Last Manifesto

How hateful you've become. It's the day before the deadline for the GRA consultation. Maybe you're reading this in a few years time and you don't know what that is - you don't know what anything is. The whole world has been sucked out and paralysed and you're not capable of knowing anything. No. That's now. Hostile subject, you don't know anything at all. We are left with almost nothing. Hatred is not knowledge, it is idiot passion. It burns in me. The reason this feels strange is because I barely know what any of it means anymore. It feels like they're having another one of their elections which have collapsed onto us over and over again. Even that last one where that desperate little weapon called Jeremy Corbyn made a bit of headway. Everything that's happened in electoral politics for the last ten years has been a hideous repulsive disgusting ridicule of human subjectivity. Actually, twenty years, actually, more or less forever, and more or less almost nothing. And so here I am in a horrible state not dressed yet, working away at the thing that occupies every minute of my entire life and often takes me closer to universal central point, making me worse, being told by my financial ombudsman (I don't know what that is) that I am not working and that I need to be working, and I look at social media where loads of gorgeous people are doing their absolute best to accommodate people who are like me, or a bit like me, or not at all like me, or a little bit to the right if you squint but almost like me or who are almost nothing like I am or who are nothing like you and I also are, or who are a bit more than almost nothing, or who are almost nothing like almost nothing, asking things like "how can I be a good ally?". I don't know what this is. A nebulous vocoder. Fuck you, ally. You are as bad as rotten soil. That's not even an insult. I am the thing rotting in the soil and you are the soil. "You are my dust" I read somewhere. It's not even going to accumulate into some wonderful moment if it goes well, the GRA if reformed as proposed will at best attempt to save a few hundred lives and what are a few hundred lives now when we are almost less than nearly nothing, after all of this? How hateful I've become. It happens from time to time. I try to resist and curtail it but it's so difficult. To have seen magnificent humans brimming with love deliberately fall out of this world and to have even a vague understanding of the mechanisms that seem to be sustaining it against so many incredible possibilities - rendering the better good utterly impossible, it's hard not to recourse to hatred... It's been a couple of hours since I wrote that. Now I'm a little calm. Or exhausted. The thing about this moment - the thing, is that it's one of those questions that I can't believe we're even asking. Around that questions is a swarm of grieving fear being clutched tightly in the fists by opinion journalists and people who've been thrashing against us obsessively for years. Suddenly they're walking under the banner of "legitimate concern". We just want the noise to stop. That's all I can hope for at the moment. I'm sick of human lives being at the centre of violent questioning. I'm sick of your pretend intellectualism. I'm sick of your stirring. There is no such thing as a trans poetics. I'm sick of the great big old world keeps on turning. There is a tongue in the neck. There is rotting soil. Moments of collective healing. What. Slow death.

(niner - after Nat Raha, after Linus Slug)


Slow death, now as in gently they made
     a centre, this hazing remedy
     hostility recognition act
     legitimized until no moving;
slow death, slow death, slow gridded death, by
     what. How hateful you've, no not "hateful"
     exactly more like a gentle grind
     called love, exactly. What. Reduced us
to releasing wasps in their houses.


Today is the last day in the entire world. Waiting at the end of something for almost nothing. Waiting at the end of something that is also nearly nothing for almost nothing to happen. Being attacked for nothing and for wanting nothing more than nearly nothing, for wanting almost nothing more to happen. Being killed for being almost nothing at all. Being nothing. Being almost something, nearly the idea of something but almost called nothing. Waiting at the end of nothing for almost nothing to achieve almost nothing; we are almost nothing waiting for almost nothing for an amount of time that feels like just a little more than almost nothing but is in fact barely anything, and is nearly almost nothing. Feeling almost nearly nothing about waiting for almost nothing being killed for almost very nearly nothing nothing and almost feeling nothing. Being feelingly crushed under the weight of almost nothing knowing nothing forward and nothing backward, knowing that ‘forward’ and ‘backward’ is less than almost nothing, the inescapable less than nearly almost nothing whose consensus we are stretched inside to the length of nearly nothing. The consensus of being almost nothing for almost no time, for feeling almost everything knowing that everything we are always feeling is slightly short of almost nothing. You are everything to me, and it feels like we are somehow going to be crushed again, gently crushed to the glint of a scent of a flavour of a speck of a maddeningly tiny almost nearly nothing, a minuscule almost nearly nothing coerced and tendered into a world of minute almost nothings forever, an objective and administrable, almost nothing. an objective and administrable slow and silent death.

Monlogue - from Hopeless Vibrato

MARTIN: I am Martin Costello - Hater of Paedophiles. For the last few months my daughter’s been softly tugging on my arm asking about higher education. Obviously I’m a very busy man what with leafleting and the little plastic gloves they use cost a penny each but we could be waste them on or at maybe ten pounds a glove! etc. For a while I paid it little attention thinking this was a soft phase which would pass her by and maybe leave her feeling really stupid when it all turns out to be make believe. Unbeknownst to me, however, she’d sent off UCAS applications. She received three unconditional offers which I was bloody well expected to be proud about when the little rubber fingers not fit properly a bloody disgrace at ten pounds each a glove! So I did my homework. I’d heard all about these “Universities”, snowflake replicators. Parsons Extruded Remoaners. I checked the list of courses available and to my surprise there wasn’t a single one listed as a “Social Justice” course. Perhaps Sargon’s petition had actually worked! Next I checked to see if there were any bloody well Paedos. There were two convicted staff members. Doddery old white professors. Not much of a grooming gang if you ask me. I ignored them. For once I felt my conception softly inch itself towards the door like grandparent fingers unwrapping my fingers, peeling them out of the little plastic gloves they have. My daughter. My deal. My taxes. I left myself at the door and flew back home with the leaflets. The sun let itself shiver through the curtain. My heart rate monitor. No daughter of mine. No.

The above is from a long theatre / poetic monologue piece I'm working on. The working title for the performance is "You Will Live Today", with the internal monologue under the title Hopeless Vibrato. 

There's a new Binnsclagg E.P. here for you to listen to, if you like that type of thing: Binnsclagg - Fly Away Peter Fly Away Paul

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News! Gossip! Books! OMG!

THE NEWS

Hi there.

There's loads of exciting published matter that you should go and buy immediately.

First of all look at these wonderful objects from Boiler House Press!

New collections from Nar Raha, Sophie Robinson, Francesca Lisette and Marcus Slease. All of these poets are doing incredible work. I'm also mad about boilers and gorgeous printed matter.

I may try and review these as a set. You can pre-order them here (out on November 5th):

(funded) Boiler House

And look what's new from Sad Press:

Stoked to see new work from Imogen Cassels and Naomi Weber. They can be got here:

Sad Press

I have a new book out on Pilot Press. Also any day now you'll be able to get A Queer Anthology of Rage. Here:

Pilot Press

Timothy Thornton's In Skyscraper Dawn has just dropped on The Winter Olympics Press. Solid banger.

The Winter Olympics

There's a new Press in town run by three absolute Baberaham Lincolns. A book is out by Calliope Michail, which is excellent. This is a press which supports writers and has good politics. It is here:

https://www.the87press.com/

I've made a Patreon page because I have very little money at the moment but I'm working really hard and I want some new cardigans. If you'd like to support me in my life you can do so. I will send you treats and stuff.

Help This Nervous Slow Worm Live its Best Life

GOSSIP / OMG

So the TOTALLY gorgeous poet known under Francis Crot, Pochahontis Mildew, Axle Prose, Jowself Walton etc. has only gone and landed a job at Sussex which mean's he's in the same town as me. The other week a group of us had a little intimate reading in the upstairs of our local and it was GORGEOUS. Totally. So like, we should do another but with Walton in the room. 

OMG me and Joe Luna are both at the University of Surrey now! Surrey is known as Britain's Patio!

Keston Sutherland and Stephen G. Rhodes have an exhibition on in the back of a vape shop on Western Road in Hove. It's right by me and Dolly's house so if you go give us a dot at verityspott@gmail.com and maybe we can go for a cup of tea. Here's a like to that: We Get it You Vape

Come to the next Hi Zero too. Hi Zero 64. There's going to be a Nat Raha, a David Grundy and a Gizem Okulu. It'll be a madness!

Speaking of which I'm a bit worried that Ally Law might be in prison or something. His YouTube account has been pretty quiet of late. I know he's meant to be on tour doing Madnesses every day. Lord be with you, Ally and your pals.

I'm not sure who fancies who at the moment. If you know please drop me an email. I'm also trying to get back into the agony aunt business so please drop me an email with your problems, but be aware they will be published.

Cya. xx

Snow

for Kesh.

26th - 27th February 2018.

For I have seen love
and his face is choice Heart of Hearts,
a flesh of pure fire, fusing from the center
where all Motion is one.




It started to snow at midday, maybe somewhere after
why there refused to be snow for so many years  and now
it’s hanging in the sky and I came downstairs to see
the snow and I met it with my toes and with very few flakes
at stretches apart and a cyclist glared as I ran after one and the air
was ringing with you, how it impossibly felt like a world under
the hand under the eye and the skin itself was my skin your skin
full of snow and water bumps us up and tossed to the fish
to the porthole. It upended it started it goes out of nothing for
if you, we, claw; for I have seen his face, a voice or that exacting
curve from cheek to eye of in our minds what isn’t
able to go or an unobtainable exit dangling in the sky. To one
another now it is still there the rising and falling the flakes the
accidental winning, remember when we accidentally won the
quiz but we were all and it was summer. And it was still the
end of summer still near enough that it was warm and sitting
outside of it. None of this rising and falling they have now
from Russian air I see the toadstools and the swallowtail and
the ropes and fledgeling bulkheads. Now there is no you only
the rising and dipping motion impossible not to simply stare
and if it is, if there is hell to get into its memory drifts back
and up in the order of relentless suns, waves, portholes,
collapsing into our arms they were waiting for your body’s
commencement in motion, down and outwards your soft
falling body. I want someone like the powder it is up and
varied to come and destroy this collapsing chain of snow it is
how welcome could a thing like this be as it collapsing in pain
and in the light, in the rising and falling light that is coming
in the morning, coming gently onto the surface of the world
and remaining. I want to know that this snow will never
finish until the whole of the world is gone to its gentle
shoulder. Now it starts to go, it’s all melting and all
there is is wanting. Wanting nothing more than for nothing
to ever have to melt again until everything at last is covered.

The Bed Moved

I woke up a lot in the early hours, itching and feeling pretty rotten. I had diarrhea and had to keep getting up to void myself - that’s exactly the word for how it felt - voiding - unpacking. Like there was something horrible in me. We watched The Exorcist the other day. Very bad idea. I remember seeing it as a teenager and being creeped out by the noises in the attic but finding the rest of the film completely ridiculous. This time around, at thirty, I found it utterly terrifying. That daemon, Pazuzu. There’s something about it. I’ve got really messed up in my head about it, superstitious - as if by writing his name here I might somehow be inviting him in. Our house is full of ghosts, by which I mean lingering little troubles - I think that is to some extent what ghosts are; echoes that don’t seem to go away - our physical proximities crammed with repeated patterns that have to be comprehended often in exhaustion. You can be afraid of them and you can also speak to them. I have done both. There used to be this banging on the door. That was maybe eight years ago. I thought that was a daemon. It was so sudden and insistent. 

I woke up at around five and felt terrible. I do stupid things but somehow they work. I put a documentary about Stalin on and I drifted off. There is a moment when you realise it is working. When you notice that you’ve stopped listening to whatever it is and that you are thinking about something quite different. Your mind begins to perform for you and you know that sleep may well be on its way. I love that feeling. However, this time it was very deceitful. All those lines between dreams and wakefulness became scrambled and I had a dream where I was simply trying to sleep. I kept waking up inside it. At one point the bed had moved quite considerably and it was absolutely terrifying. 

My dear friend Elle and her boyfriend Jan live in a really nice little flat on Clarendon Villas. They are moving out of it soon. They have been dreaming about a disembodied voice telling them to lock the door. Their door has a Yale latch and a deadlock. They don’t use the latter. Several times they have woken up to find it tightly locked. Jan said that the last time this happened he thought he saw a man standing near to the door. The other night I was taking the rubbish out. We live in a flat up sixty eight steps in what would have once been the servant's quarters of a massive Regency townhouse. Historically one family would have occupied the building, now it’s divided into flats. The final staircase to our flat is narrower than the rest, which is spooky. Anyway, I went down all the steps with this bag of rubbish and opened the corroded bolt to the old coal cellar where we put our rubbish. As I turned round for a second I saw a face at the window of the basement flat behind me. I stared into the flat for a few seconds. The lights were off but I could tell that the huge room was empty. I ran up the stairs and all the way to the top of our square. This Halloween has done exactly what it said on the tin, or what perhaps I whispered into the tin. 

I am more or less okay with ghosts and I am aware that I romanticise them a lot. Actually I am really fond of them in many ways. Me and Timothy Thornton wrote a whole book of them, every poem was a ghost and each ghost was full of ghosts and had ghost friends to play ghostly games with. Daemons on the other hand, I renounce them in the name of Christ. That’s not a joke. I actually do that sometimes. I am really scared of them, which is like telling one of those awful columnists that you are offended by something they have written. 

The bed had shifted forwards by about a foot and to the left by about a foot and a half. There is a small wooden set of drawers on my side of the bed. I found them in the street one day. They have an American flag painted over them and I took them because they looked ridiculous and useful. Where the bed had moved the American Drawers were crammed in behind it so we couldn’t move it back. Dolly and I had to shift the room around get everything back in place. Whilst I got really frightened she remained quite calm and seemed to have quite an assurance about the nature of unexplained things. This is a trait of hers in waking life. Where I often become terrified she will see something brilliant going on or somehow embrace the nature of the mystery. We both have our panics but I think she has a greater grasp on not Daemons, or at least not letting Daemons invade and occupy, than I do. I suppose not having them drilled into you helps. I was still asleep, and this went over and over. When I was finally awake I was paralysed and sleep took me again and again some horrible nightmares. 

I woke up feeling sick. Had to void myself a few more times. I had a couple of hours to get to work but realised I probably had food poisoning or some other nastiness. Managed to call in sick and get cover, then I was sick and whilst that was happening I was convinced something was going to tap me on the shoulder. I’m not sure what else to say, but that at night I’m afraid to look in mirrors etc. and that I’ve been heavily drenched in the most obvious versions of ghosts all my life. Now they seem more apparent. No more spooky films for a while, young lady. 

"I never said that I was Brave" pt3

(You might sleep, but you'll never dream

Onward! Progress! Or so it seems

And you might laugh, but you'll never smile

Come on in and waste away awhile)

It was hard to get to sleep last night. I was drunk and tired. I took myself home, took myself into my bed and lay there. There were sounds and expressions going back and forth through my head, through the air. I'd read every word you had written. I had tried to listen to it. There was a pit of despair in my stomach.

The body lay there. It had no words. The words do not exist. Everything is loaded. I bind you to love yourself. I bind you to your immaculate care. From doing harm to others. From doing harm to yourself.

The questions have lived in my body. They are my body. It lives underneath a microscope - in its self hatred and wrecked determinism. Its visibility is its own worst enemy. It was not put here for you - it was not put here against you. It was beaten. It was hidden. It was not an object of compassion. It broke under eyes. There were walls of eyes.

It never wished to become a theory. It never intended to hurt you. It had its life inside it forever. It kept it at bay. It never tried to stop you from speaking, even when your words were nails. Every movement it made - every sign, was the production of a question. It had you in its dreams.

It saw a small act of law as a tiny emancipation. Though it knew that the law was the enemy the law made a tiny but significant change and the body felt a tiny weight lift up. The law was in the air, under the ground, in our mouths and our hearts. No matter what we did it would hound us, bury us, coerce us.

(When dreams of rings of flowers fade and blur

Giving way to that familiar ill

Come over and part your soft white curtains

Where I'm waiting for you still)

It remembered how well dressed the moralists were when they opened the doors of the town hall and said "people of Austria, our identity is under threat." "Men of America, if you don't make a stand you will lose your jobs and your wives". These are the words of the custodians of law. They said "we need to have a fair and reasoned debate about the Jewish problem. The Jews are a threat to our identity. They are trying to infiltrate our spaces. They are unsafe." They said "womenfolk, your primacy is being threatened". All the while they enforced the primacy of women. They constrained women. They used their bodies against their bodies. They said "you are under threat." All the while those custodians of law were the threat. All the while the mind of the abuser was left unquestioned.

Bodies like this one became the icon of threat. They became abstract examples - they were subjunctive bodies. They were used to demonstrate what the custodians of the law might be allowing. They were made to be hypothetical. But listen, dear friend, listen to our weaponised bodies. Listen how they howl, how they are mocked and disassembled. Our bodies are united in their strategic capacities. I bind the law. I bind you, law. I bind you against causing harm to others. I bind you, law. I bind you to cause harm only to yourself.

And then you shocked me. You took a picture of a human being up onto a pedestal. You made an example of a human in pain. You questioned to essence of a human identity. A cold argument. Asked for a logical dissemination. I didn't think you could do that - become a custodian of the law. What would that spirit say? That immaculate compassion - the one who has seen into your heart beyond the tracts of laws and of bodies and of polarities. What would its words be? What would it make of these establishments of fixed icons? How will the spirit purge you into love? It was a coldness I had not heard in your heart before. I bind your heart against the cold.

The custodians of law threw wide the doors of the town hall. They set out the rules of engagement. They guided the voices of the people. Steered them away from their compassion. They taught their tongues to articulate their displeasure. They showed each other to the targets. They held up bodies in front of the people and said "these bodies are a threat". They said "these bodies are mentally ill". No one thought at this point about how the mentally ill should be treated. Their resolve became firm. The custodians of law said "these bodies want you to be silent. Look how they scream when we try to debate. See how their eyes are filled with hatred!"

(My stomach swears there's comfort there

In the warmth of the blankets on your bed

My stomach's always been a liar

I'll believe it's lies again)

Did you look into those eyes? Did you see what fear looks like? Did you really see hatred? "See how they do not want you to speak?" screamed the law, all the while the law kept the women in their seats, in their bridles. All the while the coercion of voices raged and hissed. The bodies on the platform were ready to take leave of this world. All the while the law whispered in the ears of the people. All the while the men looked on. All the while I bind you against the law, against coercion, against the formation of fixed polarities. All the while the bodies on the pedestal trembled and said "I bind you" through the dust in their mouths.

The bodies were photographed and examined. Their names were passed around. The discussion was the end of compassion. The law dismantled it. The law enforced and switched. The law crept into houses. I bind you to your love. I bind you against definition. I have no power. I do not exist.

The bodies in the air, their sound: "I do not exist. I do not exist. I do not exist. Only you exist. Only you exist. I do not exist." And the law fizzed, its subjunctive electricity. The spirit. The law. The sky. The body. The water. The fire. The wind. The chaos of the silent air.

(My Lord, how long to sing this song?

And my Lord, how much more of this pretending to be strong?

When she stands before your throne

Dressed in beauty not her own

All soft and small, you'll hear her call)

"I Never Said That I Was Brave" pt2

There are some quite complicated social equations.

A wish to abolish gender --- The subject that destabilises the binary --- The natural fallacy

In the middle of that equation is the subject, the lyric "I". This character will be made to continually testify. They will be hounded by the wish to deconstruct and the ideologies of natural gender. Both of them at once. Hate crimes against trans* people. Natural women. Alpha males. Radicals. It is not possible to merely live. They must live to testify. Their visibility will be their act of martyrdom. Or try this: You live in a political situation where you have been told the laws of civility. At the same time things that you do in your day to day life have direct links to the torture and murder of people you will never look at. You have been told what is a democratic decision. You have never chosen a form of governance. You have been told what a debate is. You have spoken with corpses in your mouth. Until that is understood there is not a unit of sense in any single schema. "I did not mean any harm" does not equate to "I did no harm". We are harm. To most of the globe we embody it, pronounce it. We are the enemies of the soil we stand on. Then there are the circumstances of day to day living. Do you ever feel you are being watched? No. Embodying harm does not mean you can justify feeling guilty. Guilt is the fascist inside you cackling. There is no movement from point one to point two. There is an entropic motion of spheres perhaps but you are not hanging off a hook and this won't get you off. Nobody likes to be interrogated. Yet here we are put on the slab for your discussions. Men are still at large. They way they win is imagine the natural fallacy and the wish to abolish gender abolishing instead their intrinsic contradictions and acting as an agent of death against the subjects who dare to dissolve parts of their taught genders. You are now an agent of that violence. It's like every kind of splitting. The desire for unity is tantamount in some situations to the desire for the death of the other. They were taking photographs to send to the estranged families of people who are 70% more likely to consider or commit suicide. They called this the "documenting of a reasonable debate". I cannot write about these people in clear language because they will doxx me. Before you begin to say the word "reasonable" consider the power relations. "There is only one way out", they thought as they balanced on the edge of the bridge. There is no radical movement in enforced binaries. There is no psychedelic plane in the enforcement of motionlessness. Sometimes someone says something to you that makes you want to die. That is not an abstract metaphor. We were sitting by the window. Neither is it a logical set of circumstances. The enemies of the soil do not get to speak with logical voices. They howl in the wind. They do not posses the powers of reason. There is an argument to be made for removing the bodies inside our brains piece by piece. Apart from that "I am afraid". "I do not mean harm" when "I know not what speaking is" or "I do not know what I mean" or "creating a world devoid of context". It will end with a few horrible men wondering around in the dark screaming "faggot!", "fucking bitch!", "you deserve rape!": All of the walls will be gone. There will be nothing left to echo. They will be stamping on bodies and dead soil. They will beg their own shadows to take offence.