Along the packs of birds, raising and dipping, reeling,

I clipped the tops of mountainsides,

Arcing between pastel blues,

Hoping without hope,

Focus enough, and the hum of mass–liturgical

With the dissonant bass of a cello.

 

A nebulous shape behind my eyes,

Caught in the attempt for it all,

Hold it for a moment, try and attune,

And find only the shape of a lattice.

 

A set of points strung together,

The superimposed sight beneath me,

Stilted floorboards, grid-iron patchworks,

Rusted fences and walls around small squares,

The sight of the world, lines and lines crossing,

Those squares where our parents traded goods, pies,

Or whathaveyou. I forget the intricacies from the height,

The entrepôts,

And abandoned their smiles for the straight edges,

I saw beneath my feet.

 

The world hummed as an electric grid,

An invitation–a pleading for me to turn back,

No choice, focus on it, and Dot 1)

An AA sponsor warning me against ‘pulling a geographic’

Who could ever escape themselves?

Dot 2) Did I want it to happen?

Then I had to give in, let it happen,

Dot 3) A spinning white disk, small and dull sun,

Shining centrifugal over a cup of tea,

The end of all things, when lineated, was that wafer,

And its procession of smiles, an alogia,

A new form of poverty.

 

Bleak, the gulls circled amongst the sky,

Pulled in whirlpools out above me,

As metal augurs they were caught shimmering,

Gasping, grabbing and shouting,

Forming a language with their beaks beyond,

The minarets and bell towers of the world, still below,

Were met with people queuing in line,

Waiting for a diagnosis,

Waiting for things to be terminal.

​

Looking down at the river Colne,

Words didn’t seem much like talking,

Like grids, they predated me, outlasted me,

And I saw not much point,

Colchester 2012. And the word -Chester,

Or suffix, mounted onto Britain,

Is Latin ‘to cut’ the earth,

To turn each hill to square steeples,

‘Castrum’—a Roman fortress.

Those impressed victims of empire,

Imported from the peripheries of civilisation,

Brought by attraction and repulsion,

To work, kill, and die.

 

A cruel geography beneath me,

The word flatlining and revived,

By ancestral murderers like Freud,

In ‘castrate’—to drain the bodies circuitry,

The ir-ration of Europe an ur-text for empire.

 

2.

 

Or Hegel, whose ‘predatory shepherds’*

Begin the world, cool, steely,

Traipsing those seven hills ad nauseum,

Time exists for buildings that never needed it,

For aged stone and tiles of granite,

Those first measurements of time:

Were church bells rung in the morning,

Father’s coming home in the evening,

 

A twilight admonishes all seconds,

Smashes its hands to smithereens,

The buoyant lightness that comes with

An eternal present,

Or suspension of the future.

 

All moments are contingent on property,

At least, philosophy holds,

And the straight line that holds me up here,

‘To cut’, or rather, ‘castrum’ says:

The camp began all time.

All that knock-down-ginger as a child,

An attempt to see inside,

To be invited in—(penetralia, marginalia)

Those forced pictures of sunsets,

And smiles where I was rejected.

 

So many blank walls, a tabula rasa surrounds

Each passing reflection,

A past of alabaster cubes as walls

And straightened, shined teeth.

That I could never get in, a bored irony,

Something that rhymes with those statues of Rhodes,

The ancestors fled from.

 

3.

 

Coordinated, or caught, in time and space,

An object within its crosshairs,

All was made to nodes of a grid,

A pint, paracetamol, 10mg of risperidone,

Things to stop and start the shaking,

And keep me free–weightless, up there,

Pontificating, we scraped against stylites,

And watched man defenestrate itself.

​

It was a simulation, that is:

To ‘feign to have what one doesn’t have**

Pretending to be ill was as,

Real as the real thing,

Some reflexive lump in the throat,

An excuse to hover above the powerlines.

 

The sight of fire off in the distance,

Recalled Vitruvius. And I spoke of him,

Hoping a turbine might’ve failed,

Hoping without hope,

An old interruption,

And turning to my bride-

to-be, how we inched closer and further from the heat,

Never satisfied, we built to contain,

Those blithe, hateful petals.

She wiped her nose, I’m told, a Boer politeness,

A dream: a house to play knock-down-ginger,

Successful for once,

And watch those steely augurs, waiting on a sign,

To be let in.

 

Intimacy, a camp, a fire at the centre,

A dull repetition,

Intense and self-exposure, all embarrassing.

Flaming, disintegrative, then,

Blank, the empty world sent

Another telegram destined for the both of us,

And message that I had missed the mark,

Of bodies colonising others.

 

The strings of a cello vibrating,

In a bored vibrato,

Combining and splitting,

Circles ran and traipsed around it,

Until her bow bent and cracked. Chichester 2020,

And we were students again, a red landscape

Of leaves kicking themselves up on nothing,

That vortex of saffron and,

Red wax dripping centripetal; circles of dusk,

And it came to me then too: Love

Was an ability to narrate a life in order.

All such a shame, those vectors, I meant,

Lineated: wasn’t it just blushing, just shame?

 

The next dot, dot-whatever, was a rejection,

That I’d chase the Comets above us,

That I was ill. That I’d stay interred,

Within a maze of alabaster cubes,

Overcoded and inscribed with the logic,

Of a grammar I wore for skin.

Like Othello, whose Moorishness, when performed

Against his bride (a strike) transfers black,

Black paint onto her. A bruise.

Wasn’t I a bruise?

However long did it take to forget about that homeland?

Her, her and Johannesburg?

 

4.

 

Diagnosed as terminal and flying away from,

The World. I ate three square meals a day,

Slept between blocks of observation,

And felt a grid form (psychiatric) within my mind,

The wafers, when handed out, gave me tremors,

Whorls that shook the ring from my finger.

A joke I’d tell went as following:

Psychotic, but not my fault, I mean, Get Out,

Was supposed to be a generic horror,

Life was supposed to belong to that living it.

 

Once out, the wafer sun spurned planes in the sky,

Split into saturating rays by fences, furrows,

Streets divided and houses-as-contradictions,

The old remnants of ‘suffering’ held back,

(katechon), by the Fanon and Wilderson in my bag.

–coloured, in between—

All attempts to lineate those lines with words,

To explicate a scream into legibility,

To explain away the shame of Love,

Had led to leadish alogia,

A taste of burning metal in my mouth,

And various extrapyramidal affects.

​

Another contagious word then:

Castus, Latin ‘to wash’ as Pontius Pilate

Expiating the guilt. Bath 2023, a celebration

‘For getting out’ of those cubes.

We swatted flies from our scleras,

And toured those shapes in her head.

Roman bathhouses, from which the city was named,

‘To wash’, castus, ‘to wash’,

A word dug up for modernity,

By the puritans that built the world,

Translated to Portuguese,

Comes as this:

Caste.

 

And eyes burning with Love,

An order of shame,

We decided the camp designed all our

Loves.