today I am thinking about
what it is like
to be a hard-up stand-up
about whether people
from hawaii
really do speak slower
because they are laid-back
no one wants to be a caricature

imagine me, coarse hands and a
bubble butt,
imagine being able to skateboard perfectly
and using it as leverage or a
substitute for personality.

imagine opening your black hole mouth
and your black hole legs
and your black tongued lungs
and sucking speech out of the air
but less all-encompassing,
less vital, less alive with evil,
more mundane-annoying.

imagine living to the age of 30 and
not being able to read or write
then have your friend humiliate you
about living in caravans all your life
to strangers on a train
that you have offered
vodka and weed and ‘baccy
and a seat.

I was gripped from behind (in big cities you learn to say no much more quickly) and pushed towards the crotch of a beefy-but-falling-apart man wearing an obiang gold chain around his neck in what he must have assumed was a firm but sensual encounter. I realised by the end of it I was literally pushing at his right pectoral to try and distance myself. his hand in the small of my back like you can ever own someone like that. I mistrust my gaydar even more. I mistrust people ever so slightly more, but never stop smiling, never stop throwing out the quips, the unruffled un-botheredness of it all, because if you don’t get to me can’t get to me then I have won,

but just a consolation prize, like a toaster, or knockoff abalone.

some memories are
as painful as watching
straight men
try to dance.

last night we talked a lot about setting your partners up for failure,
and the promise of communication, and in theory, theory,
technicalities, the insidious and pervasive nature of the lesbian dram’s,
how does one be firm with oneself? how does one be firm with someone
crying that they never sayang only scold everytime

let us be very clear:
you feel chastised because of your own actions being pointed out to you.
let us be very clear that I would love to not have to be a nag,
my childhood ambitions never included horsehood,
but I want a partner not a child,
accountable, logical,
unfarcical,
soft.

I’m sorry I’m not x,
she says, again,
always x
you can’t fight a phantom
that neither of you admit
to summoning

I’m not a necro
just a romancer

I feel terrible and guilty for disliking art that is
so obviously
for a good cause
(syrian refugees)
but my embittered heart and ears
reads you as self-absorbed
your little dramas, your
mediocre self-indulgences,
why do we permit self-indulgence
in men but scorn it in the
feminine,
just as long as they try and shoehorn
something about donating
to save the children
in perhaps three instances
three lines of an hour-long show
that went on for fifteen minutes too long
because he kept fucking up the music
and had to pause
to get his props from the backroom.
and had the gall
to tell us we weren’t laughing half as much
as the audience in edinburgh.

damn right.

imagine taking on
the appearance of marbled granite
but upon tactile contact
being realised as downy, soft,
pliant, lucid, a charming notion,
the feeling after waking from
night terrors and swallowing a tall
liquid glass whole, rabbit-tailed
velvet, sweet stink of decomposing biowaste,
uncooked meat, melting beeswax bodies,
a chunk of grown man, only seventeen again,
phantasmal, jillian holtzmann’s winking monotone,
an audience sighing so barely you just missed it,
roasted chestnuts mashed in the teeth,
the underside of your thumb.
imagine being caught out
in all of your blatant lives.