COMPOST HEAP OF DESIRE

 

The sun is a jaundiced Eve bulging over the city

a yellow cyst ripening in a sky the colour of a bruised lung

The developers are pouring liquid lead into the throat of the soil

asphyxiating the earth until the worms turn to grey ash

They are harvesting the shade and bottling our panic for the shareholders

The concrete is a calcified tumour growing over the common

while you sit across from me in your bias cut spite

My mirror leech

My shadow twin with the structural tailoring and the serrated smile

You look at me like a sample sale you can’t quite afford to mock

Every word you speak is a fine needle under my fingernails

Your envy is a starving animal snapping at the light

Bewildered by the way you want to harvest the salt from my scars

just to season the flat taste of your own boredom

You want to wear my breath like a vintage brooch

I am a toxic acre you can't gentrify with a grin

You want to wear my face like a filter and my voice like a trend

Your solidarity is a starched collar gag

a revolution tailored for the light of a profile picture

You curate your outrage like a discarded swatch

Palestine, Iran, and Cuba are just accessories in your digital window

But you won't buy the fabric of the struggle

You won't pin the movement to your breast

scared that the badge might leave a hole in the silk of your safety

while the world outside is screaming in a language you refuse to learn

And 5000 miles away, she is a physical decay I carry in the hinge of my jaw

My marrow twin in the LA basin 

My phantom limb that rots in the heat

The distance is a slow necrosis of the bone

a biological breakdown where the static of her mind is a needle in my eye

We are two ghosts tethered by the same frequency of grief and grit

It is not about the skin; she is the infection I welcome

a necessity that bypasses the touch and eats the marrow

I inhale the exhaust of her distance and call it oxygen

The space between us is an unwashed wound I refuse to stitch

because she is the only one who smells the woodsmoke on my breath

the only one who doesn't ask to see the lining of a velvet coat

We are a conversation that has been happening since before we were born

a collision that leaves the soul bruised and leaking

The ache of her absence is a physical nausea I mistake for hunger

while 300 miles of grey salt water separate my body from the soil

where they are a mouthful of other people’s spit, and I am the hunger

We are a compost heap of desire that I am learning to worship

There is no judgment in the crowded bed

only the hot oil of imagining their skin against another’s 

while I watch a shared liturgy of hands through a glass screen

the friction of the distance making my own blood hum with a filthy frequency

I am touching myself to the rhythm of ghosts

painting my skin with the memory of a tongue while the pixels bleed

We are rutting in the wreckage of the calendar

The biology of the breakdown is the only truth that sticks

The nausea of being a temporary tenant in a heart with multiple occupancies

Is the cold iron cock I welcome into the gut

I am falling into a mouth that is a riot of shared breath and strangers’ fluids

swallowing the anonymous brine of a collective skin until I gag

Mapping a mattress I haven’t claimed in weeks

where the linen is stiff with the sweat of ghosts I never met

The residue of an absence, I am learning to love through a lens

and the distance is a parasite that I feed with my own longing

The planet is a dying animal, thrashing in the heat

The glaciers are melting into the lubrication of our despair

I want to feel the world burn while I am slick with the thought of them

The rising tide is a tongue licking the salt from our wounds

The ego is a heavy wool I am shedding in the middle of July.

I am reconnecting the wires in my own throat

Reclaiming the space between the ribs where the rot tried to settle

I am not a project or a peer review

I am the unwashed scent of the library stacks and the grit of tomorrow

the beginning of a new lust in the ruins of the old world

an unoccupied body reclaiming its own territory

I am a thief in the university library

sneaking the ghosts of my blood past the turnstiles in the lining of my cloth

the road dust of a thousand years clogging the faculty’s lungs

While I watch the black ink stain their ivory carpets like an oil spill

waiting for the authorities to smell the woodsmoke on my breath and call the bailiffs

waiting for the institution to vomit me out like an unwashed organ

But the summer is coming with a vengeance; they didn't budget for

I am peeling off the performance like sunburnt skin

digging for the red earth underneath the paving stones

But the earth is poisoned, and the road is a loop

I am an unoccupied body in a city that has already been sold

standing in the faculty lounge with a history that nobody wants to read

listening to the sound of the rain hitting the glass

realising that even when I am stripped to the bone

I am still just a guest in a house that is being demolished

waiting for a knock on the door

That sounds like a  grave shovel