my health matters too down in the hard black earth before the shadow-gifted body- shaming shrieks with future rank refused among the fresh night blossoms on a cork-popped psyche stashed by means you guessed were taken back on board you eat what’s yours and listen for today is just the ticket for a hunt through city streets you seem to recollect a flock of bats you made some conversation with the sith you welcomed sharp incursions of the mob her mouth’s the thing you seemed to say was viscous there was flowing under glass was then bizarre in vain so let his head fall back on bones and set aside more surface bursts the searching worse the land was hot she nursed him to his smooth and privileged form then edged his syncopated back a corpulent in ball and chains they wrapped him up in veneration and in pink to table and to then compare with all the fuck- ups on our screens a teenage fantasy for sale a part of that a piece of his the warmth and then the getting-good it’s morning if it’s bright enough the house anxieties that led to fill the plague graves early on are like a growing list of foods their scatterings were surely doomed and sometimes tampered with in sheds we spoke lovingly of roe deliverance through a glancing-off of riddles in one untidy corner of the mind delusions widely disapproved of as yet others are reluctant to placate themselves at all and almost perish with their pleadings and denial and you might even get tugged off when once the tired poetry arrives with stomach botch the wilder sort and if there is a god or not you stumble through your stratagems hallucinating forest fires and now she’s troubled by her arms again and only so much scribbling through the pain can halt this placid streak if that’s allowed to gift you motivation but it’s not like that at all it’s milk two sugars then the mescaline arrives and long-term prisoners are forced to stream some aspects of that vicious night with pushing motions of their blood-stained hands while pools of septic effluence gush out from washed-up dreams so short on fatherly affection yet again but this time on the railway banks or rolling down the river tyne with bark from ripped-up holy trees while glancing round at comic-book type treatments line by line or understanding great cathedrals in the season of the wight the un- remembered and the meaningless shape up the artist in you rides the london eye partly political keep them squaddies on their metal by the by no longer visible like beasts persuaded through your efforts down against the rusted factory gates while dipping bending showing all the glowing stacks of burnt remains of shamed officials on bell-bottom nights without the magic mountain camp with boots that shine like bathroom taps or crawled neck residue that thrashed was where it started then was torn the thing that’s feared the most was taken from a point on stolen braille maps by the river’s scent a three-lane highway out of nowhere on a mountain bike or steaming thick and creamy cabbage by the light above a patch on posh boy’s vast inherited estates that’s got to be extruded from a space that’s partly labelled by the past and having spent the morning playing human chess in tunnels or a maze it crawls a london boy by chance unorthodox supplies a big old grub to catch the only interspecies still at large perhaps the bloodied swimming pool has given up its secret to those corresponding principles at last and with an excess of its like to read a telepathic slow-descending self-erasing spine and side-lined masks a crudely nauseating metronomic tick within its zone beyond the pale with wish- fulfillment at its core while washing out the tupperware in fits who knows where morning is before the shrivels week by week still hating thatcher as they weed their beds those nervous tits have been out there in charge of landscape-format glass-based art events an installation of suspended things that much was visible along the curved beak’s nesting lost in limbo and was long-suspected by his friends of putting tories in the ground without permission be widespread he states the high mind's ornament deserves the block and matter of the hours it is suggested that the bold take notes on unscratched holograms with common praise in some hard past was smoking rocks and shooting up on city streets with skipping ropes and spinning plates while those of us who did refuse still wonder when and why our hormone levels peaked
Eddie Heaton studied innovative and experimental poetry under the tutelage of post-modern poet and educator Keith Jebb, achieving a first-class honours degree. He also won the 2021 Carcanet Award for Creative Writing. His work has been published in Blackbox Manifold, Otoliths, Lothlorien, Focus and Fold Editions
Twitter: @edwardHeaton9
