milk of mania
Exercise/exorcism of domestic imaginings -- when wonder is waning in restrictive margins beaten into the
page by mangled feet stepping to a monotonous, deafening pitch of life.
I became a spirit on the first day of summer, impotent to the intoxicating juking and clustering. Rigging
like mobs outside corner posts and shops, cornered connections being tested fruitfully. Conflicts swelling
with contrived meanings, testing the weight of comfort-love that operated between the cold season.
2.5L British Whole Milk warmed with faux strawberry sugared powder ------------>
milk of mania
I
I
I
Seeing shitty preserved camel milk in the Asda aisle --
swallowing any bad diaspora poetry
urges that may follow.
I
I
I
Seeing neighbours at crossroads, seeing light through the sheet of time. Dusting out sentences that had
been hanging heavy on their chests, airing grievances to anyone who'd linger longer than three minutes.
Desperate transmissions of earnest vomit.
I learnt that lightning strikes once every three seconds on my first day as a spirit. Imagining enemy
peoples on noble quests, jamming for sidereal sense-making and sonora. Linking new and old verso
underneath the sound storm of deafening capital.
The sky etched the finest grey lines to carry radio waves along its sheet --
perfect to carry the sound of you to me, back through distance.
<-----------------------------------------------------
Backwards was the current direction, because I was finally quiet enough to afford the belief of hindsight:
that the future was almost here in my body, that I'd be able to sound out and exercise ragtime senses.
I could slice up reasons into countless different portions -- all mathematically correct, different doses for
whatever weight felt like excess on my frame. Your explanation of nothing stayed with me. Explain
anything, it will stay with me.
I have been thinking about whether the conditions of unease are due to our spirit's ultimate knowing of a
life panned out. Did my cowardice mean my stomach had to work overtime to digest new timelines -- gut
instincts it needed to engineer the sub-life? Was the discomfort in knowing this alternative was a
subordinate one?
Writing and dreaming came then from the source pool of a path too cowardly to tread -- desire flooding
my organs, wishing I had once been able to muddy clear channels.
Cover image: Lovell Telescope, taken by the writer on a train journey.