hyena commitments
'to call a man an animal is to flatter him; he's a machine, a walking dildo.'
– valerie solanas
hyena is not political, merely bruised. wearied, condemned in absentia. he who has iron has bread. no, my dear. he who has iron has language. we saw them at work, erecting argots to posterity. nights of detour, sullen irrepair, in a city of plinths, in a city of scapegoat masonry. on days made samey with heat, how the body sizzles. hyena has not slept, wresting words of love from her gloaming tongue. rapists in a waking dream. skin fades, organised into roaring militias. onslaught of pornography. not political. speak softly into the wind against all the precision mischief of capital. world of repeals and breaches, of penny-ante whistle-blow, drooping through the days. i do not feel essential, the worker says, but sacrificial. after all, they speak this ultimatum into shambles weekly. a woman is something even less than sacrifice: a series of banal ablutions, a liar's oath sworn on a stack of bibles. hyena is a fur harangue ran mad through these methane fields. lethal and ignorant, the bourgeois fear of crowds. book reviews, raptures of discernment in the guardian, she hates. fashion's furtive tiptoe through these quarantines, untenable thread count for minimum wage. our lady of retail. our paragons of chic couture. catechists of instagram. a hyena is not political. is the fog at the back of the throat, not nearly a word, a syndrome. is the ragged seam between language and amnesia. you, malingerers on twitter. where sarah vine is a witch-finder's finger. where cumming's head is a poison gourd. don't you wish you could burn it all down? don't you wish your girlfriend was hot like us? from houses, mumbled into borough as an afterthought. sink estates disgorging their grot-persuasions. land of retributions, dialects, a dealer's revenant ministry. don't touch us, we will fly apart like a swollen murmur of birds. hyena, raising an eyebrow with difficult languor. umbrage, courtly displeasure, an opera of awkwardness, touching in gloves. you, veterans of pleasure getting silkily signified, don't you wish you could burn it all down? let your anger cohere into heresy? hyena didn't etiquette. hyena didn't marxist summer school. hyena didn't poetry london. hyena didn't bloodaxe. hyena wasn't sexing her pedantry for boys and boys and boys, shining her pout like an empire apple. women are purgatory and subterfuge, an as if protest, melancholy yearning. this is not political. politics requires a centre, we have an edge, are an edge, how an edge is a commons, compassionate and teetering. there will be no embraces. you, who claim to be sick of a skunky crush in suburbs. don't you wish? don't you wish wishing were a pure thirst, a means to an end, a raving salvage in itself? don't you wish we were more than a motto, a moist eye rolled toward utopia, utopia as theme-park, utopia as gift shop? hyena is not political. who has no iron, who has no bread, who will unscrew the inscriptions from statues. land of deficit and vendetta, the grimly expert. johnson's few deft crudities, trump rigging famine in his favour. this is politics, a kind of anti-life. the smiles of racist comics, amused by their own jokes. hyena has no dogma only appetites. where women become cutting tools. the moment is now, whenever now is.
what else?
for p d r, who knows
sun sinks, smoke settles. marching about
in the badge of our bludgeon. not reckless
but routine. a pole and a purpose. fills
the dreggy, pensive days. or what? storms
of a darling rupture. raw nerve gnawed.
night speaks its slow concretions in
a stilted vamp falsetto. do anything not
to see his eye: an acid singularity, a violent
green. his emerald fixity sickens, stares.
self-pitying horniness. pillow-talk is
mumblecore and dignitas, the bedside
manner of a euthanising nurse. to shut
shame out, or up. eat apples aged to
vinegar. assembly line economies
of angst and lust. normality, doing
blankest fanfare. chirrupy ringtone
heroics at no one. days of drought
and wound, men with mouths
like sombre ponds, knots
of their lilly-pronouncements: you
do not want to get better. sun sinks,
women succumb. arms outstretched.
obvious zombie, coming apart in
fastidious increments. we've no
whoopee binges here, but guilt's
industrial prat-fall, splenetic
and disordered, daily. you can face
the mirror, puffy with comeuppance,
or you can let the twilight drill down
into you, carve sympathetic wafers
from your flesh, place precious
charges of novocaine in
the cancellous manger of another
ruined tooth.
at your father's funeral
speak, and push the foaming moment from your mouth, create
your warm disgust anew. tell us how you loved him. or purify
affection with a slap, a shove, a raised fist shaking its déjà vu.
lose yer ol' man's ashes to the spitting wind. sift his chicory
grievance for gilt. your scalp's itch anticipates the tomahawks
to come. tilt towards the mantle, talk about sin and its molten
payloads: women of discerning splendours. snap! of black
suspender belts. alcohol, its tedious bourgeois chemistry. fame.
methadrine and jealousy. an addict is an addict by any other
name. adulterate the orbit of an eye. your eye, amphibious
with remorse. in a cidery slanguage, speak your loose-knit
idylls of affliction, and make a peachy morsel of your pain.
you are pouchy with uneaten grief. quaint ghouls come to shake
your hand, mither the philistine tumults of their working week,
turning an heirloom commonplace over. your tongue locks
like a thermos lid. twist their threadbare meditations into
cabaret or ferment. no? as if you never did. bristle with
omissions, fixate instead on a lithograph christ, hoary in
thorns, listing above the fire. gaunt pseudo-mirror. here is
your book, its corners are paper-cut-sharp. see yourself in
the laminate jacket, a wizened child, underfed; sink to the step.
pour yourself the rosy opiate of scorn. speak, if you can. undo
the years of circular debauch, when you worked yourself free
like a screw from the town's tight hole. crawling back
through the eerie, fissured dark to morning and to mourn. tell
us again, you hated it. girls who prissed their glossaries
of moot provincial want in boots, or smiths. shops of redundant
suffix. seedy divorcés. they say mouths wear the wound, hold
the wound, are the wound. your lips as glossy as jam, the sting
of the weather still on them. cleaning ladies eye you up,
remedial and weeping. they knew you when. a child, superior
and puerile, sucking your thumb to a sliver in blue dungarees.
eccentric thefts in a row of tartan bags, and please. a pie
all jelly and crust. greaseproof menageries, flaking golden
crumbs. on an alcove shelf, a zoo. a doolittle kingdom
of saints, rising from their knees like begging dogs wanton
to a whiff of gravy. yes, you have hated it. until hate made
you a dithering cartoon. like your father before you,
walked an indifferent liver over coals, testing your cynic's
flint on the flank of the world. he bobbed in his
bed sitting room like a cork to the sound of someone
else's uproar. you took your shimmering forgeries to
print, professing then recanting. to summon a city girl
to flit, to part her thighs to mild enchantment. little life,
squeamishly frisked. the same for all of that. a sameness
for which there are no words. a bedraggled tomcat squats
on the lino, licks up a whorl of cold, pale tea. older now,
an arabesque of bones. write about that.
38
our bodies, mere diagrams of coming splendours: menopausal death-pledge, luminous errancy of cells. i have been in prison. misrule in the rapturing networks. odes of forgetful intent. blood runs its slow amok, triumphal, even. all of their wagering woes, the desperate. we will ossify or spawn. neither ornaments nor monoliths. we've only been glimpsed from the neck up for months. i have become a chaste stone head, revoking my pronouns in airless rooms. listen. i listen, alone, at night, to my own whimpering reservoirs. to be irrational and ravishing, one time, a preferential flirt. but no: with my suedehead, my grim misgendered disposition, i am the set-faced siren of aggro: gloria swanson via richard allen. poets, with your prizes and your cliques, your institutional metaphors, all you curating angels, i'll nick your achilles yet. or else desist, capitulate. i too have my gods of dark dissuasion, entropy's precipice: feed. i don't miss london. on days such as this the streets are torpor and attrition. summer, its verdant pejorative: thistles, sorrels, worts and banes, the birds in their counterfeit imabs, lilting. the body cannot bare such heat. we come, with our bellyful of flimsy yearnings, with our bellies full of belly. the heart, in all its self-proclaimed acuteness. must surely out, give out. is a silver star like a sheriff's badge. is the law's tacit occulta, a hidden malformation at the root. i have been in prison. the scrappy algebra of unemployment, piece-work, reinventing enmity all the live-long day. in the kingdom of the poem there are no heroes, only despots. you catalysts, you clockers-on, and me, i'm just as bad. our bodies are the calendar, the cell. the altar, and the vigil. light candles to precarity, to all the day-glo alchemies of capital, the things we will become. no appraisal, only energy. a woman is this coquille encore prized from sleep to sex forever. type your own name into twitter. the sheet asserts its stains. the body, double-tongued, how muscles have a memory, how i could keep this up all day, this mirthless lyric riffing. recursive, cursive grunt and flux. to be quenched. or to live off light, have done with reckless slaking, live inside the lightbulb. to deign, to dare, to be more than the sweat of our retention, the fallopian headlong, picking a scab like a geisha's mouth. to breed more tender expectations, to be a brazen idol, popped under the tongue. garishly equipped, in a kind of morbid cosplay with my myself, i'm amplified against the sun, against these cornucopias of bollock-rending smut. virginity's golden tyrant. planted by ancestors: here, right here.
Dr Fran Lock is a some-time itinerant dog whisperer, the author of numerous chapbooks and seven poetry collections, most recently Contains Mild Peril (Out-Spoken Press, 2019). Fran has recently gained her Ph.D. at Birkbeck College, University of London, titled, "Impossible Telling and the Epistolary Form: Contemporary Poetry, Mourning and Trauma". She is an Associate Editor at Culture Matters, and she edits the Soul Food column for Communist Review. Fran's eighth collection, Hyena! will be published by Poetry Bus Press later this year
