zkthepoet

The evening I said I want to sleep near my children again

Now I know you hoard cinema ticket stubs

warmer than magic number sperm

belch “not boyfriends” and grin loftily at their memories

of ale-breath lust and Westfield promise

Fourth occasion you’ve colourized me sick

The first; Ronny’s friend’s “piece of me”

A second; swank for Vince, prior and prettier than I

Third; the dearth of sentiment in your goodbyes; I wave at backs of heads

By the fajr prayer I’ve gone

inside again

where I daren’t tell if I love you

and leave Nocello, Sidekick, Bianco beside the crumpets of 37p

Dihydroxyacetone on the other side of the pillow

I want to ask you how many men you fucked in Benidorm

doodle it

stencil their arms from rap fetishes or scouse bravado

contours carved over your faming back chops

grinning evanescently, smarm

clink the tally of drinks they worthed you

if they held on their hat for long

and I think you not cheap

but miserly graffiti lines win you

tender your glass for a spike

I call out the bake of their speech bubbles

the yank on your weave

pull me how much tongue you took them

to spread their smegma cheese

we credit gestures for what we cannot count

but can we count the penises inside you?

the breaths on your earlobe

virused sperm in the rectum

paw-print sweat perm your hair

let me see the lipsticks you packed for Benidorm

tones of intent

for how much tanned-up germs I ingested

just now

why you cannot feel this

dry tanekka

bimbo for a vow

there are cut tears parked on the wings of your butterflies

pollen of reckless requite

so scott and rich treachery wedge


now you press out, pretend to cry

and speculate infantile on the apostasies of love

wheezing show into the virgin bed-sheet

pitch of no warrant

calling me by other boys names

and I heard you spell police again, J


dry tanekka

you cannot catch it from me

javelin salt-drops

and climateless blocks of ardour

how tempting it is to regress here

derange from the figmenting

I am the first toy out your pram

tyrant litter stairs

obliterate tweeted testimony

repent facebook tomfoolery


some days

in these shoe-high confines

it is solely babyvoice and switchblades

bunkers of rage and ruminate

and then

by work end

I am wearing your contact lenses woven

neglecting your phone cancer pleas (please)

Even though it is my smile you miss

one bronze midnight we guffawed together

noses pointed at the lemon butterflies

of youtube stand-up

one evening our belly buttons printed onto the duvet of an unused double bed

and it was that you’d never hurt my littler sister

or pounced the pigs on me

before I’d crashed you into the Asda of my fiction,

and snuffed our religion

another evening you carried the laptop to my daydream

on the couch of student loaning

                                                                        as if

                                                                        you’d discovered

                                                                        that solitary fork

                                                                        I ate with for months

                                                                        in Shadwell

                                                                        before you came

foraging the browser history

and tried to have us recover an old laugh track

I wouldn’t give you anything but six inches by then

as I scratched barbarously at the dense of the door

and chased amys

today she and I melted into Ikea

a place I’d never been with you

and I felt like the shallow father you weep at the kids to call me

Uterus

by that snow-funnelling March

I had ceased praying

and gyrated my rotting worship to a songstress

who terrifies me with white noise

like God never would.

I’d shorn my kufi to admit her longboat fingers

my nosebridge

swopped blanket rugs of war

for xxxxxxx.

I tip-toed into sleep, daring retribution

couldn’t even accident His name.

I let her deplume my beard of solace fuzz ugly

and tease for the silver whiskers I caught from witches at twenty-five.

so one dusk I ran from her

unbuttoned my phone with battle sulk

having dripped mutton sweat onto her baking tray

and smelt the growl before the screak

on the touchscreen pad.

inside anew

I slotted between the musaleen

in a pensioning teacup of a mosque

prostrated aground

rotary-dialled back in (‘subhan rabbi al-a’la’)

but couldn’t even hear the old pulsing

                                                    on the raddled whistle of the other end.

then ambled back to her with pineapple punch underarm

studying my voicemails

Pool party night

                                                                                       post-pizza

Pouted on your living room floor,

alone with me and masturbation,

are the leather coil heels that squeaked

that I knelt at and slipped from your ankles

and replaced with the colour I talk at as beige

Beyond this door

in the half-room of dolly mixture garments

slouches my borrowed suitcase

zip grazed open

bewildered there

confused like the babies I absented in Millwall to come to you;

the pair that pushed me post-it note pleas

like that suitcase, dragged here

                        then dragged, scraped, hauled to the launderette of portly landlords

                        where our socks cakewalked together aboard recycled heat

but I bullied it closed again

with the spring of your cat-calling, asterisk blame

and shuffled toward a cross-country storm-out

before finding your kitchen counter eyes,

your stymie of bloodshot coral

redecided

biting the arsenic of my wooing promises

In here,

sparingly heatered,

when the lids peel from our drowsying smiles

we inhabit oblivious exes

and centre ourselves in ourselves, slugging

to schedule a trade off of saline fluids

for equal parts nothing and always,

equal share solid and shattering

When I am an adult petitioning you with my juvenile whims

you do a tot with grown-up concerns

and I ask to smash your rasping door

so the end thing you hear is neither a yelp nor a blubber

between two cathedrals and imaginary belper

a safety catch is a mechanism used to prevent the accidental discharge of a drunken firearm

my heart is on safety

clamped into the lever

pouring into fingers ringing thin, sweet hair

and so the race is then to infect you

to pervade you with the excess of me

for you to sing

it is not that I will love you,

although I will not love you*. I promise.

it is that it is your age to be princessed, chinesed

and held.

I desire little more than to be the one to dispose of your porridge-packeted bins,

to top up the electric, run aromatic into your bath,

escort you tenderly across your cyan party bridge, wiggle my bum up the stairs at you

then kiss you into the goodnight

I cannot love you*, but it is not that;

it is that you are broken and must only be broken again

I will not break you. Ever.

anyway, whispering to the spirits is gum in my DNA

in a night before my rescue’d drifted rowdily into wastage,

ahead of a limehouse police cell, your emergency lock changes

and grubby slags of sister-in-laws dangling street violence

us two windowed maghrib snake-charmers in the museum screening room

where you winced at the allusion of perfect sodomy

as we sucked clock-hands for the exorcist to become ready,

bordering Velcro glances, weighing the barren planets between us

his admissions of shavery,

epiphanous slurps of laughter

and campish hesitation

betrayed

more than cowering before psychiatry or coincidence

but it was the cardboard simplicity of his formulas;

the edible ink and paper

photo-copied onto the ethereal.

vowing the scripture-lit water would scorch us inside.

though he would not incur your witching story in his calibration –

                                                                          the form said evil eye /     

                                                                          the form said evil eye.                                                                                              

mumbles in my slumber were incensed demons,

the stiffening exit from dreaming was the devil’s pin,

jinn had bunked in your dirty blood, he swore.

you bought everything haggle-free,

especially the possession of my ego

and paid again for him to rap quran behind our cut heads

with notes we owed away

how we configure our bribery for blamelessness;

stubbing woe out on impalpable,

snarling the scorn into ogre huts.

I mule-gobbled my father’s privacies from the tease;

          letting believe that I’d never slept in the indoor ice with lost hookers,

          seen Dad turn agony to white wind

          or heard the unlit back garden screeching my name blue;

and almost had you trusting that this was cure.

charlatan

Lol!

I have a girlfriend. I seem to’ve always had this black hole of a girlfriend. We burrow together in one prickly noose apartment. I don’t know when our cohabitation began or even who moved in with whom, but I’m certain it’s been approaching eternity because all the viable hiding places are covered with boxes of unlabelled, anonymous crap now. At one point I used to tally time by how crooked her teeth became. Night pins her in perfect parallelity to my reading position, where she mimics a creature that has newly discovered their fingers and who cannot conjure a thought that isn’t plastic. All of our non-essential dialogue has long evaporated so she stakes her options on some pitiful memory she saw me coax once. I do not need a lazy blowjob anymore; I have a powerful, self-cleaning shower hose I can lock myself away with.

I recognise how to shake her off, but previous experience teaches me that application of this swift technique soon means I’m forced to endure the sound of inflated sobs that five walls are unwilling to muffle. If only there were some words to share that we both could indulge in. I tried reading aloud to her a few times, however this merely reaffirmed our calamitous extrication when she laughed well before the punchline and then clogged her explanation with fucking lies. She is a moron.

When I converse with genuine women – and recently this is all I do – I am a gluttonous listener and the bloody heart on my sleeve seeps uncontrollably. It is just that there is nothing I care to share with this girlfriend. I’ve fantasized a thousand punches for her face, yet the only one that in reality ever connected was entirely accidental. I miss that punch more with every washing cycle.

Tomorrow afternoon I shall kill her. We plan to drive to the supermarket for another argument about acceptable ethnic foods. Years of observing her irrational driving means that I have been able to calculate the precise point in our journey where my hooking the steering wheel sharply will cause us to collide - driver side - into a beautifully thuggish concrete wall.

It is not the first time I’ve fallen in love with another during our relationship term, but it is definitely the only occasion that I’ve felt so amorously about an idea. I’ve got these gigantic butterflies.

Speak soon. x

Herbivore:  I forgot how deep you could be.
Himsheet:   I forgot how deep you were too. (meaning something totally, totally different)

plummeting   

Mitch and the myth of the long reach

her dead father’s penis was black               *and delicious*

blacker than the corruption in his teeth

down at that hide-and-seek, earth mantle angle
 

her father’d swallowed the squid of a thing hideous, poison-rich

pinning him rapidly at the tail

and she charged him with nuttin’

but tagging coolies, mixing breaths
 

father’s crowing cock smelt of her summering hair

and she labelled maternal uncles chapatis

insisting their sons were only cousins in that they couldn’t really touch her here
 

once,

little after flower-changes and spat-on insurance forms

a man-child, similar to most of her island

swathed her tautly, suffering a guilty smash for she.

he was the colour crystal with rusting jaw follicles

and when he told her, hoping for only more of her air

it brought her Garveyan nausea

in a can in the canteen where he’d parcelled her chuckles;

swirling dopamine -

    like her daddy had at his diwali door

    unlike tall, popular, St. Lucian boys with no eye for Delhi fat

    like her name when it abandoned Hind [and settled on a slave-owner cognomen]
 

she’d picked races concretely in her damp-pillow room

beneath the hulking (up) shadow of his boasin tone
 

her facebook newly-addeds were so ebonious and testosteronic, so men

that their profile snaps winked at each other

and puckered live, out of shot erections
 

only when the ghost of the grin of her father’s urethra

gnashes into her anal cavity

without the slink of a kirpan or knuckle of a whip

would everytin’ be cook an’ curry

Before the balloon

today I just observed

somewhere you’d key-snapped me consent to be there

where it was syrup water-boarding

simulated drown inside cosmic brown

bluebells in your larynx

liquorice hair

and a kissable fruit below your lip as a dare

the elation of silly

my feet never detect reaching that cliff ledge cajole

just the berk’s wanton tumble,

stolid tin grin and dopamine,

fried dopamine

Incan swept a handkerchief

The only Incan I ever saw breathing was in Southall

He was jesus water

ponytail of a 1936 black lacquer Ford

oiling onto his poncho,

Andes midnight under a ram-wool band,

in a sloppy grill on the Uxbridge Road.

Measles and diphtheria lost the final Incan

less than a century after Francisco Pizarro

For me he sat brilliant, stark, 1392

Tell old pharaoh

When I am a puny escapee sparrow

   lugging the altitudic brew

at some toontown dusk

I will truss in the pinch of nosebleed pondering

   proud of unsignificance / blinking at God and spermless

then brute, lone ring talons will stake to kidnap;

                             ransom perforate of my nugget-yielding stomach and bowels

                             [sieve, notepad and towels]

where I shall be taught neo-classically

   with kettle dash, missing glove love

   that I am not pure code, but virus

and there is no sky

hollow enough

for my rotten-gotten wrong of liberation to hide.

When occultists and hackers unite