DRESSES

(NEW POEM)

monday. is a pristine glitch, the ghost of a joke, sedimented terror. a mess of nonconscious cognitions. i have failed to authenticate myself as human, a clever and relentless animal that iterates towards entropy. subtly vanquished, basically naked, an infection in my chest and reading: one must still have chaos in oneself – thanks, fred – to fissure, to split, to chasm haphazardly into, to undergo mutation, to detach one’s self from the present, its singular intention. to become: a prototype, a nucleus. whatever. i wiped down my desire, passed through the bright turbine of my grief, digested at speed by its rotary blades. life is like that, sucked into the thrust and surge of somebody else’s lift-off. it’s fine. dark gaggle of dresses hung on a rack, i can no longer wear. shrink back from my body, as gum recedes from a spooky tooth. o, the congealed dream of a meatsuit, meatsuite, meetcute. this trembling attempt at a self. i have not discarded my dressed, my dresses have disowned me: this one, taffeta and straps, symptom of an earthquake, all shook up. this one, not squeezed into but poured over, like bourbon on the rocks. this one with sequins, inscrutable boogie. this one to wire through lust, to weigh it out pale like delicatessen cheese. these obligatory bodies, imaginary friends. this one is red, a playground in the brain. this one, surreptitious, it synthesised itself from ebm and air. the stealth dress, the death stare, the dearth slip; famine’s finery, a protection of feathers. this one, dress to cleave the trim and incomplete mojo of festival, holiday, holy day, funeral. this one, panic at the krankenhause, strict as a nurse. this one, tulle’s fool, a slivered nincompoop, i stepped through her neck-hole. this dress is the secret sauce i rolled myself in. and this one, its crude gothic authority over everything. maiden, seize the augmented selfie! enormous and consorting moon! i swam this dress until i drowned. i fled through this dress like a forest. this dress dragged me being her like a shadow. no, an embarrassing, overripe child. this dress, the hyperbole of pride. this dress, satisfaction catalysed, a cinch-waist witness with puff-ball sleeves. this dress, the heavy denim of my mood. this dress was a method, storming my wardrobe. this one, lethargy and leather, sluggish and creaking like a pair of deserter’s boots. this dress is pure kum-ba-yah, abundant circus gathering itself. this one, back-with-another-one-of-those-frock-rockin’-beats, is a ripple in the room, between glitch and finesse, the pixelated power of – i ironed out illusions, i opened up the ivory penknife of my own stiff form, i cut through fabric, smoked myself out of my clothes. i have been fumigated, crawling away from the dress, rolling the fat roach of my body. the dresses do not want me, chiffony clique in the fractious, missionary morning. not worn, occupied: extremes of entrenchment. what’s the use? the dresses have rejected me. as have i. so have you.