Smoke under your clothes
Who’d know?
Summer died beneath you
In some apartment we ****** in

Can you taste the disappointment
When you linger on my lips
Cold scents long languished
Sparking dead neuronic wisps

A frantic reformation
For an addict to the bliss
In the dust realms of a blanket life
Where fiction can exist

I’m the broken bones you found alone
And kissed into a whole
I know
That everybody dreams of the soul they had, the soul they let go

But I’ll find a way, hold high this ache
Breathe life into every mistake
And grow
Into the man you never had, but mourn to this day

I’m grateful
For everything

Deathshaker
Twenty one years
Crossed hearts and hoped to never die
Slept crooked, and woke deaf and blind
With pins and needles through the chest
And foot, and mouth, and ******* head

Deathshaker
Twenty one years
To wake to dust and rot and ache
To once loved noises, long replaced
By crushing silence, bitter debts
To lovers long dead

Swore I felt your flesh
Push through my dreams
Your gums soft against my tongue
Metal braces tearing through me

A phantom residue
From the crawlspace of my mind
An unconsciously yearning
For love
No longer mine

How the **** can I move on?
With the scent of your breath
Lingering in morning mist

How the **** can I move on?
With the sweat of your skin
Soaking my fingertips

This ache is unbearable

I’m scratching my cheekbones
Gripping at cavities
And white noise

blind bliss
the empty contour of yesterday
turns on itself

jets to oblivion
paper streams celebrate
the century’s end

thus piled
at the foot of the terminal
a mound of teeth

and convalescence in search of illness.

sifting through black rubble
i find pieces of myself
old chokes with
fractured bodies
and little burnt fingers.

the sky is a holy grey box
downpour
spiral fragments
but mostly crying children.

when will i die?

a spilling vessel rots through the earth
tar black and cavernous.

this is the maw through which god watches overs
all his little dead children.

‘hello, god.’
god replies with an incomprehensible scream.

the young ones play break, break
it is a game where they test whether a face or a fist
disintegrates first.

it is so fun; so fun, fun, fun
everywhere the maw descends.

Lovers in the lines disappearing
Folding fading

Hazy in the midnight
Waning grey

My eyes were flickering lights
Passing stories unsaid
And a comfort I can’t remember

Curve gone crooked
I left my head here
I left my head

Misread your softness
Misspoke some promise
Blurred in the wind

I can taste her scent, riding on the morning breeze. It is of empty swing sets; dead Autumn leaves.
It is unnaturally cold. She is waiting for me, but I cannot find her.
Summer has fled my skin.
I sink with each step. I cry out, but my mouth stays closed.
I cannot find her. I cannot find her. I cannot—

I am staring into a convenience store. Gaudy labels, bright neon.
The air smells of soy sauce and sweat. A foreign sun blinds me.
Lucy’s father is waiting for his receipt, hand stretched for eternity.
I want to scream out. I want to run up to him and shake him loose of the death that will consume him and his family.
But all I can do is sink; hand stretched for eternity.

I am crying. There is a luggage bag in the hallway, clothes strewn to its side.
Mother is shouting, but she does not know it.
‘Ten more years’, she says, ‘ten more years’. I have never seen father so angry.
I don’t want to watch. I want to disappear. I want to sink into the walls.
My existence has led to this moment; this moment that I will not understand for another eight years.
‘Ten more years.’ Mother slams the door. An engine starts, but I am gone.

Perhaps, I never resurface.

lost ash blurred skin lips emptiness there was something before but it has fled departed in out something important meaningful run into the ground through streams of bitter ache i was a memory caught in its own remembrance straining to be heard now i am nothing returned to the vessel womb death it is six and the heater does nothing air like frost father telling me that the future is positivism there was a staircase surreal void morrow the edge of the world lost between something i could not perceive trapped in the moment flashing with red tumbling seeking losing words sinking through my own flesh to the earth dirt too far from my head to tell grains apart split like atomic what did i want to remember i have spent days losing too much on purpose bed soaked a matted waste of sweat and the hours **** splitting futures like a prism where i find myself a stranger i cannot stand she us a wretched heart on a couch sitting all sudden a boring cliche lips running along salt severed skin fingers head the bone breaks the back arcs itself in an unending whimper a voice escapes and i’m left trying to catch it in the morning teeth the sliver of a smile haunting the air like a phantom fingers trace smoke sunbeams and feel nothing i fell into her like ash the breaking end of a cigarette all cold and irreversible a collapsed worthless wake and now i am alone

You
are
a
bright
light
amidst
vast
emptiness

You were a laughter in the haze
A sweet smiling charmer by the entrance way
Falling for nothing is too easy
I’m aroused, I’m around, please me

It was the lip gloss, it was the perfume
It was the sweat, and the death of restraints
It was the vacant way you came
Falling for nothing

We were in motion with the windows ablaze
I was a searchlight without a face
Scanning every inch of your skin for love
Shedding my flesh from above

My cruel lover
My cruel lover
I played the part just as well

its a long waste of time
here’s the fire
here’s the two hour film
here’s the empty tract you spill your money in
yesterday returns
the same stupid wake and a body like mindless *******
enjoy your repetition
or live in misery
why enjoy when you can die
nobody answers
nobody says a ******* thing but
enjoy your repetition
enjoy your repetition
like an idiot caucus in automation
enjoy
enjoy
enjoy.

a mass shooting happened four hours from town
on the night of the wake
a vaporwave gig opened to an audience of fashion designers and other rich art *****
down the road
club music blared a bloated corpse to drunk faces
and in the centre
wilted flowers for the victims.

are you lonely?
a blur through the skylight
black prism
noise
i dream of particles
empty waterways
myself
where has everyone gone?
shoes line the shore
a galloping howl splits the earth
and we rise like mist towards dead suns
are you here?
there is a surface you slip beneath every night
sometimes you catch glimpses of it when you stare into the emptiness beneath your lids
it is where you go to watch yourself die
who are you?*
sisyphus turned inwards
the first body of god
crushed beneath the weight of the ocean

hollow cardboard reach
and the destitution of the earth
and lives that don’t matter
the open wound of living under capitalism
a horizon of black spots
mangled neurons
worthless towers lined to the sky
production unto pollution
putrefaction
and the whole end
the whole ******* end
the whole
queers ***** in prison
blacks killed in custody
xenophobic masturbatory farmers decimating the land
modern death is class war
race war
gender war
a systemic genocide through slow violence
laws drafted stressing interpersonal violence over corporate negligence
social stratification
unequal access to housing, food and education
MAY 68
**** your gender binary, your race hierarchy, your CV, your Christmas, think positive *******
**** your borders, your ****-apologising, your colourblindness, your class privilege, your white fragility, your selective free speech, your hegemonic masculinity, your silicon valley entrepreneurialism, your cultural imperialism, your meat industry, your deforestation, your ******* accommodation, your debt economy, your war economy, your prison economy, your unpaid women’s domestic economy that upholds the entire heteropatriarchal world
**** YOUR CAPITALISM
precarity unto subjugation, alienation, destitution
an increasing youth suicide rate
an inflation rate rising faster than minimum wage
a lack of jobs while you tell us we’re worthless beneficiaries
a system that chases profit at the cost of existence
the entire concept of meritocracy
debt as a promise of payment yet to exist
enforced return to nothing

Split bone
Sick beneath my skin
Dosed with death

Nobody ******* cared
Doctor came with a casket
And sold me my own bed

I slept til my tongue rotted through my teeth
And all names became foreign streets

Knitted hands and pieced-together arms
Hold so little but warm so much
Quilt-made lips on cotton hearts
Grow such itches in the strangest places
You can’t quite scratch out

Holy rot. I cover the street.
Breaking, breaking.
Loose glass, filling with blood.
Teeth on the pavement.
Teeth in the sky.
I’m sick of these smiles.
Blood flowing laughter.
The body turned inward.
Crossing a river.
What connects me to you?
The hunger. The horror.
The wretched maw of time.

I was born warm and lonely
An ocean to swim free
Gold and empty
Suffocating
A mother’s warmth sung saintly

Lord above and beyond
Father never felt so strong
As the days he made currents over headless homes

She would kneel like mother Mary
Lips quivering haste
And he’d raise his arms to the heavens
To strike her ablaze

Every Sunday morning
I’d watch her sing through swollen lips
So filled with veneration
For a God that couldn’t exist

No hymn that left her
Ever helped her
God save her
******* save her

I was born again on a church pew
Where I left my rusted cross beside my youth

The city was hungry. A mewing came from an alley. A hollow exchange.
The innards of the district had been gutted by libertine sons.
We were scared of the silence, so we filled it with shootings, and lynchings, and stabbings, and rapes.
You came an empty reflection. It was the night before the bombs fell. I remember the way my atoms shifted. You lying there in the morning.
We fell into one another, like rabid dogs at corpses.

Limbs lined the streets.
You were distant that day. I broke ******* climbing over a fence, and lined them with the rest.
The radio tower looked abandoned.
You told me three years later you didn’t care either way. I walked you to the bridge and watched you swim the Styx.
I’d never cared from the start.

The world ended soon after.
The moon’s belly cracked, guts spilling onto the earth.
Children pelted one another with flesh. Parents stood in doorways, smiling.
The swell stretched infinitely, reaching neither peak nor fall.
I fell asleep on your grave, nestled in the cold of yesterday’s ache.

Morose, tongue-tied lunatic
Rattles off his hates, watches loves sink
Hypothetical end-on-end
Wrenches life out, a mouth-to-mouth death
Never seeking anything
Never seeing anything
More than the previous
Light

Callous-ridden fingers pull
On caskets long buried and closed
Thinks forever is a substitution for stable, never-changing, never-ending love
Never knowing anything
More than the previous
Light

Shakes the world away
To relive better days
Losing everyone he’s ever replaced
Shakes the world away
To relive better days
Losing everyone who’s ever stayed

Sullies every heart
To stilled blood
Cracked vein
Idle love

This vacant warmth
I ******* hate it

I think I lapsed and missed my own funeral
Shrugged and felt my head roll off
But did nothing

Because what’s the point, anyway?
What’s the ******* point?

just apart
radiant
refusing to exist

no media
no touch

erring the side
catching the wreck
this double standard won’t survive
so what’s the point?

the closest cliff is a ride away

Your lips shed a thousand words
That coloured your chin golden
To blend into the last light
Of radiant, dying Autumn

I refuse to be alone
Because of the blood on my fingertips
Or the gunpowder
Sunken into my bones

I made my mark in the past
And the plaster beneath my feet
Is a coward’s retreat
For living

What’s past is passed
What’s dead can never be
The blisters I crave
Have long healed

I have always been whole

Hold yourself higher than the sky
To watch all you love die
When you go seeking infinite wisdom
You lose more than one life
Every second in this endless void
Gives the earth fragility
And all those who choose to stay
Become specks you brush aside
There’s no dust that can rise this high
And when you breathe in clarity
You realise that the smoke and fog
Was necessity to feeling alive
A perspective without cold calculating
Thoughts that cause you to writhe
Building yourself a celestial throne
You become a suicidal God
With no friends to guide you
And no heart anymore

THE GULF WAR DID NOT |
THE GULF WAR DID NOT |
THE GULF WAR DID NOT

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Staid quanta of individuality. Phenom asks if they can go. The Big Mouth replies, babble babble. In a fit of rage, Phenom shouts, I’ve had enough of this. They wrench themselves off the dissection table, fetters flying into the air, but a sudden bout of vertigo sets in. They lie back down. The Big Mouth sticks a thermometer into their mouth and begins heating a can of corn soup.

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Professor Kippotkin takes the stage. She coughs into the mic to quiet the audience, but they are caught in sordid *******. She coughs again, managing only to project a trail of spit onto the shoulder of the nearest security guard. He turns immediately, a perfect ninety-degrees spin, automatically signalling the first in command. He has been trained since seventeen for this one task of momentous disciplinary precision. The first in command bellows, Let her speak! a phrase his colleagues repeat in serial down the chain of command.

The crowd soon catches on. An isolated few nod in consternation. Let her speak! they yell from the pits of their lungs, Let her speak!

Thank you, thank you all, Professor Karlpoppins exclaims, cheeks flush with amazement. More and more of the crowd join in. It is a rousing spectacle, a poignant display of human decency. But something is awry. The professor’s gratitude is swallowed into a cacophonous whole. Let her speak! The carnal grip of the big Other’s command unleashes the crowd’s jouissance. United in the master discourse, the crowd fragments into a bewildered totality. Let her speak! they scream at one another, arms jostling, heads tilting back, necks bared to the beating pulse of the earth-sky. LET HER SPEAK! Their combined blows begin to generate an ominous om.

Pl-please, Professor Kibbiezsche sputters, please, everyone! but the crowd have already forgotten her existence. Reams of toilet paper fly through the air. A crashing plane sounds in the distance. Crops burn.

The security team are forced to intervene. They close in from the sides, wielding riot shields and tear gas. HYPOCRITES! one of the members of the crowd screams. OPPRESSORS OF THE WORD! another follows. Footage of security guards flailing on the ground circulate on social media, tagged with the phrase WHO SPEAKS MY SPEAK?

Within twenty four hours, the whole country is ablaze with media coverage. Political scientists gather with literary scholars to speak the unspeakable into commercially-viable forms. Semiotext(e) sign a deal with Hollywood to write a docudrama about Baudrillard’s turbid *** life. Professor Kubblebutts is flown to Hawaii to give a speech on combine harvesters.

WHY WE OPPOSE:
I desire, therefore I am not. Incantation of the other spills through my greasy fingers as I fumble towards the hot sauce, dollop dollop, chicken salt strewn across the nommy wedges. That’ll be $4.50. They have already handed me the note. Our fingers touched for the briefest second, an anointment of the greasy chicken, the wedge fingers, the have a good night mister gurgle bop.

The taxi man sits outside in the cold, back heated by the friction of the smoothie machine, an indefinite spin, western civilisation’s meltdown. The turgid heat breezes past my neck and I sigh, almost in delight, but mostly out of convention and solidarity with the other workers. I hear the pitter pat of my shiftpanion as she scoops hot chips into the fresh night; it is so fresh, there is still so much night, why are you giving me $5 dollars, there is a bug on your face.

I take a break. The cool taxi man glances over just as I put my hands down my pants to shift my boxers into a more comfortable why is it always like this.

Everyone blames Foucault for destroying agency, but agency only arises in the gap between discourses, which is never a gap in power, but rather, the transversal of one power relation into the discursive matrix of another; what appears original is merely the same performance in the wrong site, that’ll be $24 for your **** and condoms.

The crumbled fish is shrinking with each passing day, little gasping body beneath the heat lamp, waffle waffle, waffle waffle, I am suffocating :)

WHY WE OPPOSE:
|||||FEeling BOLD? FeEL BOldbous ;;;; new Paracetamol Jelly and the KINK-CATS tour out the last week—
Thank you for holding. Please note this conversation may be recorded.
To continue, please state: 'my voice confirms my identity'
||"my voice confirms my identity"
and again, please state: 'my voice confirms my identity'
||"my voice confirms my identity"
Please note that this conversation is being recorded for the purposes of confirming your identity.
||"thanks"

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Slowly, slowly, Juniper sinks into the bed frame, the draughty window, the rotting sink. Hibiscus coveted for its prophetic dreams, pale steam smites nostalgia for a vision of the beyond. Streamlined entry into New World, an endless reshelving of family-value Mi Goreng, stormwater through the hollow vessels that twist beneath Juniper’s soles.

Juniper climbs the Garden steps. Pale trace of past motions set to automate at the slightest incline. The cloying rot beneath the pines pulls her closer and closer to the vital cache, the hidden excess. Another hedgehog climbs the mound; it admits its body, it expands in putrefaction.

Exiting onto the street, Juniper is greeted by a sign that reads “Caution. Night Shooting. Stay Out.”

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Steam creeps the mouth of the lid. Pallid flesh of yesterday’s body, settles the kitchen table, the hand, as motes crumple beneath gravity’s well. Mottled refuse, tied with a plastic ribbon, thrown into the street. Keys digging trenches, grandfather, the hollow behind my knee.

Last summer I waited for the rain in the dry concrete channel of the Leith. I was alone with the kayaks and the road cones and the fish, holes festering, showing their ribs in the walls of our flat, legs spread wearing high school sweaters, unable to breathe through cling wrap.

The summer before that, I watched films of myself bashing in the heads of strangers. Every night the ceiling of my mouth would transfigure into a doorway and I’d force my tongue through its serrated edges, waking with a new face. The cassettes would arrive soon after, testimonies of a brute physicality I could not remember enacting.

Earth grins, death strides. Hydraulic incisors pry the dead awake. At the smallest unit of life: phones, condoms, water bottles.

like smoke
you drift apart

its a sad old cliche
your braided hair
lost
in the glare of sunlight
turned
to obliterate

i hadnt looked in years
i hadnt looked in years
but there you were
caught in my mind
loved without remorse

wreathed in dead skin
this body is whole
severed from where i departed
eternally homeless
i am alone

this flesh is bone
light fractured
i woke choking god
a crown of teeth
until my hands lost definition

i was never here

This phantom pain, comes haunting every second breath
The new ache mirroring the old, dressed in past’s clothes
I’m stepping on growing hopes, don’t want them to take root
Before they blind me
Can’t bear to close the distance on happiness
If it’s false I won’t let it be
If it’s false I’ve been blind since I could see
I’m wasting years of my life, days fly by, at a standstill with a racing mind
Been there for years
I swear I’ve let it go a thousand ******* times
If I could just let it go
I’m dwelling on coloured memories
‘Cause the black white truth ain’t all it’s built up to be
But it’s all I’ve ever seen
And it’s all I’ve ever wanted to see
There’s a time when you realise every promise is a lie, if a pretty one
If one you’d rather believe than the thought that the future is uncertainty
And that those laugh lines, those good times, carved from people you love
Will stay
Even if they all leave
And you wake every morning looking into those creases
Hoping one day they’ll bring you as much joy as you once had
But they’re just the consequence
It’s bittersweet

white snakes the gallow
perdurance // a mottled core
three hundred galloped
tocsin! klaxon!
adorned with horns of yesteryear
tar and lynching rope.

I am cascading through myself,
and no one can save me.

We’re outside some gig.
A light rain.
An almost mist.
My knees are cold, and there are too many people,
and I have never felt more alone.

You’re waiting for me to reciprocate.

Everything is white noise.
I’m caught in the eddy of your words,
watching waves flicker into being,
before dashing on the cobbles beside my feet.

All of my existence has been an ephemeral becoming.

I’m in a car.
My flatmate screams at his window for a single second before apologising.

I’m climbing out the side of my apartment,
because I’ve locked myself out of my room,
and I no longer fear death.

The other day I thought I heard you singing.

I watch cars pass.
They bleed into the city.
A breath without beginning or end.

Reality loses definition,
or perhaps I do.









My knees are cold.

Jesus came wrapped in paper and coated in tape
Saw the sender and fell to my knees
Felt my body sink right through the earth
Felt time reverse

Was a child crying beneath the bridge
Watched his mother and father pulled to the sea
Stopped for a moment before pretending
I didn’t see a ******* thing

Should have opened my heart long ago
******* wasted on my own problems

I crawled through service
I collapsed at the grave

Can’t shake the sweat from my tips
Can’t wash the guilt from my sheets
What the hell happened to me?
What the hell happened?

I watched you go
I watched you go
I watched you go
I watched you go
I watched you grow
I watched you grow
Without eyes
I watched you grow

And I’ve been trailing
Ghostly figures wrapped in pain I’ll never know
Just to see if they’ll notice

Take off your bed
Tied to all that sleep
Descending motions
Air warmed with defeat

Set the sails
Out from under me
Those anchors on your eyes
Will disappear if you leave

Rain soaks the ceiling
Falls into the air like crashing jets
Black red white

Smoke collapses
Children break their teeth
The earth screams

They touch their tongues
It’s a sign of affection
Like oil
Or maybe kerosene
Some time later
The streets cover with ash

I try to speak

There’s nothing there anymore
Empty space
A neck without a head

I remember how you taught me to tie my tongue
Or maybe I taught myself
Doesn’t matter

I just wanted to fill the space
So we made nooses on our deathbed
I caught your breath and framed it
‘Holly blooming’
Before asphyxiating

Never did pick up my head from your apartment
You’ve probably moved away
Shifted flesh and become someone else

Doesn’t matter
Never did

My greatest desire is to slip out of this world completely unfelt.

life seemed safe
stab yourself
the harbour would be a nice place to die
if these ******* couples would just leave
leave me the **** alone
my resentment is my resentment is split the city in two and ride your body through hell
some people carry bukowski never read and spill their emptiness into the world
what do you do?
sleep and sleep until everything is worse

You haven’t lasted me
In a deathbed hollow
I closed my hands on nothing
But a phantom emotion

These flowers in free fall
With their withered stems
Drank their last purpose
When I severed their heads

You slipped your noose around me
And choked the breath away
I writhed for seven hours
And broke the dawn with a gasp

You scattered motes to the ceiling
And rode the sun’s first light
Sever your black wings
Wither my heart

Awkward pause
A bird drones on in the background
Unaware
You try to meet my eyes
Don’t bother
This life is just boredom trying to transcend itself
Someone somewhere lies on the ground
Traffic picks up
Voices in the crowd align with the bustle of the city
They fade into insignificance
Too loud to be heard
I comment
I stop halfway
Words elude words
Connections wither
A sprawled empty sentence meanders half hearted out of existence
Frustration tastes a lot like the memory of past relationships
I have noticed
So many people just want to be affirmed
They speak to be heard
Exist to be noticed
You’ve been repeating that sentence since the beginning of the year
A mockingbird singing at a broken mirror
**** the jays
Dissenters, right-wing *******
Yeah, yeah, ***** them, hella
Swallows the choir
It’s disgusting
Regurgitation has become the new culture
I realise I haven’t talked for a minute
You try to meet my eyes
Sorry
There are too many voices here
Repetitious wavelengths cascading into negative space
It’s all white noise
I don’t care about the weather
The whole city can drain into the gutters for all I care
It’d be better that way
Look there
There’s that homeless guy who has no one left
Family or friends
Let’s invite him to the house
He hasn’t read anything in years
Maybe he has something worthwhile to say

I’ve worn escape in my eyes
From time to time
Disguised as lost sleep
I abuse

Watched foundations lapse
Into sand
Framing old dreams
In towers crumbling beneath

Spoke to sensory ghosts
Lacking heads
In silence they remind me
All passed is dead

Lay my mirth to rest
At the foot of my grave
I think it died the same day
I lost my face

Who the **** even knows me?
Who the **** even cares?

There is smoke between your braces
My teeth shatter on touch
It is dry ice; a phantom
There is a blur in your speech
Blood trickles down your gums
And onto your tongue
Stop
Please, stop
Sometimes I wake
To your mouth sealed shut
Because you'd clenched your jaws so hard that blood filled your mouth
I haven't figured it out, but I think
It is the wisp of a nightmare that haunts you
It carries into morning
Settles in the crook of your teeth
To spill long into evening
Look at me
I’m sorry
I bring out the worst in everyone
I trace phantoms into corpses
Long dead but still living in me

A dream escapes itself.
Goodbye dream, a little boy says.
Is a dream nothing more than the silent play of indolence?
The boy has already forgotten.
I am lulled into nonexistence.
Cars pass. Water streams off tires. Fireworks exhale dust.
A mist settled here once.
It drew in the collective breaths of all the inhabitants within the city.
A blanket unfolding into itself.
Nevermind.
A bright death swept through me.
The sun drank my body like ambrosia.
I became the abyss.
Or perhaps always had been.
The pavement is grey with dampness.
Vapours rise.
The world escapes itself.
But no one is there to notice.

earth over my lids
cold hum black stone
apathetic and thoroughly
out of myself

split my lip
without thinking
blood
down the side of my
headstone

If only lovers lasted
As long as mistakes

broken pieces of a holiday clock
displaced by the phantom visages of
our own vanishing hands.

There is a deepness here
I no longer recognise as my own.
How do you laugh so effortlessly?
Mouth so small
all teeth.
I used to have nightmares of you
reaching into my lungs.
You’d draw my breath
on a cold August morning
and I’d suffocate.
People are a lot like homes.
There is laughter at times
but for the most part
there is silence.

You taste like salt
It deforms
Along the lines of your limbs
The inertia of an infinite movement
Creeps down your breath
The run
Swing
Lolls your head
And pounds the ground wet
Withered
Stop
Stop
Immediate
You—me? You—me?
Existence clings to your leg
Like a dead child
Wrapped into your flesh
And nothing makes sense
Nothing makes
Nothing makes sense