tick all applicable
please use blue or black blood
when exercising choice
in the type of role applied for

Liberation                [✓]
Vindication             [✓]
Resignation             [✓]
Transformation      [✓]

do you recognise yourself
as belonging to a Demographic
Of Brotherhood.
Of Commonality
to other hurting spirits

Hope without creases                   [   ]
Hope, in spite of bruising            [✓]
Train without brakes                    [   ]
A tunnel bricked at each end      [   ]
Forest fire as result of
volatile conditions
and negligent spark                     [✓]

do you accept that the data you provide
not only reveals everything you would
sacrifice and be sacrificed for
it
      also
               counts
                            for
                                   n· o· t· h· i· n· g

1.

Sorry*
for gasping attempts
to distill something cruelly,
intangibly pure
on a page from nowhere.
I’ve done this
in lieu
of any useful gesture

2.

Sorry
I was late

3.

Sorry
I always say
'There are Worse Things Than…'

4.

I am sorry I froze
when all the worst things
crowded icily around your bed

Growing up ugly, alternately fat and thin
eating scars for breakfast and time for tea

having almost climbed out of a buried bin
only for it to be upended & held in place with
1939's world atlas; the one that got europe all wrong
& like me, was designed with accuracy in mind

Personable birds of prey prodded, persuaded
and set free the mean old biped growing inside

beach ***** jolly popped and sandcastles raided
just to see the looks on hope & holyglow faces
their defeat in optimism: my triumph as ****
full circle towards schematic self-sabotage

Once again i am bitter drunk and to be wed
we improvised trite vows and cut ourselves

spare keys for access to one another's sickbeds
In attendance: maternal ghosts and retired reapers
hurting with knowledge & witholding screams
Liver-spotted harbingers of age and all its mistakes

Older now than I ever thought was likely:
refuse to fight against the alarms of everything

as everything and everything change around me
But there are too many different colours of skin
and i never was a tolerant, I was always just witch
Now finally alone enough to weigh my empty chairs

Surprising, that when black hands  materialise
my own teeth flash & spit through septic spells
make even him blink, in his absence of eyes
For in his face is a nothing that stills me

It's the same nothing that i've rotted with
All my sorry life i'd settled this way, instead of that

To ask for one more would be greedy, wouldn't it?
Now it feels like I've begged before, i'll beg again

I think when he kisses me  it will be over

Police brutality
political chicanery, the
privateering of industry
that polarises community

Poetry
you can plainly see is ruining me along with corporation tax and mindless drone attacks,
but
I can bomb my own flat
empty magazines into my own dreams, eject the casings, reload and repeat,

I sabotage my own defences
IED's I have for tea
Nothing feels better than opening a love letter when it blows up in your face

That place is reserved

In the bunker when the fans are on, when the sound of screaming gulls are gone and the air is scrubbed before we breathe
I do believe

and that belief is based on movie reels, deals I've done with the Devil and the good lord's son,
the ruling class, the kiss my *** brigade and pharmaceutical top grade opiates.

If what is
is what is
what it is and
what it takes?

I only open my eyes when I'm sleeping and that's to watch me watching me scribbling out some poetry and

erasing my body chemistry

I can see it
if that is it.

It was a hope, but mostly me,
rust red and tired—
resembling the person who you’d
take the time to tell goodbye.

It was.

Now such a hope is taking shape
as that pretty sight you see
in your rearview mirror—
perhaps,
the shape of the clouds
outside of your window seat—
either way, she
dons designer shades,
a wickedly telling curve
on her lips,
and her *******—
a beacon,
held proudly to the sky.