Factions

by Fran Lock

/ late diagnosis. it's a language of dragnets and factions.
/ contractions and stammers. his slack-jaw gravitates.
/ to globalized consciousness. this corporate scorn, and sweet-talk.
/ drilled into flat writs. king stephen in the courts of contempt.
/ steel mesh over the eye. oscillating spotlights. yoke and arrows.
/ there was an anarchy. war of succession. war of spoils.
/ was a steel mesh over the memoir. bleats his upheaval. was a dunghill cock.
/ there was an anarchy. time-sheet stooges, scuppered duds.
/ these stadium basics. smug opportunists.
/ many and meanwhile. beguiled and distracted.
/ the houselights come up. the houselights come up on –
/ a lightweight nightmare, nightmarish finality.
/ his existential dread revoked.
/ interpretations and appraisals. was a botched demagogue.
/ the foreman. with this megaphone full of rancid parable.
/ the foreman. with his lung full of port talbot steel.
/ handshake. shiftwork. the fashionable rackets.
/ carries his spleen in a suitcase. carries his spleen in his handshake.
/ all the couch potatoes of discontent cover their faces.
/ late diagnosis. there was an anarchy.
/ packed meat into magnificent disguises. smiles.
/ was a cipher for dismay. climbs canker, spits from the top of it.
/ the houselights come up. the houselights come up on –
/ disposable spectres. temperent spectres deposed.
/ the drumroll, the punchline.
/ says: we don't like posh boys, but we like their drugs.
/ in a showband burnout. the rarefied tyrant roars.
/ in a city like this. paranoia's perspiration running down its pillars.
/ in a city like this. the pillars of his paranoia. doric.
/ ghosts in the rosy order of things.
/ the letdown of decades. the rapturous anticlimactic.
/ sin-sired. pockets full of poachers pentacles, dead disciplinarians, limbs and trivia.
/ punishments will be disproportionate, skewed.
/ language of drag, of drain. facile and tangled.
/ a language of purge and shudder. a language of –
/ threshing dismembered hungover fatalists.
/ there was an anarchy.
/ sober and shattered. an alternate hell with hand-sanitizer. alternative hell with hotel bible.
/ and he was our monarch. those forgery years.
/ all his complaint in his face.
/ little land of wrecked hawks and burnt rubber.
/ tarmac over this tax-year, these catchy tunes.
/ chilled and flinching. i saw him empty his accident into –
/ imperial derelict seaside town.
/ cleaved and alive by the rain.
/ lashed to the stammer. contraction.
/ the mute, egregious weather.
/ kids swarm everywhere, the wolf milieu. off their nuts.
/ changelings of normalised knife-crime. ramsgate.
/ there was an anarchy. cringe in edwardian bafflement.
/ the listed buildings. mournful toytown incantations.
/ says: levelled up? nah. just levelled.
/ all our phosphorus wants returned.
/ this is grunting stuff. a broken-tooth bestride a song.
/ their aggravating swagger. these southern-fried flatterers. the stink on them.
/ a crack rock's phobic prelude to their bloody life story.
/ the rabble, woozily rallied.
/ i heard there were ballads for this.
/ for the anarchy.
/ for the untutored instruments: hands. tongue.
/ the thumping muscle of me. for –
/ late diagnosis.
/ oh, pedant redeemer, scorched and thwarted. your tarot of thwarted slang.
/ do you not have a spell for the anarchy?
/ these dismal syllabists. the fagends of faction.
/ stanzaed neanderthals. marshal thralls of phrase.
/ then the houselights come up. the houselights come up on –
/ a deadpan parody of bluebirds.
/ the wind distilling his sneer.
/ to coruscating truculence. chapel of wrath.
/ on the hill. in the rain. empty of all except –
/ late diagnosis. factions filling me. filling me up.

The image above is also by Fran Lock