Engels
to Marks and Spencer.
But most of us are becoming more radical
with age we’re unable to see out the breaks
we know wombats are not household pets.
