1. |
Endoscopy nights
03:22
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Your life is so hard.
I send you photographs
From the graveyard
Of the dead who share your surname
To see if you're related.
Your life is so hard.
Your vision, evolved for distance,
Leaves you to rely on hairs
On your face to perceive prey
When they are nearer,
Leaves you without a clue
As to your smartphone-screen.
Your life as future medical equipment
Is so hard.
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2. |
Datastreams
03:55
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P.S. it's midnight.
No one thinks about you when you're not there.
No one is a dick in real life.
It doesn't matter about the medium.
What matters is no one would do that to you in real life.
I'm addicted, I'm addicted, I'm a dick.
No one thinks that about you.
Loneliness is a medium no one notices is there.
No one notices dick.
P.S. it's midnight.
P.S. it doesn't matter.
I'm a medium, I'm a medium.
P.S. I'm a real ghost.
No one notices the architraves aren't there.
My left, my left - what matters is I'm medium touching you.
Loneliness is behaving like reaching out
Will not result in you touching yourself.
P.S. it's an architrave over midnight.
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3. |
||||
Myelination complete:
I didn't sign up for this.
Can you hear what I'm saying?
Blink once for yes.
And blink twice for well,
We already know.
Are there internal events?
No, only external.
Visitors talking in a room.
We guessed family were more welcome.
It's just that they're not your family.
It's coming back to me.
"Homo homini res sacra".
You don't need to tell me that.
Visitors walking out of a room.
You say you want to see them less
More and more.
That's not for you to say.
A life flashing before eyes. Ideally,
Personalised. A gap is implied.
When I fall asleep, my lord,
I dream I am back in the dock.
They read inhumanity
As I read from my hand-me-down
book of fairy tales.
Judgement and prediction must combine,
To make that which is judged predictable
And that which is predicted, judged.
That's not for you to say.
I am ready to become a mensch.
That is not for you.
You are a virtuous cycle,
A platform from which you witness
Generation after generation.
I am guilty, I am the witness.
You need to tell me that.
I am landing. I am taking off.
And I feel that I decide when I say "goodbye".
We feel that too.
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4. |
Smallsuckrr
04:03
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Is it better to check a switch,
Up/down,
Or a door in revelation,
Opened,
When looking for the dark?
First-date intonations.
Predation tactics changing.
An age-gap of monopsonist proportions.
It's your oldest wound,
To know when your father's sad,
To know that father is sad.
Is it the best?
Is he up? Down? Open?
The oldest wound round
The youngest.
First the body, then never-stop-
Communicating last.
Differing and non-competing solutions to
The mystery of his small succour.
Has his mother's listing gait,
Lateral cusps licked away.
Knows her from work, from labour,
From long before first date-night nerves.
What does she see in him?
Who is your ideal partner?
A next -
- meal.
We are the three bodies
Of our problem.
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5. |
Queue jumpers
05:14
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I'm still waiting on my 15%
Of net worth ×
Scandals per year ×
Air miles.
I just can't get served.
What place exists
In which we could find ourselves
Waiting?
We are on that side.
What do you feel when stars pop?
It might as well be heaven
For all that you are.
It might as well not have been
For all that it is
To us.
Is there a seat for both of us?
Who's waiting for you
At home?
My blood. Myself.
It's a gray area.
In the executive lounge
In the chocolate fountain
A dead caucasian.
He's aged enough to be your son.
He's innocent enough to be me
A life-time ago.
Can you tell between
Homage and impersonation?
Between fisting and punching?
Between OD and DOA?
Between economy class
And the economic class left behind?
Say "in" without "win".
Say "art" without "star".
Say "rhetor" without rhetoric.
They say you're a singer.
They miscarried me.
Think I wanted to be this
But I just woke up one morning
With its passport.
No one comes to their judgement
But through their empathy.
This kid, leaking into the floor,
Casts a shadow on,
Is wired to, the moon.
This song that started forever
And ended
Feeling at home
Is three minutes long
And never finishes playing.
A.. .ad.. ..oo. u.
All .adly ..ook up
All badly shook up
I .id .o. ge. ..ough
I .id .ot get enough
I did not get enough
Patreon supporters, Only Fans.
You forgot.
Narrow is the way that leads to life.
It's endothelial.
20th century audience at the wrong gate.
The kings are dead.
Long live the royalties.
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6. |
Ex seamstress
05:23
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In truth,
Outside love,
Vaguely military.
De jure
In youth.
Not the best origin-story,
Mentally speaking.
In doors,
Home-help was an inappropriate angel,
Kept for light duties.
In the sky
At work, looking spruce.
In all,
It was a fortune in broken crockery
And, in the end,
All that was retained
Were post-mortem wings.
In reverse,
A fairytale prince.
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7. |
Pepé Le Pew
05:17
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The history of being laughed at
Is the history of disease.
And you and I are sick for reasons
Of which we are still unaware.
I have a feature-length face
Until I don't.
You will love me
Until you can't.
We will be fought on a beach.
We will be fought on a landing ground.
We will be fought in a field
And in a street.
We will be fought on a hill
And we will never stop the fight
To be
So wrought.
A library.
A library heating-up.
A library of the reasons
That a library burns down.
Nostrums until normalcy; surgery until serenity; dramatic until dispassionate; experiment until equipoise.
Deliver us already.
Protect me against false positives
And negatives.
Come find me
If you don't know why you will hate me yet
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 1 2
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8. |
Charlie feet
04:46
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Broke the knife on the hand.
Buttons go on the outside.
Model glue, finger sides.
A white head between the thighs.
In a place that is wrong
But the fault is not your own.
You were pushed, you were shoved
And your body broke your fall.
Santa Claus isn't real.
Personal effects unsealed.
"Did you know her that well?"
Red faced Headless Horseman
Can't spell.
I want to be ignorant
Of the same things as you
And in the same ways as you.
Only the longest wave will do.
My fantasy diet means I get enough to
Know it will come around again
And you will never ever show.
Reaching's reaching morning-after pill
But before I even knew I had the will.
A 40k-earth-year year can't be real.
Today is something tomorrow will steal.
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9. |
Hosted
04:16
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Binary pairs.
Musical chairs
in every home, as vague
as the storm's borders.
Catalogued dreams.
Dove's trained it seems to
ignore guttered roofs. A song
fleeced of all hooks -
- except the rute pelt that
you heard when rain's touch first felt
your land.
Unplumbed kitchen's window
conveys a sky better
than any chat made in
fermata ghost mouths.
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10. |
Beguines live stream
03:35
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Growing up, she was not Sam Beckett from Quantum Leap. Despite how much she wanted the travel. She reminds him more now of those people that Beckett would have left behind in unwritten, unaired episodes, who wonder why their relative or friend behaved and acted so oddly for the time-period allotted to an episode of sci-swap/body-fi TV. And who, from that time on, feel very different, in that unreal place, about their loved ones.
And just as those no-one-people would have no doubt ascribed their loved ones' behaviour to divine intervention, his mother's unusual behaviour and conduct, and by extension that of her children, was explained away by her peers as deriving from a vague but powerful religiosity. One general enough to probably be Christian in origin but which was in fact closer to pagan idolatry. The irony was that she had abandoned religion in favour of its faceless, requited brother: atheism. She was freed from and moved to another prison, like someone who has survived a visit from Death and spends the rest of their life telling people about it. Or not, in her case.
For she was taciturn by nature and that looked decidedly like divinity, by accident. But the tide of this religious current moved beyond her and buffeted him and his siblings. They reminded those around them of the Flanders of The Simpsons. What would those people, who accused them of religious belief, have made of the fact that Jehovah's Witnesses stopped making house-calls out of frustration with his mother's interminable, scriptural inquiries? With her plot holes.
Nostalgia is public domain.
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White Hot Needles UK
Blueprints for lives not lived.
Music by White Hot Needles, photography by Rose Garden.
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