You were here before…
Searching for something,
Your hands fumbling from spine to spine
Inferno, Paradise Lost, Michelle Obama,
Bertolt Brecht. Glance to see a figure serving coffee,
You will amount to nothing. You or I?

Life is a series of disoriented imitations…
Strange noises slip from your throat,
Strange because… you see…
You're intelligible. Bertolt Brecht.
Something more absurdist… but no…
Sisyphus. Observe him push a boulder
Over and over… Sartre…  ****.

Why do you believe a reference
Reflects intelligence? Stupid boy,
You're a pseudo-intellectual.
Why rage against the standardisation
Of mediocrity if you yourself are
Mediocre. Why use enjambment on
Lines previous for convenience?
See the banal intolerance of your poetry?

You were here before,
Stroking spines… whatever that means…
This was about a feeling…
But even that is null.
Bertolt Brecht rots and laughs…
A small child picks fruit.

She was that Chekhovian girl
who fell for Dostoevsky
and Camus and Sartre
and
   you.

holdover from the air cools bitter awash of dark and a turning horizon without centre. where i entered an empty frame across distance and skin like smoke. ive been having nightmares of cosmic terror a sublime loss of control like paper tearing in the chaotic drifts of broken eddies and other everyday things an inward open mirror a sunlit line wavering to heat disintegration dispersal erosion and death. ive been reading uncanny fluctuations in the sign of things in a power too great and sparse to comprehend overwhelmed by haunting finitude as time veers into collision and the fleeting panic of yesterdays blood. i find myself shaking at the thought of contact the electromagnetic law of repulsion built into the fabric of my flesh eyes turned away like a promise all language from dead stars. dragged along these orbits my skin trembles and i am hateful. faces blur in passageways half-lit rooms smudge across the surface of my memory until i see nothing but the colour of what was tightening the cords of my ribs stumbling inflexion. in the precession of traffic light blurs through my sleeve and i realise i was invisible all along and that i did this to myself and that nobody can help me and that i did this to myself and that i will retreat further and further and further because if it hurts to be abandoned it hurts more to be approached and misunderstood. the masks the words the acts the plays and beneath it all fear cruel mounting hopeless wretched fear eyes turning fingers running over and over until they break the lines of my face a *******. i turn the clocks upside down. i take the batteries out of all my electronic devices. i break the locks on my door. only then does morning come.

There is an other, there, in the mirror. Memory space. A body without a head.
There is movement. Abstract thought.
A girl moves her lips. Air brushes against your own, but it is foreign. The staccato of her breath moulds waves of language. Indivisible meaning that slips your grasp.
Traffic stills. Fumes rise from cracked pavement. A child sleeps under a rusting skyline. A mother overdoses.
It is Autumn. Cold snatches another eight, or eighty. Cells rearrange, and a man finds himself changed. He holds a knife to your throat. You laugh until he cries.
The train comes late. You walk around the block to **** time. You find you no longer recognise the buildings surrounding you.
There is misery in your reflection, but it is just the other looking back and smiling.

Determine meaning of toxic
probe quantity of goodness required
to cease metabolic function
Give space to inspections
of remaining affect-reserves
Adjust interior humidity
to +/- decency

Console yourself.

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