Lyrics: Floaters plummet from the sky, The colours as they come to me, to my eye. A shared blessing that cannot be verified. Mary was still in her room. I was in the same tomb; I saw how it loomed in the nooks of the gallery, How I was not to even be a whisper. We know no one else but ourselves (ourselves) It is no wonder why when we roll over we find strangers. We know no one else but ourselves (ourselves). It is a wonder why when we close our eyes we find strangers. Love is much more of a miracle than people make out, make out, make it out to be, But loving yourself is muscle memory. It’s understandable then, But we’re not being self-centred in the right ways. Phenomena are as far away as the noumena. We wade through rapids. We awake anew but not afresh, We need lone pews. If only more knew. But what can you do When survival offers no satisfaction to the consumer?

Lyrics: You style your hair too; You’re relatable, aren’t you? You keep blood off your suit; They behave like a brute. You have so much to say; You’ll never last on a podcast. They inflate. You depreciate. Strange is only okay if it’s up on stage. You took 7255 steps across a salt plain. We all make mistakes, Like filming someone’s suicide Or plugging child gambling sites. We’re here for them, Beetles of their bildungsroman, Their never-ending story. It gets harder to rise from your bed with dignity (down to serendipity); Raise any qualm, any invocation of the Frankfurt school, Told you’re chasing ghosts. So little left of the left; the rest Grab their participation badge and voucher. Vouch for her without having read a shred of her words. Marvel at the state of contemporary cinema, Or how people now equate depiction with endorsement. They want their hands to be held, their eyes blinded before the lights go up, their ears sewn shut, The latest model of reality. If you voice your own dissent, Whiplash from the velocity, “You boomer, you doomer, You must repent. Keep singing the paeans and ditties.” In one breath it helps unearth atrocity, wisdom, and hypocrisy, And in the next, sculpting koala brains, Leading friends and family to their deaths. It’s all about being blessed by algorithms; First impressions are everything. Critical thought is assumed knowledge, And the right-not-right are happy that way. Smell the spilt the flour, live by the hour. They want it to seem dour, live by the hour. They… Demand that art must part with politics—AKA, MIA: truth— Be light-hearted, but I hate to break the ice, Anubis had a broken device. So, write of your plight each night, Paterson. It always leads somewhere, And, even if others never know, you’ll have always yourself to show. My compass is the minute hand, and I seek to withstand the expanding sand. I may bleed, but I plead, do not feel that you have to heed these words.

Lyrics: A coincidence in the foyer, Whilst admiring a Goya, That sagging face passed by, A visage summoning brass, Of the generous septet, Blaring away for decades, Through jammed in mutes, Scoring the longest of sunsets. In another life, I confronted him, said: “It’s a simplified world, When it comes to everything But easy decisions. An industry of tragedy, Retrenches majesty. Easily avoidable, In plain sight, For those furthest from might.” Sadly, I relented, I knew He wouldn’t have repented, Raised on a lack, Hardly a hunch to his back; Too long ago the horror Of horrors came and went, The old binary was spent, The guilty realised they Had always been a majority, And thus became an authority. Rather, I left the destroyer, Never forgetting them in the oral oubliette, And went to reconnoitre The alleged opposition And rounded the Mobius. So many felt impervious, Upright when only in sight, In words, aware and alert, Outside, offering insight, In truth, they just parroted What happened to be right, A dearth of pulses behind The echoes they carried, Didn’t hesitate When dropping articles in digital print, Their pundits unwilling to swab Identical acid rain atop Runnymede’s sod, Pliable, porous only to a point, Who will they soon anoint? Uneven master, There’s only one thing, You make faster, Always capable of laughter, Sleeping above Jakarta.

Lyrics: When we were forced inside, the devotees needing to devote, We weren’t used to wheels, but we’d lived our lives on rails. We weren’t used to bandages, but we’d nested in cocoons of gauze. We used to fuck next to Bacon’s portals without first thoughts. We were prized atop wagyu plinths Erected by that everybody we so sought to Impress // through repressed distress, but we stressed it was In our name, Our hollow veins; The only things liberated were your breasts. Outer is inner; Inner is nothing; Naked finally, but We’re just tanned hides. You said everyone was beautiful ’Til I came home from the hospital. And this song is about as long As the vogue timelines we’ll leave behind, Laments of unanswered knocks, Symphonies of dried leaves. Smoke glaciers in a whiskey glass...

Lyrics: “I too was without luminaries, Until I uncovered the credo only nighthawks know: They will care for you unimaginably, Throw you into a fire to dry you off, Insist on involving teeth with a kiss, Seal the exit to utopia, planned obsolescence of external worlds, And peering through the keyhole of the mahogany door, The lights brought up, you are met by bodies so thin, That the skin hardly hides the networks of bone.   The only place where the aperture is wide enough To accommodate all, Is the antithesis of where you now find yourself. You mustn’t take the job. It would see covertly spent, overtly—it doesn’t matter to them. There’s been quite the shift from daylight to twilight robbery—” Abruptly, my recitation was interrupted by the unimpressed listener. They said, “Don’t you think I haven’t already picked up on any of that? I’ve heard this all before, Aesop.” I sat there in silence, unaccustomed to such scepticism from my nightly audience and unsure of how to reply. They continued, “You know, the funny thing is, for having memorised those words, you clearly haven’t thought about them a great deal. I wish I could opt out. My family wishes it too.” After slipping on their coat, they filed through their wallet and produced the payment for both of our meals by the register. As they looked down at the treacly tessellation of waffles on my plate, the squares of batter alternatively filled with whipped cream and syrup, they made their last comment, “It must be nice having the time to do that. It really must.” They then left, an unseasonable chill sneaking in through the door before it creaked shut. Through the modest stained glass of my gastronomic temple, perched on my usual stool at the counter, I contemplated the despondent soul continue down the sidewalk, at one point stopping to collect paper strips from lamppost advertisements in the ivory tusks cast by the streetlights. Their form slowly melted into the eggplant tint of early morning, the vanishing twin more tangible than its counterpart, who was still entangled in nature’s vines, a rhapsode passing off as progenitor. Against the premature light of that day’s dawn, the industrial dunes, the stockpiles of the port, appeared as an impassable mountain range.

Lyrics: Ropes snap in the heat. Crowds witness the fleet sink. They realise An anthem is just a catchy elegy And the cranks of a watch being reset. They’ll reassure through the press that it was scuttled—outmoded— That they are in control. False dilemmas in a barter economy... Singularities unconsidered, The leviathan antagonised, And now its prey see the second door they were afraid to open before, But when order offers chaos, Then chaos they must Embrace, Embrace Brace, Brace, Brace, When the balladeers smear me with my own puke, There’ll be no rebuke; I’ll understand. The one consolation would be Uncovering someone semi-compotent Behind this crucible. Just let me have that, Can’t you? Why can’t you? Can’t you? Why can’t you? All the Mr and Ms Ks smile wistfully. The stakhanovites loudly mock: “No compromise, No compromise." All in all, you’ll still find the farrier engaged, One chimera interchanged with a ground-level pipe dream, “Revolution” taken literally, 360; There’ll still be the fleshy secrets under the interchange; There still be the grass-roots widows and widowers, Both away on leave, leisure remains a luxury… So close, yet so far; Overcorrections never rectified. Nuance never codified. Fate still fallacious: two prongs, golden worn calves, golden means, Means to an end; the well-meaning will still be exploited. It can’t be; maybe they’re on to something: We should just enjoy the ride into the sun. Or, maybe, these are just more musical fish hooks?

Lyrics: There’s frost on the glass. I’m lagging behind, From where I do not know. Soil sticks to my soles. All I know is something is up —Another trifle Or my time on earth? The mucus in the bowl, Discomfort dismissed. Purpotedly, I’d be missed, But I felt just like mist. I hadn’t pissed it away Like many of my peers, But I felt like I had missed, But I feel like I miss. The vacant shipping depots, Cardboard boxes and lives Under white light. Majestic for me. I’d been a tourist… in my own body. It had sufficed to be cognisant, To read Said in the weeds, To dream away of a filled ream, To say thanks and do the odd job, To not see that two untouched decades Were nothing more than a miracle —That I could soon be plucked from this fugue And spaghettified in another black hole. It was when those metal butterflies started bursting from my stomach, And I realised I’d always been afraid of flying, When the sinkhole was addressed with a feast And daily sacrifices of the sun and moon, Or when I returned, and we all went inside, And despite being spared everything, thinking it was logical to end it all, That I saw I should never keep a bargepole Between me and death Because I only was lending the magma gondolier a hand. This—the naive sound, the nascent words, the disclosed dialectic— Is survival, something I’ll forever be thankful to afford. But rest assured, I shall pay the loan each day, Each day. Thank you so much.