By Georgie Hurst
UCL
CN: VOMIT, DEATH,
WOUNDS
‘I am surrounded by some sort of wretched specters, not by people. They torment me as can torment only senseless visions, bad dreams, dregs of delirium, the drivel of nightmares and everything that passes down here for real life.’
– Vladimir Nabokov
Where I am, there
between – airport, skirting
suburbs and the great cane refiner of London –
rolling clips of clay temples.
Un-tethering:
Albion’s ever-evolving-disease
now deformed, again, from maltreatment
to a malignant baby that regards
itself, only.
The last bewailing,
suffering sentient historicised on a
social media profile.
No matter.
O Mary, my imaginary
garden never grows,
hiccupping sobs slap that shell from
god-knows-where
(act 2, sc. 1, 15-21)
all day this contrary maid moans
— we like a sad ending don’t we really.
Dear lecture-theatre of
bright keen kids
who eat and vomit up the words of an enigmatic bard,
who trace that last thread to
beautiful romantic death
beautiful bloody mortality
beautiful blank and mindless
now from buzzing lips that vibrate the brain,
shake free the corpse of chitterchatter
inane,
your busy organised flesh grows,
taut in forgetfulness of sorrow
taut in forced absence of pain.
Looking to the half smile on the plate
of breakfast half
eaten;
looking, theory-mad, to the beautiful
in physician-like study of its wounds
as though they are truth, mangled.
Header image by parisodonnell
Blueprint 