Survival reduced to pickets wakes me at night. Walls painted in stench, each day the beginning of my last. A siren of coppers chases rioters waving placards about paradigm shifts. Faces of my dead friends break out from the wind, imprint on each uniform’s head, sketching shapes with colourless lips. Hearts weeping, bones humming. I exit by an alleyway, words raining like a president’s bisque full of grime. I duck into cold roads of the city, walls pissing unfinished graffiti: I. Can’t. Brea… A hobo with an umbrella hands me a parcel of dreams. More sirens—is there a better life? I take each folded dream and its prosthetic limbs, flick it to immortality. Text is your legacy! I call to the drifter losing himself in the brolly as I flee.

Eat it! Lest

the world murmurs

oaths buried

in your manuscript.

• • • •

It’s a Doofus

Escape is a burst of tears stowed with an eon. Next [n. /nɛkst] is temporality. Held in abeyance at a wonky intersection of slog and poise. An interchange of fact and fiction. Imagine this: a cerebral download metamorphosed with a nincompoop. The world is spinning with lost chronicles, missing ballots, sad songs. A jaunt of storms. A zigzag of lightning.

crackling to stillness

at the foot of a brand

new gravestone.