Now skim the shock of sky that split without
us, sinking through the plaiting of the reids:
You slept, and whispered all your silence out,
the shoreline sang out threats in choking heaves.
The houses, polder fizzing in the ear.
What’s that? It snaps your cheek; a little rain?
Behind a shock of teaming buddleia
the face that switched my heart back on again.
The choice, to wince or lean into the gale
disclosing faces traumatised by rote
our unclaimed lives that rocked and broke in trails
the subtlest loss at edge of eye, remote:
To build an oath or crush this tiny snare
make rendezvous in all our hearts, laid bare.

She creaked beneath the weight that taught His skin;
His tense electric ghost to be put out
amongst the ropes and ladders of His doubt;
He’d shake to let his body climb back in.
They pushed her organs into disbelief
that nouns should grind and populate her life.
And with the dream of sanity’s respite
pronounced the lockup – rendered her to grief.
Reanimated all His emptied flesh
to crush away her testifying voice
and break from life confessions of His choice.
gave all His rigid promises afresh:
The icon’s truth of He and her made love,
intolerance, its pronouns from above …

for Dolly

Coming home to all of most alarm, there
across the shaving edge, & back stuck in,
be shored &
built back, snared
to granted joy or tensile pins.
If you are there,
oh there again is us,
colliding harms unite till bodies sing,
closely taut and still. Just as their stationary mind
comes back so left among unfelt alight.
Filled my voice to courage –
newly hammered fractal
pheadsfgia to surface,
to running up the front
hungrily. Just play this intricate drumming
the cat-wound flat of the string
banging on the paws …

[1]So in your silent still small throat my broken voice may sing. I’d say a mile off the shore is the wind farm. One hundred and sixty eight windmills. I wonder what their sound will be. As they were being hammered into the seabed the pile drivers sent their echoes to the surface of the water. I stood there by the pebbles at the edge of the water on a very cold and still night. The sound was barely audible yet so completely full. It seemed that the sound was coming up from the smooth flat surface of the water – that the smooth flat water was somehow projecting the sound into the still night air. I fell forward in my bed with a gasp and my eyes shot open. By the edge of the tidal flow I watched. We watched as the water found its passages towards the sea. We watched it come back. We were stranded and we were also drowning and we were also breathing and we were also silent. We were also speaking. We were speaking as the water was projecting itself into sound, into the air, into space, into our minds. We were also no longer alive and we were also completely full of life. In fact you and I, we told ourselves, were the life and soul of the party. And so we stepped from room to room, our vast economies, our limitless data. Conversations. Stepping back and forth against the tide. A colossal warning on the beach. People must not come onto the beach from the sea whilst they are alive, unless sanctioned they must first be dead people. We do not speak ill of the dead, or of newborns. It is everyone in the middle we detest. The young know nothing. The middle aged are themselves. The old are stupid and angry. The dead are perfect. We do not speak ill of a tide once receded. The stones and jetsam it leaves behind it. They are its clothes. The discarded. Speaking like “a dotard”. Fire and fury. The sound that rose from the water was so terrifying. You told me that it was the piledriver. Similarly when the tide has totally receded the wreck of the SS Vina comes into view. Its mast pokes through the waves at a high tide. It was left at the outflow, primed to explode, you told me.

The Fleet arrived at Invergordon on Friday, the 13th, and shore leave was given that night. There was some disturbance in the Canteen and several men addressed the other men present on the subject of the reductions in Naval Pay. On Monday, the 14th, the WARSPITE and the MALAYA proceeded to sea to carry out Exercises. On Monday night further meetings and disturbances took place in the Canteen and the men present agreed that the Fleet should not be allowed to go to sea the next day. On Tuesday morning [in some ships] the men fell in when ordered and carried out the normal work of the day and prepared for sea, but in other ships the men refused to fall in.1 Fall in too be as a lost face my tiny voice to sing. Still, small, gut there’ll uh. Assailed laughter slipped across the salt. “We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that’s all.” [3]. Arrested on 9 January 1954, in March of that year Pitt-Rivers was brought before the British courts charged with “conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons” or “buggery”. It was the first time this charge had been used in a British court since the trials of Oscar Wilde in 1895 and it led to public criticism that the police were pursuing a McCarthy-like purge of Society homosexuals. [2] The father of participant Jeff Tefft felt he needed to post a letter in a local newspaper disavowing his son. Pearce Tefft says that although he and his family are not racists, once his son’s face and name were posted on social media they became the targets of people upset with his son.3 The distance is non-metrical. The movements beneath your feet. The inclination of the voice to turn back, to give in. The speculation of credibility. The meanings in the bitten tail. The hazardous examples. The set in stone, in stomach. The fact of victim. The fact of aggressor. The proximity of love. The traction of disrepair. The normality of sustain.

The pang of forced closure. The pressure to be. The iconic nature of being alive. The games, e.g. Golf. The analysis of the subject. The descriptions of illness. The testimonial. The cement of disdain. The barrel, the captain, the boson, the peninsula. Being afraid. Being tested. The elegance of the shrapnel. The hyper intelligence of quantified freedoms. Speaking. The endless glib section of the auditorium or of the galley or of the lips smacking together in. Or of the eyelids smacking back and forth, closing with a colossal loudness in the dark. The intrepid pioneer for example. The Royal Air Force used it for target practice leading up to the invasion of Normandy, and in 1944 a gale carried the SS Vina to a sandbar where the hole-covered boat took on water and stayed. [4] The company’s staying power, to give but one example. We gathered at the top of the field and walked. We were unquestioning of our complexion. The skin, for example. What it has given us. Speaking of that us. How uncomfortable you are now. What pain! The plaiting water snaking out through the marsh and the birds that narrowly asses the ground for their landings. The twist of a kind in the stomach. The change in public opinion from pre-op to post-op, to the dead, to in gradients at a fast incline a living face. The violence always in inaction. The wreck loaded with explosives. Things like that.

1† Extracts from a letter to Sir Clive Wigram, Private Secretary to the King from Sir George Chetwode, the Naval Secretary, 16th September 1931 (ADM 178/129)
2† NON
3† NPR
4† NON

In single minute gulps like propranolol the night sways, steadies
to a short halt. And the neck stops. Stops wide open to the space it now
appears to be in: Belgium, on the north coast where it now seems that
it has been having a dream in which it is in Belgium with Camille

having an occasional polite hug. Not really knowing you just
who you are and what a part of you represents. It speaks to Camille,
but Camille speaks back in French and though when it is awake it can’t speak
French, nor can it in this dream, the French it hears is perfectly spoken.

It goes to Koksijde with her. They wander around staring at the knives
with bone handles in one of the windows. Suddenly it can explain
something it has come to understand: How on earth it might actually
feel at least some of the time now in its sleep or when she or they are

awake but mostly then it’s kept in silence, that thought interrupted
by the angry parent on the seat at the back of the bus. It goes
like this, for example: The heaping anxieties of, say, being
taken to a wedding to be shown off as some kind of sinking face,

an unspoken motion amongst all the other celebrants who sign
to one another and themselves, to be true or to be failing
“Hold. My. Hand.” pulling their willing or unwilling or half reluctant
faces into one another’s fields of vision where marriage flickers,

how the only satisfaction that it gets here is relief at not
invoking all that screaming which it comes here to feel guilty, when it
hits its digit at the dimming window to the next unliving waste
of food and gestures to the lighting of a world it doesn’t know. Help.

W hat it is, how much of a peculiar straight line turned deeply up
as it is into every line of consequential fire, families
become more deeply ingrained or lost. Or else it feels somehow going
back to its old job with its old rotas where the annual leave forecasts

the rest aside from sick days so long as what’s disclosed is now never
to be made again to choose. It wants (it is trying to tell you this)
to have silence and solitude, its own distracted time so it can
sort its own shit out in its own kind of broken distracted way. Or

not solitude but in fact the ones it often doesn’t get to see
who somehow don’t fit the usual configurations of names and souls;
who are beautiful yet also they are always. It wants again that
shield against another one’s mouth where it knows it might help. Need it. But

now it gets torn from the knife window down into a locker room filled
with towels and showers where it has to use them, the towels, in full
knowledge they belong to those that use the locker room and It cannot
withdraw money and owes Camille at least €60 for transport

into Koksijde alongside any incurred translation fee it is
dreading all that might come from the day ahead. Dreading getting it off.
Dreading when next it might swallow it or sharply inhale as if to
gasp, only to push again at what it knows won’t happen: Not heaven.

T he same songs in the same eyes blinking over in the same glissando.
It is those same faces make it still alive. Not allowing it dare
drop out. In what is called its real life it knows full well there are things
to be dealt with – things that never have. At that moment in general, teeth

and just later called “now”, its teeth. Saying things back to its life then
again into silence. Going to the hardest lengths to keep its things
so easy. Doing the hardest easiest to get jobs as opposed
to the easiest hard to get ones with air conditioning and breaks

and socials; training and tea and career development. It is
the mistress at deploying its scar tissue in place of its fate.
It chooses one of the wrong towels: A blue one – already wet. It sees
someone it thinks it remembers coming from a cubicle where it

finds a boy wet from the shower, about seven years old. The boy
is joking about horses. The jokes are crass and the adult from the
cubicle is cut, infuriated by their sense of Belgian pride:
Belgium, where horses will not be mocked. Another petrified gulp, the

other side. It looks on as the boy is hated for his infringement,
as he is set up on a bin, his leg spavined raw left arms askew
as if in the open palmed prerequisite stance of a new Christian.
But what he is there isn’t like anything except what he is. He is a boy;

made into a tower on a bin. An improvised example of a punishment
in the evacuated wet room. Camille tugs on its arm;
that it’s time to go. We think about leaving. The lights go off.
The administrator leaves the room. She comes back. The boy has slackened

his position and so she reinforces it. She commands him back
onto the tower. His leg out. His palms. It feels as though there ought to be
a hood like it had seen in the famous photo of this ritual.
It thinks when it is awake that really it is still on the other side

thinking that monogamy is like a really disgusting cult whereby
people are not just allowed to be jealous of other people who are doing them
no harm, but where everyone is allowed to enact more harm, to
persuade themselves their jealousy is well founded. That’s what cheating is.

T he boy listens to it having this thought but doesn’t allow himself
the pains, they well up in his body. It doesn’t know everything.
There are some solid facts. The traumatic ones have been so painted they
almost go. The easy ones feel as beautiful as fiction: It has

a memory of it being called I: I at the bottom of Kilburn
hill. Probably in 1991 when Pringles went international.
We were at the bottom of the hill and a man called Toby Pring
offered everyone Pringles. He was only eight. It had one. It goes

to the shower nozzle and unclips it. Under the disc with the holes
in like the holes in the back of a birthing toad there is a perfectly formed
ready salted Pringle; and the same for each nozzle. It feels disgusting.
Now speak slowly back to its pain. Here it goes. Speak slowly, back to it.

*

Regained to make its service all but ready for his impact as the
tower he is made from lossless like its fortitude hurts, very damp.
Damp. Opening locking damp. Removing locking damp. And then I woke.
It woke up and it was me. I walked into the day with a pleasant

gait. Walked through the park and the trees. I could still feel Camille’s left eye
on me. A musty smell and the brilliant sunlight told the approach,
and on through the sink estate, past the buddleias and the bee hawk
moths dancing in the faces of the flowers. As I passed the wall by

your flat I caught something from the corner of my left eye (-
1.8). It was an earlobe cleanly severed sitting on the blank
wall. The bricks flattened out. It shudders. Each day it shovelled itself back
up that winding path on the slope unaware of its trauma to live

in its penance. Giving back its pain as its own penance to itself.
It has an allergy. So it pushes its eye against the nozzle.
It’s sad inside the socket under the filter. Outside the tower
is tortured. She’s still coming back to him, screaming about horses and

about national pride and decorum. She’s snarling in radiant
righteousness meanwhile it is dead. Meanwhile
I am dying in my sleep, seancing her, him and it with that one
stunning memory – the crisp – the happiness afforded at the base

of Kilburn wilfully tethered to another memory I don’t
have – a dog dragging my tired body up another hill. Constant
expressions of parental kindness. Forcing that clearing human
weight in gallant unmarked penance from one leg to next evacuate.

C lean basins, mirrors, toilets, surfaces, call to correct, as it stacks
up its meanings go remorselessly into this sluicing cabin. No
break out for a moment stolen perhaps don’t beds, desks, and solutions
in this clotted category its neck juts out at the tortured

tower of boy. Incendiary. It finds a token shell of love.
Departures from the town of its birth, of its sadness coupling buckle
by the writhing tormented elements above and below the bridge.

My young domestic lifeline came to sit
exhausted, by the ashes of its lot
for what these boys so bravely now commit
when life itself is grounded in their rot?
If I would be the guillotine, its rungs
the head of Richard Spencer cold, shoved in
the microwave as testament to none,
his resolute interior, the pin:
To stretch the dried up soul into its frame
wafting paradichlorobenzene
his molded face and maggot mouth regained
let out in one last slip to feel obscene.
All gains in this lush meadow held my head:
Will summer’s fragrance block their throats instead?