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

I have to use words sparingly now. Things used to be different. Before surfaces there was depth. Before identities there was self. Words go into words; wasted breath, white noise, mute hum.

We camped beneath the stars ten billion summers ago, the park down from your house. We fed the horses with grasses we picked, our hands soft with dew and lust.

I miss every inch of your being. I miss your wretched shadow spun lugubrious in Sisyphian recurrence. The slow burn of your love as it fled black char, the whole ******* forest dead.

I’m sick of spitting smoke, but words elude me. I lack the form of your departure. I’ve been trying to flee for years and now it’s happened. I’ll die astride the world immaterial and worthless.

What’s holy is dead. I swallowed it up with the branches that lay beneath you the day we kissed in the forest after school. The last trace of eternity passing into myth.

Eternity passing in a moment.

We dream in highways and landslides, miss the bus and walk the industrial zone, rusted barrels and weeds through the milk carbon whine of gutted machinery. I wear last decade’s dress, all black and splayed hollow; you, the ostentation of a formless pullover. You reach into your pocket — the last smoke before you quit, so you say — climb the graves of primary industry and exhale a microcosm of pitch.

We don’t speak for days. Years of wasting, ******* on churches, and the emptiness of night walks. I don’t *** because I hate endings and you depart to whatever next fix won’t sort you out. It’s a dreary waste of time and we both know it, but we move in circles before an abyss, growing wretched until nothing remains but traces of a vibrancy we’d never had.

After you depart, I mould myself a simulacrum of you. Time slows. I lose touch with my surroundings. Piles form. The imminent dissolves like sugar, like scent on the clothes you left. I find your pullover from months back and it clings like water. And it smells like negative space. And it covers me completely.

the beginning and end of every sentence is indefinite
this is the aim of every death

keep the door wide shut
let the groan steep
and exit in the blue of night

its all a blur
mouth decorous bloom
and bile above

I think we buried him here.
No, no. Don’t dig him up.
Sometimes when it rains the earth opens up and blood pours out.
It’s like flesh, you know?
It’s getting harder to breathe so the pores have to open wider every fall
and more and more blood rises.
The other day the electricity in the city died.
No, not just the lines.
It was like a pulse.
Every electronic device failed
and suddenly we all saw ourselves reflected in our screens;
cellphones, televisions, laptops.
Everyone was so scared.
I remember a child gripping his knees.
Mum, mum, he repeated, but she didn’t reply.
I listened for a minute
and did nothing.
Hey, cheer up.
Some say at the end of every year, all the dead skin we’d shed to that point forms back into itself.
Living, breathing beings indistinguishable from their hosts.
No one knows if they remember their pasts,
if they are born as blank slates or prefigured individuals
destined to repeat the same mistakes,
over, and over, and over.
One day they’ll take over the city and we’ll be out of jobs.
They’ll forget everything we spoke of today and drill deep into the earth.
The flesh will split so cruelly it won’t ever knit back together again,
and blackened blood will carry skyscrapers into the earth.
Don’t be sad. It’s inevitable.
Think of it as returning to the womb.
A pure
unending
nothing.

there's not much point being here
there's an expanse
there're people gathering outside
i can't see them
here there
the empty passages that go on and on and
i haven't moved in years
curled into myself
empty confine
shaking arrowroot
dried to dust.

i thought i was existence
not yet
not yet
never.

and lust without courage is fright so immense you cannot walk out the door.

slow burn through the frame
you shrink with every breath
laughing in your sleep.

Barbiturate is one of the few drugs capable of killing you painlessly, so of course the state has banned it. Instead we get paracetamol, a ****** over-the-counter painkiller that leaves you in pain for up to five days while your liver and kidneys shut down. Suicide prevention is a ******* joke. Secular appropriations of Christian values that assume life is worthwhile, whether you desire it or not. It’s long been known that rates of suicide rose dramatically with the birth of modernity—techno-scientific paradise for the middle-class which stresses efficiency over existence. New forms of automation, the human body disciplined into repetitious acts, the partitioning of workspaces so that no single worker could operate the whole—so that any worker could be fired and replaced with the minimum amount of training necessary for capital to continue circulating. The body is individualised, scrutinised, and punished by rich kids playing panopticon, so that any mass agitation is coerced into silence through the threat of destitution.

Slitting your wrists barely succeeds and more likely than not leaves you with tendon and muscle damage. Catalytic converters in cars now convert carbon monoxide into harmless CO2 and H2O. Drowning is one of the most painful ways to die. You cannot escape. The state places helpline numbers around suicide spots to treat life after the fact, rather than at the source of suffering. Vocal band-aids, ****** ******* aphorisms that seek to revert you back into a happy state-serving commodity. Things will get better. Life is worth living. Think positive. Alienation is omnipresent. Neoliberal discourse requires you to be subservient to the greater system of capital and the easiest way towards this is the instilment of comfort, of pleasant nullity, the circumscription of emotional capacity and reflectivity. Suicidal thoughts are abnormal, because life is worth living. Eat your packaged food item and watch Netflix.

For a drop into water to be fatal, it has to be 250 feet. Try to aim for your head to maximise brain injury. The most prominent suicide spot around here has a drop of 100 feet. They cordoned it off anyway. Your life doesn’t belong to you. The first time I tried to suicide my mother asked ‘why would you do that?’ as if it was the dumbest thing in the world. The second time, the doctor looked at me in an exasperated manner and prescribed me lots of drugs. Geettt bettterrrr. Nobody cares about you, they simply want you to return to normal. Normality as in serving your parents, serving your friends, serving the state, and serving the market. Normality as in not questioning social norms and institutions. Normality as in get a stable job (i.e. compete against other workers in an exploitative, undemocratic system that values and inculcates self-serving desires), get married (preferably to someone of the opposite *** who is middle-class and imbibes European culture), get pregnant/get someone pregnant (but only once or twice, because anyone who has more children than that is backwards), invest in housing (those students and lower-class families need to learn how the world works; really, it’s a benefit to take their money), watch sports (to instil national pride in your children; no son, we didn’t colonise the Pacific Islands, keep watching the man with the wooden stick hit *****), eat out every week (preferably exotic restaurants), go see the world (preferably exotic locations, so you can be served by exotic people, take in exotic sights, then leave without considering where any of your money has gone to, whether any of it has reached the slums, whether the beach you lay on is accessible to the people living there, or whether it has been privatised by the tourist firm so that only rich tourists like yourself can lie on it), join a club (those capitalists were innocent, it was the indigenous folk that were making a ruckus over the new golf course; it’s not like we’ve been colonising their land and culture for the past three centuries), donate to charity (but never any charity desiring systemic change; that’s crazy), consume, always consume (keeps the economy going; why question the desire for infinite growth in a world with limited land, resources and markets?), replace your phone every year (those poor workers in Asia need our help), repeat to the point of nausea.

The most successful method to suicide is a shotgun to the head; high calibre, slug rounds. Of course, with all these methods, the chance of failing may leave you disfigured, paralysed, mentally disabled or physically crippled (spinal damage, broken limbs, failed organs), with no guarantee that your family, or even your state, will allow for euthanasia. After all, the popular discourse paints suicide as selfish—an irony, considering liberalism places the self first and society second. It is viewed as sinful regardless of context—deontologically detached from anomie, alienation, material deprivation, social pressures, psychological affectations, any cause or structure. Life is worth living. This ignores that the subject is situated in existence. The subject moves through existence to live. Life, then, is the totality of the subject’s interactions. It cannot be universalised into a single state or judgement that merges all subjectivities into a catch-all worthiness. Worth is dependent of the subject.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. Maybe I just want everyone to **** themselves, because the world is ****** and the majority of people are ******* it worse. Most people think being nice makes them good. They turn blind to the systems of oppression they partake in. A while ago my mother was asking if I’d heard about the mass suicides happening at Foxconn, the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. This year she showed me her new iPhone. I don’t ******* understand. I don’t understand how people can be outraged at humanity abuses, yet do ******* nothing to help or change their ways. Yes, market solutions are ******* ****, but these commodities are still coming from somewhere, and while capitalism is in place, our money is still flowing back. I don’t understand how people can be concerned about ecological issues, then pour dishwashing liquid down the sink every night, dissolving the gills, eyes, and organs of fish in rivers and oceans. I don’t understand a ******* thing. I feel physically sick most days. I can barely function outside of university, because engaging with real people, in real systems, just reminds me of how careless, worthless, and disgusting they are. When I first turned vegan, my dad simply said plants are living too. Well no ******* **** dad, why didn’t you ask me my reason for turning vegan, rather than simply repeating the dumb **** everyone else says? If you were stuck on a desert island. Well I’m ******* not. I’m stuck on this **** world filled with nice people who don’t give a **** about anything. I’m stuck every week walking the same roads, to the same university, where I become more and more distanced from reality through abstract philosophical theories that no one else cares about. I’m stuck walking through the supermarket every week, to purchase overpriced commodities produced by transnational corporations I don’t support, but nonetheless have to buy to survive. What alternatives I buy are mocked because it's so funny being ethical in our day and age. Because it’s so much more normal eating pies, and drinking beer, and treating women like objects, and affirming nationalistic sentiments of white supremacy, and making fun of ethnic minorities while they’re incarcerated, and beaten, and killed. All lives matter, the liberal conservatives cry out, while doing ******* nothing to help any cause. I don’t understand this world, and I have no desire to be in it if this is all there is.

New horns
Paper crowns
Ink kings
Flash smiles

Sever your minds
Sever your necks
We’ll speak in circles round
The fool within

A frenzy target for your
Sensational ****
Dissect this media market
Black lust and haste

Reduce
Reuse
Retie
That ******* noose

No, that’s not how it goes.
Start again.
Do you remember the tree on the lake?
It was a forest.
No, it was black, like tar. It tasted like broken glass.
I remember the incense on the drapes.
Yes. It clung to our clothes.
You cried.
No, I smiled.
You cried smiling.
Yes.
I hate it when this happens.
What happens?
You know?
No.
Um. Sometimes it feels like the world is too crowded with words. Like it's too dense to speak.
That--
Like there’s something in the air that pushes against my throat.
There was a black dog, just then.
What?
Outside. It’s gone now. Sorry. Start again.
Do you remember the tree on the lake?
There was a raven.
Yes.
It was black like tar.
It caught a worm once.
Ravens don’t eat worms.
Yeah. It just sat there, with the worm in its beak. The worm squirmed, wrapping itself round the beak, over and over.
Is that why you were crying?
It wouldn’t stop. It kept going, digging its flesh deeper into the edges.
What was your father doing?
Smiling.
Why?
He’d filed for a divorce earlier.
Right. I wasn’t there.
No, you weren’t.
Do you regret locking the doors?
Sometimes I can taste the rain before it comes. It’s a skill I’ve had for as long as I can remember.
I’m lost. So your father was smiling?
No, he was crying.
Sorry. I swear I just--nevermind. Start again.
There was a storm in these parts when we were young. The worst storm in a hundred years.
I don’t remember.
You slept through it. I held your hand all night.
Why?
Because I was alone.
You still are.
Yes.
I hate it when this happens.
What happens?
You know?
Yes.
Where have you been?
Everywhere but here.
And where will you go?
Nowhere.
Sometimes when I look at you, it’s like looking through static. It’s like I’m looking at an impression of a person.
I get that a lot.
It’s like all my memories of you have blurred together. Vague feelings rise out of the haze. Feelings I recognise, yet cannot describe. I cannot connect them with who you are, what we were, or where we’ve been. It’s--
Like exiting a dream.
Yes. Exactly.
You feel a gap in your soul. One that has always been.
Always been. You held my hand, once.
During the worst storm in a hundred years.
When was that?
Every night.

Tailor-made,
You’re full of form
And ache.
You’ve covered yourself in knots, you can barely make
Out your own doubt,
And where it’s coming from
Now.

Darling blue,
You speak in rhymes, you soar through acres
To the same old room.
You’re a head full of ideas, and a heart that craves and craves
To be real,
And to feel more than you can keep
In one place.

But you can’t hold such hope, without a helping hand;
And you can’t trace the clouds, without losing yourself in them.
No, you won’t know the rush, without the halt and the loneliness;
And you won’t ever love, without hurting time and time again;
But you will anyway.

I hope you wait for the one,
I hope you find happiness,
I hope you love more than life can give.
I hope you live without hurting,
As much as I know that you will.

Maybe we’ll get through this.
Maybe we’ll get through this.
Maybe,
Maybe we won’t.

Maybe we’ll get through this.
Maybe we’ll get through this.
Maybe,
Maybe we won’t.

Just don’t lose hope.
Just don’t let go.

Half found terrified—half lost fearless age
I’ve only the courage to get me through the day
And my perspective has been waning with each sleepless night
Lost in faces I no longer recognise

I’m certain I follow the same as my father
Running from the troubles of east coast
Or my brother, and my mother
Letting all my loved ones go

I’m too weak to fight my fear of lovers getting close
Too tired to wake from the delirium
That I hurt my own soul
Too changed to shine on and get through the day
Without a stutter in my thoughts
That I’ve made a mistake

I’m not sorry that I let you in
More that I cut you off without a thank you
Or a goodbye
Kiss
But my lips tremble and my hands shake at the slightest sign
That life is getting on and getting by
Without me by your side

Twice the fool is the runaway
Who hides his trail, as he hides his ache
All bottle and pills, temporary sleep
Insomniac daze and cheap dinner meals

Static lies on a stationary screen
Radio chatter can’t feed the famine in me
The world is aflame
With no one awake

Sunrise slumber
I fall unconscious to the restless on midnight pavement
Breaking bones or breaking bottles
Selling skin or dealing dust to lost souls
Hearts tucked and folded from the cold

Future oblique
I dare you, predict my dreams
Late riser / never bloomer

Packs a bag, a change of clothes
To deadbeat joints, and dead end posts
Been as many years gone as daily cigarettes smoked

Bloodshot symmetry eyes
I see in every passerby
Like the whole city gone up and left their troubles behind,
You and I

We’re cerebral projections
Locked into motor whirs, recursive disintegration
Status acknowledged, clean cut
Black and white since day one

Mould breaker, you’re told you’re out of line
Gutter graves or veins, stay your place or fall behind
The only constant is the throne
You sit upon or come to view as your body’s own
The red light stare, blue flicker flares
Blare on your skin, like prisms, colour wear
Better to fade to grey than know yourself
For what you truly are, just a shade of catch and tell

Dire straits
No deviation
Full advance
Or desolation
Empty eyes
Golden restraints
I don’t want wealth
I just want change

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.

strands of hair, half-remembered
the sun has shrunk to bone.

light across a bedroom floor
spread brittle, held, lost.

this world deserves nothing
acre lit.

nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing
nothing.

a swelling pocket of fat
over and over
the tongue shifts left and right
some nervous gag
mottle
other cascade
where nobody says a thing

well what do you give?

an open palm
a sick stupid wreath

Red black red black
There is nothing more

Traffic runs endless through the gutter Styx

This city is an empty vessel
With mass every day
Triumphantly awaiting its own pointless decay

I just wanted to fill my lungs
With corrosive apathy
And feel my ribs shatter free

This life is so boring
Flies gather on light bulbs
And burn their legs off
I’ve spent the last hour
Rolling their bodies into the storm drain
But they keep coming
They just keep coming

Mute little bird crying on the sill
where is god?
drowning in the river neck choked on weeds
ribs marked with blue bruises
inward outward in

little bird little bird
swaying through the wind
where is
rising to to the ceiling fingers
devil come riding through the
frame of the world

flitting flitting berries thorns
somebody smiles at the torso
tea cup stirs the black streets run
sun sun no sun sun sun no sun
devil through the alley

it’s going to rain little little
falling from the sky grey it's all
streaks down glass wooden frames the
clutter clap of shutters and here i thought
god was slitting our throats

some nights the black torrent
holy mouth opens wide
breathes carriage horse
arthritis
tombs cracked like pristine teeth

where is god? where is god?
walking down the square walking
hands holding empty air and
silence

blood against the window
head lolling drinking corner masking
salt along the tape bounds the
end of time

out keeping light erosion
bulb eyes burnt the devil riding
heaving shoulders hands encasing
strangers set in motion

little god perched on the tower
devil riding shotgun strikes the
bell the evening opens
temple
sickness
hands through flesh

blue cheeks end of time
world speaking maw the heft
oh nothing wasted comes the river
bird rolling brine

Stolen light, comes to life in the downpour
Awake in the dead of night, shutters open to collapsing skies
Folded up, I felt the warmth of five points held to mine
And a breath to distill fear
As regular as my heartbeat

fuzzy fuzzy static static
god reached down her hand
and little people gasped in the back of my head
ah ah
this is the static of becoming
where you perceive yourself as noise
retracted back like origami
paper people
ah ah
you have a blank sheet of paper
(fuzz blackout
death)

They keep the air cold to slow the spread. A pale light draws you into existence, a bloom of city smoke and glass. I watch the shadow of your wrist thin as the sun dies. You turn your head away.

Everything thins. Houses shrink. Streetlamps burst. Organs wither. I walk for hours along the wharf. Rain trickles through broken windows and falls into the black harbour. Dust clots the waterways. Skin sheds.

The problem is you were born human. Turned away, you obliterate.

A woman swears at her crying child. She pulls his arm violently. Existence floods the air. A miasma of confusion, fear and hatred. The mirror turns outwards.

You rise with your bed. A fold in a sea of whiteness. It was your spine, they said. The thing holding you together. It was disintegrating, flattening to infinity.

There is nothingness. A flood of it. A pitiless swell that never ends and threatens to crush the world with every breath. Bated wait in a heart white as bone.

Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of reality. Years pass. The loop breaks and I reform it. You lie in a bed of stone. You sink beneath the nothingness of—

The IV fluid is imaginary. So is the taste of cold water beneath your tongue. It is a fractal world. A reality formed from a fragmented possi—haven’t I written this before?

There is a traffic accident. I am not there and neither are you. They pull you out of the wreckage, smoke rising from your chest, breast alight with hatred. You gaze at me, a stranger, and I break into shards, each one capturing you like a memento, a death drive.

Ash falls from the sky. I gaze up until I am blind. I reach my hand out and find the neck pulse of the earth. I find you.

I sit in the common room. I shuffle through pieces of myself. There is nothing here but you. Where am I? Where the **** am I? Where is the nothingness between you and I? Someone addresses me. I look up and find myself incapable of speech. I reach out but my arm fails to follow. I listen but cannot catch a word. The bell rings but you aren’t here. I look down. The pieces reflect nothing.

Reality collapses. Hypodermic crash to the libidinal economy. Desire and lack the same. Anticathexis sublimates into worthless ******* words on a document. Wren bursts black particles across the pavement, like cancerous soma running fingers through a spinal column. You smile. I sink. I sink.

The mind is sick with existence. Ganglia, myelin, dendritic sprawls. It all functions. It all works too well. Purpose, connection, reaction. I envy you. I *******—

Winter is here, bright, empty winter, almond grey and silent.

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

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

worn out alone
three years a headless drone through feverish lights
endless tunnel
ouroboros burning pavement
the whole ******* drive

make me whole with your absence
i’ll burn my lungs through and through
and wear the scent of your clothes till there’s nothing left
but radiant waste

holy ****
these concrete walls
are held by invisible strings
and collapsing
fire.

City came underwater
Circling itself
Fumbling through wet cloth
Rain soaked, rain soaked

Flooded all the mean streets
Dead ends
Singing like the cold stream
Running through our summer sweat

That moment ten years ago
Swore we’d die, but not like this
Broken like the old oak
Salt on your lips

infantile death spectrum
blood is litter is
carry on and other unassailable tears
wretched vacuous laughter

I remember
this archway
all too well.

When I was young
the concept of time
was a distant thing.

Do you remember
waiting,
every sunrise,
in this archway?

I was late
(more often than not)
but you never failed
to find
and kiss me
good morning.

I’m sorry
for everything.

i’m just not sure what you expected
wasting through the flesh of your palm
as if some invariant nightmare was worth chasing
right through your ******* palm

******* distraction
don’t pretend you’re worth anything

sand sand sand sand sand sand
i think my mind is disintegrating
i might
**** myself
it probably began before i was born
in the beginning there was nothing
and the world was perfect
then i came into the world
and read lots of articles at university
because
i wanted a good grade
but the world began to fuzz at its edges
i’d drift back to the flat
and stare at all the objects in my room
unable to understand them
most of the time i hate myself
it’s one of the few emotions
i have left
i had this 4500 word assignment
but every time i went to type it up
my words came out, out of order
a string of unrecognisable
broken symbols
a mangled image of my own
stupid head
i came to the conclusion
i was
having a mental breakdown
the other month i
sat in the city mall
and
stared at all the passing people
in their most mundane moments
and thought
this is the rest of my life
this stupid, pointless repetition
i watched people rise on an escalator
faces fixed blankly on
the space in front of them
as if they weren’t there at all
i watched seagulls poke at one another
and squawk into the ground
and thought
there is more life in them
than us
i didn’t want to be a **** up again
i would try to read over
what’d i’d written
for hours on end
until i was shaking, on the edge of tears
unable to understand why this was happening to me
i’d lie in bed
and think about the infinite worthless stretch of my life
feeling only an untraceable anxiety
deep in the pit of
my flesh
for the longest time
i thought all this anxiety and fear
came from without
that if i learned about existence enough
i could
excise all the bad parts out
but something in my head broke
something i couldn’t
control
maybe some part of me wanted this to happen
so i’d have a reason
to die.

slip break the sky, god’s descent, tiles in the sun.
shot gaze of desire, dead flesh, leviathan.
they play in fountains, the barren bones of king fisher.
blown white, origami unfolded.

Casual catastrophe
The hollow yearn of death’s widow
Bites the pavement on a thunderous night
For crippled rattles to ignite

The insidious ruin
Rides a blanket corpse into the liquor store hold up
Feigns apparitions for the madness
Distilling cruelty as a hand’s reach for addicts

A sleeper savant
Stretches his face across barren lust
A killing grin between rotting tusks
That rent the light out of a *****’s still blood

Devouring maggots
Of the ignorant, the arrogant, the cruel
Kiss the blisters on the swollen hearts
Of starving nations left to tear themselves apart

belated coward on the step
shot break of dusk
twilight receding into concrete
packed on the alley wall
cigarette ash and the suffocating mist of
a lurid breath
fade.

in a dreamlike wake
time collapses
caught in the hybrid space of
ambivalent mimicry
a traumatic double which morphs recognition
into terror.

you smile
i slip into
La Frontera
and learn to hate
myself.

master motor bearing and the tap tap tap tap tap

end of century summer sweats the tablecloth mixed iridescent spill mixed rancid cream mixed spilt milk mixed mother’s breast

entry the market aisles the aircon slick with dripping fats processed flesh working meats gotcha thumb! gotcha thumb!

plasticide yanks the chain blights the debt fifty-five to the triumph ever closer

above the clatter you let it happen you take out your wallet you scan your loyalty card you take two plastic bags a great machine turns grinding everything to dust above the clatter individual sensations collapse into one cacophony one cluttered ******* oceanic spectre of death

we’ve been here before the flat words the repetition the living death the sickness desire

how far stretch the pennies down

myself myself myself myself myself myself my

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

Blanket state
Sun rise, sun set, sun daze
Wide eye glimmer maw
Go swallow the sky whole
And trickle tar . . .
Over Death’s mongrel bone.

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

There’s too much air to breathe here.
A swirling mass of emptiness heaves through the crowd’s lungs.
Stop.
Won’t everyone just *******--

Someone sings at the bus stop just outside my window.
Wires hum, ignoring the melody that person has so carefully constructed.
A hiss.
Rising steam.
An abrupt end.

Another listless night.
A beetle flies in through my open window.
It takes me twenty minutes to help it back out.

I think about wandering the forest.
But am too scared to confront loneliness, and the frailty of human existence.

There is a gap forming already.
Here.
A dialectic that seeks to sublate my very identity.
Subsume those closest to me.
Until I am completely alone.

There is a bush down the street which is in bloom right now.
I think the sun is too hot.
The flowers are wilted.
And the pavement is littered with dead bees.

Voices.
An exchange.
A language game.
Two horizons meet, merge, melt.
‘Wait--’
The horizons drop.
If only for a moment.
And the abyss is revealed.

The only universal in this world is that we are all alone.
Trapped in our own understanding.
Forever interpreting one another.

I am waiting for the day the wind carries me out the window.
Perhaps it will never come.
Perhaps I will live a long boring life amongst friends, family, and all those people I despise.
Oh well.
No point, either way.

I think I felt my spine break
As I clutched my heart
As if an irregular beat
Had tied nooses round my arteries
And cracked my bones apart

I choked on my gasps
I whimpered into my sheets
I bled through my sleeve
Until I passed out

It’s just another dream

Should have known better than to hope
On hollow words
Sent to and from two dead birds

I can’t believe I ******* thought
You were an end
And I was a means worth living for

How ******* naive of me?
How ******* naive

Dream your peace
Whilst the world rages
Go lie in your steel-walled sleep
Let the crueller men deceive
Let better men bleed

A sleeping mind for sleeping times

What’s another casualty?
Doesn’t affect me
So you let deflections become reflexes
Unknowingly

Happenstance you came to live
In first world palms, with first world eyes
Never looking back at second place
Least of all the third in line

Whatever gets you to sleep at night

With such birth rights,
With such languor
I will rule the world in my own mind
With such circumstantial, beneficial, superiority
I will turn a blind eye

To everybody’s suffering but mine

******* pathetic
I lace my tongue with regret before my lips even open

Belly up diner
Fork and knife set to the sky
Infinity swallows
A thousand shining eyes
Belly up sleeper
Hands knotted to the chest
Waking to disaster
Makes the roofs cave in

Everyone’s faces are folded under the surface of the concrete
I can’t make sense of any of this

There’s a barrier to the plaza
Air blows through
Too fat to fit
So little pieces peel away and litter the ground like skin
Everyone just goes around it

They said it’d be 18 degrees today
But I think it’s going to rain

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.

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

Death lies at a bottomless cliff
Gorging the valley till the earth splits
And marrow spills through black haze chatter
Between bones of ancestral desires

His voice came through to me one night
A wisp that seeped past glass and flesh
To trickle deprecation
And lay my fitful mind to rest

"All you are, all you to blame
No innocence
You gorge yourself to death

All you are, all you to blame
No innocence
Where men exist"

The first attempt ended in nothingness. Ribbons flowed from the belly of mother hollow, and though they grasped at their own absence, their fingers broke like brittle leaves, returning to the mother’s flesh.
This was the birth of change.
The second attempt ended in madness. Shadows rose out of the nothingness in waves and cascaded into pools of being, but when being opened its eyes and saw its image, it let out a threshing scream.
This was the birth of separation.
The third attempt ended in lack. Fire poured from the cosmic maw and baked earth to blood; flesh gorged on itself, and pale figures gripped the edges of rivers, gaping at one another, unable to speak.
This was the birth of despair.
The last attempt ended in man; and nothing birthed after it.


Appended File

Source states the archaeologist was investigating the Mariana Trench. Strangely, he began displaying symptoms of decompression sickness on the descent. His state worsened, but, due to his insistence, the pilot continued the mission. The archaeologist began recounting, in “muddled and broken speech”, accounts of his wife and children. In interviews conducted after the incident, colleagues claim to have never met any persons matching such descriptions. Soon after, the archaeologist collapsed. The pilot recounts, in a shaken tone, “By all means he was out. Like—I called to him, you know.” When asked why he did not administer first aid, the pilot replied “I couldn’t st—he was out cold, I ******* swear. I didn’t notice it at first, moving my hand over his face, you know—staring into space. I grabbed the kit, turned back, and that’s when it hit me. His eyes weren’t glazed, they were fixed on me. Tracking me. Like—those weren’t his eyes, anymore.” When asked to expand on this, the pilot broke down and had to be escorted from the room. The archaeologist has yet to awaken from his coma. It should be noted his eyes are closed.

— 37, Male. Cairo, Egypt.