Even mindless violence is boring today.
–Vyvyan, The Young Ones
This country that self-identified so smugly as stable, tolerant and moderate, with a crown to symbolise traditions honed down the centuries, is revealed as fissile, fragile and ferociously divided.
–Polly Toynbee
Summer moths collect still at the windows.
Then leaves & winter ice.
–Paul Mariani
So our response is the same as always. We will continue to cover this administration like any other: fairly, aggressively and fearlessly, wherever the facts lead.
-The New York Times
But today, as a cam girl, all you need is a hundred men who give you fifty dollars a month — a hundred men in the whole world! And trust me, there are definitely a hundred men in the world who love the fact that your left breast is a bit bigger than your right one, or that you’ve dyed your hair green.
–Nina Hartley
The air in Eastbourne … is melancholy with the sweet memories of childhood, and the promises it breathes are prayerful and lenitive: all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of things shall be well.
–Howard Jacobson
You lose your purport, losing me.
–Rainer Maria Rilke
The worst trouble is no trouble at all. The only lasting and final danger is this contentment. I fought long and hard to be in the mess I’m in. It’s quiet here. For once the twat next door isn’t banging club hits through the paper walls to the rhythm of the ignorance of her own death. The world has a full faith in it’s beauty but I wait the decay of time to see what new petals will spill their joy from the cut earth. It’ll be gasoline and harvesting the bones of dead things that made this Rome the last. Though I don’t know why I will get after this and spool out my every overwrought thought, do divining with hot tea and a word count. Asking why I write is pissing in the wind. But if I try and get to the bottom of why I do anything it rattles my skull and sullies the gut. The day in and the day out have got me, the irons of Babylon and a healthy reptile fear of being outdoors and never getting back in. I ain’t much for this though I might have been but it’s taking so long to cut out in the get lost. The Big Night. Drinking the milky way, tumbling with black carbon and getting blown out in streams of white phosphorus and sulfite. I’m waiting for my love, when her evening class gets out we’ll go night swimming and dip into the fissile forever among stars the color of salt and semen. Things I remember coming at me as we spiral, mirrors cut to scimitars, pieces of me cutting me to pieces. Things I forget are forgotten, maybe stuck and caught in Gitane smoke and shook with throaty laughter rumbling out the ardors of every strife. I think we will be free but we’ll need to get free to be there. Use our finger bones like literal skeleton keys to get to where the endless bottles of booze are in the next room.
What it counts for is all that hasn’t gone missing. What dogs ain’t tore through the barely moored posts and whatever can still be read in ink on the pages of our skin. Boats in the harbor are buildings. Politics are guns for the dead, newspapers money you can’t even spend. All for naught laugh the madmen and though they’re merry with pain we only turn in our wings, a weight of dried teeth and nails. The poets, dead right but not proud to be. The days finally sideways with sunlight leaking upwards and flowers emptying, spilling out and cops and priests pulled by coffers and nailed to the bottom of the world like roaches stuck in a hot glue box. I’d like to think I’ll be standing, some cosmic 2nd&Market 95-exit that goes from blue to black, great flue to lack. I want to hold on to that summer can I, can we scotch the deepest Autumn lover, can I plead your Irish freckles over me like a net? Are these words and all the others I have spilt and been outlived and outshined by, a janky pile of these firelog words, pillar words, words longer than a wait for a trolley in the suburbs and words shorter than the penis shaft on the David–can these words, these black coffee with white sugar words, dive-bomb starling, folded up at the cuff words be festooned and maybe piled up to foist her both hands that ass, up and over and soon follow myself and climb up and hoist with all that world-class spite I been sharpening and sucking on and hoist me, too, up and over the great divide, this filching life and get out to where the living’s easy, wide skies as blue as blank checks, and we’ll tumble there my Ciara and me drinking long glasses of sun-wine brandishing long taffy smiles and only singing a roaring song, only there forever being in love. Out of these rooms of verse into a chorus of streets.
Going for the Throat 