the you/me confusion

you know,
when you want to please
to mask, to be accepted?
you know,
i mean, why do we say you
when you clearly mean me?
when i clearly mean me
when i mean to say
i’m a people pleaser…
but i’m not good at it.

do you ever find yourself saying, ‘you know that thing where…’ and then you find yourself describing your own strange anxiety or neuroticism and you think to yourself: this was me i was talking about the whole time. we talk about ourselves specifically in this universal manner. we put our situation into the listener, and ask them to empathise, and forgive, but we don’t have the strength to say: i am weak. i need your validation.

the failure and possible redemption of language

we don’t yet have the language
for the time in which we live
the 2010s, the 2020’s,
don’t feel lived in like the 90s
like naturally stressed 501s
two sizes too big
in every direction
y2k was the last mass adopted nickname
there is no confidence yet
in the unfolding millennium
so i propose a radical redetermination
y2k of d2k,
then d2k.1,
now 2k.2,
or, i posit “point two”
in practice

i mean obviously i don’t expect this to be taken on. its quite abstract. but i hope i can at least draw attention to what is a serious problem. we can’t be going around calling this the 20’s, it’s preposterous.

but you never know. this will probably go viral. by next week i will undoubtedly be a very famous poet and everyone will agree that this is d2k and maybe even that this is y2k.25? anyway, if we are going to live in the future, we should start talking in a befitting manner.

airport toblerone

airport toblerone? spoiled child
and a backpack of packs of lambert and butler
i have a theory that good things wait for those who come
different but the same

i remember back in the heady days of the european union when there was free movement of goods and persons. when a soul could stock up on several thousand cigarettes at the airport shop, sold in such a big packet that it came with straps so it could be easily transported back to blighty.

we have always lived in absurd times.

many vietmans

a day without contact,
perhaps it’s really passed
two, three… many vietnams.
now detente,
defcon four, defcon five
cooled down conflict. digging trenches.
trying to stay alive
love is unconditional, but trust can be lost
a provisional impasse that can’t last
defcon three, defcon two
don’t turn the dial to first
but good souls have forgiven worse

this was the beginning of the lost weekend. a two month long weekend. i was in the depths of my postdiagnosis identity crisis. i suspect i was insufferable. my diary entries were long and messy.

vulvic pud

fruit forward vulvic pud, touched,
lingered upon, picasso pubic crumb
a tender rebirth, but is this the beginning or the end,
reprise: why does your love hurt so much?

i was out for dinner with friends at a fancy italian restaurant, and honestly, the dessert was so obscenely vaginal it could not have been an accident. luckily we were are liberal, open minded people and we were not offended.

it was also a very rainy day.

the hoarse foreman of the acopalypse

the firewater fades to a numb, dumb dysphoria
as we tag along
behind the hoarse foreman of the apocalypse
on foot due to cutbacks
we lost the yoga word to an armed counter revolution
modish clatty vogon rogues
namaste, karaoke, ok?

technological advances continue at a barely digestible rate. yet we must always find efficiencies and makes savings. the nation states have given up on space travel. now, that is only affordable for the owners of multinational corporate groups.

we have more resources, more potential, than at any time in human history. yet we must increase the retirement age. and cut the welfare state.

as a disabled person, i worry. i could lose my job. and there would be nobody there to stop my fall. i’d have to spend all my savings, sell my flat, and only then could i claim £75 a week or whatever the dole is. enough for an ok lunch for two at a restaurant.

i’m not flash. i am happy with cheap beer, pasta and cheese. bananas. i could give up holidays as long as i still had time off. but i’m unusual i think. i think a lot of people would like to have children and buy a semi in the suburbs, but they just can’t make it work in the current economic settlement. that sounds like failure to me.

actually existing capitalism

life under actually existing capitalism continues;
a unique combination of boring and stressful.
face it, i’m never going to be a hot porridge-man
i think trusts are somehow fundamentally immoral
for tax wheezes and to sneeze-on late diseases
build car washes and slag heaps on the green belt!
speed eden’s fall to it’s infernal conclusion

i don’t want to be too political, but i don’t like the world that much. i don’t claim to know how to fix it. but it’s just not that fun. work i mean. we spend years in training, like 13 years of school, then maybe college as well, you’d think we’d be like smart enough to make the world work without everyone spending most of their waking life just trying to keep on top of their emails.

an odd feature of actually existing capitalism, is that the essentials of life, you know, shelter, food, raising a family, entertainment… are priced as luxuries. lots of jobs just don’t pay enough to support such things. i don’t claim to understand economics. but that seems to me like an abject failure.

culinary weekend

gloriosa, parliament sauce,
crises on the high seas
a paddling pavarotti leaves
in degrees of blue cheese
graduates to a sextet roundtable gaff christening
make the dog wait late to get out in the rain
halved iced raw lobster twitching
piled up plates in the kitchen

was there a thing about the three tenors and high c’s? sometimes i read this poem back and i haven’t much of a clue what was going through my mind. i think this was about my girlfriend’s flat warming but honestly. it was a tough time. maybe we just leave it at that. need to get better about oversharing…

in my second novel, tentatively titled ‘sleaze in san estaben’, there is a character called pavolvia who is loosely based on pavorotti. except it turns out he isn’t really italian and has a gruff new york accent. and he’s a bit of a sex pest. man i need to spend more time working on my novels.

the elucidation

hey. imagine if everyone knew everything
not about the physics and philosophy and the universe,
god and the mystery of life;
but about every dirty thought you have ever had,
and all the gossip since the pharaoh and moses
smoked camel lights in negotiation
round behind the pyramid
not just who horsed who,
but every weird wet dream too
we would be more liberal and better behaved i should think
subterfuge stymied,
the obfuscated elucidated.

an idea i think about a lot is that of the book at the end of the universe. i like to think that, when this whole thing is over, all the players will be invited to inspect the logs and find out what the other characters were thinking, what actually went down, who thought they had got away with cheating, and so on. like, the ultimate compendium of gossip.

so for the purposes of this thought experiment, we accept that this book exists. the question then is: could it have existed before the universe started? does it already exist? but only the players who have already quit have access? or are there superplayers who have access to the book now? and would reading the book change the book?

ms. diagnosis

i only realised i had dimples
when i was 39
its fair to say i have a disconnected
state of mind
my health so misdiagnosed
i associate doctors with hurting mine
so let’s let this limerent love sing fine
aside regular meltdowns,
it’s still the honeymoon time
we bond beyond the boundaries of skin
and trust that good souls forgive everything.

when i was in my early twenties i had a girlfriend with facial dimples. how, how did it not occur to me that i also have dimples. even as i was researching the idea on google images i was doubtful. but ultimately accepting. diagnosed with dimples at thirty nine years old. with autism at 40. what next?