an unholy sermon

Let us join together and deify the obscene in post-modern communion:

Take, eat, this xanny, for this is body of any artist prefixed by ‘lil’, which has been broken for you, the consumer. Do this in memory of them.

Take, drink, this henny, for this is the blood of the new covenant, the desperate scream of America and therefore England and therefore the world. Do this in memory of the present and therefore the past.

The past – that inflaming individual which shouts and stomps about in the daydreamed recreational parks of your childhood, oh your sweet innocent childhood

One must never forget that the neoliberals never found the milk and honey Moses promised them

Left hot and mad and impoverished in the desert rueing their trust in legal racketeering schemes, who are now more organised than ever

Record label accountants and Thatcher’s tailor and that bloke Mr. Jesus H. Christ

And so to the present

Aptly named for the juicy gifts I am unwrapping for you here

Adverts are now more friendlier than ever. Meet them on your mobile phone screen in-between watching lovely white people with lovely jumpers give you lots of love and hugs and kisses

They’re so weird haha lol :p they’re sooooo uncool but I still think they’re great because they’re really personable hehe

And they speak about issues.

Like, ALLLL the issues

Depression and anxiety and toxic masculinity and that

They’re vague anecdotal reasoning esteeming themselves as my moral backbone

Because they get IT, okay?

They’re normal but also so not normal like me!

They’re the freaks and geeks exalt that traitorous slut called pop-music, toasting bottles of liquified codeine

In the molly-coddle of their bedrooms bedecked by drooping fairy lights

Follow the fairy-lights

For they are the lights of the world

Dim but pretty

Linked by a single circuit

Shining as precariously as the ecosystem

Oh shit, the bulbs blew

What do you mean you don’t have any, high street man?!

WHAT?! The highstreet melted?!

Doesn’t matter, I’ll order off Amazon

What?! Amazon’s data systems have been corrupted?!

Overhead drones are dropping banana skins and Israelian plutonium on the suburbs?!

Run, my beloved congregation! Run from my unholy sermon!

For Paul’s prophecies have been revealed to be true!

Beyonce weeps.

It’s too late for deathbed forgiveness now.

The Newspaper Seller

A newspaper seller stands in the high street between The Bank and Waterstones

Roll up, roll up, read all about it!, he calls out

Three stabbings in one night!

Pillowey cappuccinos get the subjects of young mothers’ tittle-tattle sweating

The gardener, the neighbour, the lasagna, the dishwasher

May heavily defeated in commons, again!

A landlord whistles as he organises the pub signs to be as inviting as a headboard

Come in and inhale, deep and slowly, the somnolent aroma of brown ales and worn-in leather

Man accused of sexual assault innocent, judge rules controversially!

A pigeon snuggles into it’s feathers, fluffed like a dressing gown, as it settles down in the shade of a roadsweeper

Climate reaching dangerously high levels, experts warn!

The newspaper seller’s shift has finished. After depositing the stack of unsold newspapers back at the newsagents, he goes home. The work is long and boring but he reassures himself, as he always does, by the prospect of money in his bank account come Friday. A job is a job, as his grandfather always used to say.

I wonder how grandad is, he thinks, and mum for that matter. The middle pages detailed rain back in Ireland and he knows how much the weather affects her mood.

Alight here for home. Home is where you pay 700 a month for a one bed flat with your girlfriend. A stark reduction, he thinks, but one which is premised on standing on your own two feet. She’s in the kitchen making some dinner before she leaves to meet her friends in All Bar One. A kiss on the cheek is exchanged and all is reassured.

Bedtime arrives and he reads a crime thriller set in some made-up town in America. Unimaginable horror depicted through medically unsound descriptions of dismembered human anatomies. The fiction informs his dreams as his eyelids concede to the lullaby of content independence.

I’d wake him up if I didn’t envy him.

creative endeavour (cake)

A friend observed “all the greats were obsessed”

A friend offered the suggestion like a lovely piece of moist red velvet cake

And the gluttonous careerist I am gobbled it up

A leap of faith

Fear and trembling

Oh how delicious to smear self portraits in blood red sponge

Watercolouring fame and money and love and cars and respect and need and respect and need

With the vague serenity of Monet

He was obsessed

There ain’t half been some clever bastards

Ian dury, he was obsessed

Steven Berkoff

Johnny Rotten

James Joyce

Danny Boyle

Eddie Cochran

John Cooper Clarke

Alex Turner

Jesus Christ

(In no particular order)

I’m in Clapham

All my friends are here

In white shirts

They’re in grad schemes

They’re getting on

Being the powerful people the suburbs prescribed they would be

Just like I was meant to be:

Skinny with good diets

Traitors

They aren’t no friends of mine

By choice

How liberating

How disgustingly tasty

pure, disgusting vanity (Howl 2.0)

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation

Experiencing craft ales in moderation

In establishments upholstered in varnished oak and merlot reds

5 pounds perhaps better invested in a pension

What’s a pension?

In other words, I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation escaping the relentless weekday

Whose pressures pound pitifully like a diseased heart

Pressures, pressures, punctuality, performance, targets, professionally, socially, personally

I’ve robbed the greatest minds of my generation by reducing them to plurality

I’ve seen them robbed of the individualism which emboldened their parent’s mental health and bank accounts

And I’ve seen them fight back in pure, disgusting vanity

Shouting at technological gusts of air which float through infinite, empty spaces, bumping into everything on their way and punching the air in frustration

I I I am a vegan, a woman, a man, a something, a cuck, libtard, an incel, a free spirit, a humanist, a name, a Tom Butler, that’s me, that’s mine, don’t you fucking forget it babe, a a a a a a

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation fall in love with Marvel superheroes

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation repeatedly renew their vows to Disney princesses

Ive seen them fall in love with themselves – pure, disgusting vanity

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation getting their tight, white, pink pussies creampied by their black step-fathers 10 inch monster cock

I’ve seen them not even flinch at crass statements but, instead, roll their eyes

They’re so used to rock and roll, rebellion, fragmentation, counter-culture that it’s just cliche really, tut tut

What structures are there to destroy anyway when one remembers the greatest minds of my generation marching in the hundreds of thousands in pure, disgusting vanity

Pure disgusting vanity

Those feet on the ground are the feet of gusts of air which would struggle to topple a house of cards

But still dissipate by the rubber bullets of conservatism or despondency

I’ve seen the greatest minds of my generation enveloped in pure disgusting vanity

And derided for it

Lazy, moralistic, boring, moderate, extremist

And ignored for it

Ignore them

Ignore yourself

–

But I’ve also seen the greatest minds of my generation in those moments where you can’t ignore yourself

Where the distraction of pretence dissolves into honesty

–

Allow me to be the voice in your head for a moment

That moment where you’re in your bedroom with the blinds drawn and the lamplight tenderly caresses your skin, exploring the deepest crevice of the furrow of your brow

Let me accompany you when otherwise you’re alone

Inhabiting your wildest, most vulnerable and isolated thoughts

–

I’ve just got home from a tube or a bus crowded with other people in outfits bought from Topshop and Zara and Primark and I cared nothing much for them and they felt nothing much for me, and I’m really tired because I worked as hard as I could today which was nowhere near as hard as I could be able to work, where i moved ideas impregnated with value such as money or influence or a politic, my eyes are still a bit watery from the extended exposure to the screen or the artificial light of the shopfloor and my nose is running from the cold which remains, always remains, unrelentingly bathing me in ice, I can hear my parents move around downstairs of 50 miles away and their presence annoys me for the litany of sins they have committed which makes me feel guilty because I really do love them and I am no better because I am just as fallible as them, I kissed someone I wasn’t supposed to and I also got too drunk and once I tried a class A drug and I enjoyed it but also loathed myself for it which made me loathe myself even more for being like a tragic character in a film I like such as trainspotting or taxidriver or Gavin and Stacey and the girl or guy or whatever they say they are is not texting me back and i just want them because I’m so alone and I try and convince myself that I’m not or at least I’m empowered enough that it doesn’t matter that I’m alone but basically I’m alone and I hope I have a successful relationship when I’m older wherein i love my children but my, or my friends, parents divorced and one of them was an alcoholic such that I know in this unnaive, brutal, tortured, beautiful world that maybe probably life isn’t a happy ending

–

I wish I could go to sleep

I wish the greatest minds of my generation could go to sleep

Be allowed to sleep

And wake up tomorrow

Refreshingly honest

And accepting of their personhood

smoke in sunbeams

Smoke in the sun beans

Twix wood window panes

Dancing and twirling

Above finger nail stains

His love is absynth

Her life is wine

Inebriated in

the gaps between time

Darling we’re nothing

But slipping held hands

Darling we’re nothing

But best laid plans

Darling we’re nothing

Apart at the seams

Darling we’re nothing

But smoke in sunbeams

 

 

Our silences are waterdrops

On a windswept front-lawn

Dewdrops holding on like hands

They’d fall at a single yawn

Reminisce about that joke

About that bath we shared

Dancing like smoke to

Blared tunes in your kitchen cheese room

Careless midnight whispers

I’m Mister Darcy

You’d ask me to rub my whiskers on your thighs

You’d ask me to turn off the light

My face is pale now, smothered shaving foam

Sucking my nails now and bathing alone in the glaring midday glass

Have you always had that birthmark?

You’re cheeks flush like wine, deep violet

Are you okay? You’re all quiet

I’m sorry, yeah alright, I’m sorry I’m sorry, it’s nothing, it’s nothing, it’s nothing

 

 

Our silences are waterdrops

A wind sweeps over our front-lawn

Dewdrops holding on like hands

They’d fall at a single yawn

I imagine the church pews,

My mates would chorus the “I do”

I always moan and groan on the phone

“I’m alone, at home, on the throne, on my own”

Water might fall through fingers

But so does smoke

So does steam

Let’s get hot, let’s daydream the honeymoon,

twist limbs like the dancing plumes of a mid-afternoon drag,

Curled, tangled, snagged, weaved vaporous seams,

Love me, love me, love me, love me…

Say something, say something, say something like

We’re something, we’re something, we’re something, anything, anything

 

 

Our silences are waterdrops

A wind sweeps over our front-lawn

Dewdrops holding on like hands

They fall at a single yawn

We listen to the TV talk to us about nothing

At least that’s something, I think?

But you uncoil yourself from me

I hear your eyelids sink

I hear you fall into the sheets

You look better on your own

Floating downdreams, without me

I put on my shoes

You yawn as I kiss your forehead

I leave a note as I leave

“I just can’t thread

Smoke through our extinguished sun beams”

 

 

Smoke in the sun beans

Twix wood window panes

Dancing and twirling

Above finger nail stains

His love is absynth

Her life is wine

Inebriated in

the gaps between time

Darling we’re nothing

But slipping held hands

Darling we’re nothing

But best laid plans

Darling we’re nothing

Apart at the seams

Darling we’re nothing

But smoke in sunbeams

fight me

You’ll have to follow my trail of beercans to get where i am

Cos i stand still like an ice sculpture

I spill moving like a gust of guff

Dispersing clumps of art school fluff

Reeking of communion wine

Checking Greenwich Mean Time

Parroting parental platitudes: “the GDP will be fine”,

Pressing attitudes: “just accept the yearly grind”

A joke about boobs from 1972

Hello, I’m Tom, how are you, I’m a meat eating boy, what about you?

Oh, I’m sorry

I hate me a bit too

The anachronistic fat that I chew

Apologist to yesterday’s rosetinted sunset

But what else can I do?

What else can I do?

But be proud that I melt in dying rays

And enjoy the smell of my own fetid flatulence

Fight me

why bother? you’re a salmon

Sunbathe besides the Med, unsettling view:

Your pink skin tanning, swimming with the tides,

Determined breastroking betraying youth

Sweating to etch your name on waves you ride.

A human salmon. Almost twenty five.

Dumb fish – accept your endeavour remains

As doomed as breath itself. Winter’s frostbite

Coincides with the currents as they change:

Upstream you’ll toil til you break like ice, along with your name.

RSVP ASAP

The tarmacs cracked

And I think I have too

The code, the myth

Of who i wanna talk to

The tarmacs cracked

And I think she has too

My hyroglyphs

RSVP quick please

Hottest summer since 76

Mates more like kids just as pissed but not like angry more like sunkissed, sunsnogged

Dead black dog across my knee

Follow his trail of blood back to my street

Back to my bed where i used to dream

Of a riverside promenade like this, of a pilsner this sweet, a ladyfriend to whom I can describe my day or the life I really wanna lead

It’s been about a month now

Last Sunday we shared soup

But she didn’t wanna shower with me

But then she bought me a croissant

Tap tap hey hey you alright? How’s your day going? I watched that film you said to watch, it was good. When you about? Tomorrow?Tuesday? next week? next week? Two kisses or three or four

Tap tap

The tarmacs cracked

And I think I have too

The code, the myth

Of who i wanna talk to

The tarmacs cracked

And I think she has too

My hyroglyphs

RSVP quick please

Allo allo Allo you sweet mother’s son, what you having, another one, another one?

Merci Monsieur, your generosity betrays our inability to connect:

You ever see those perpetual motion toys? Two bright balls swinging, never touching, like out of sync fists,

That’s what boys is, that’s what boys is,

Fun fun, unending blistering summer sun,

But forever a swing undeserving of a miss

It’s been about 2 hours now

She should have finished work

Does something exist without description?

Why would she want to take that risk?

Tap tap, ring ring, cough cough, how many bars? Alright, okay, cough cough,

Beep beep,

beep beep,

beep beep,

beep beep,

“Hey you, how you doing? How was your day?”

The tarmacs cracked

And I think I have too

The code, the myth

Of who i wanna talk to

The tarmacs cracked

And I think she has too

My hyroglyphs

RSVP quick please

alright alright, I’ll be happy

Brain vs Me

What goes on inside me

Try make sense of this

I find it hard

But I think I’m just a slave,

I’m just a slave

Hello brain, it’s me, you okay? What we doing today? I suppose we’re doing the same again,

You’re gna push me round the london snow,

The grit mixed semi-solid slush, once white, now brown as smokers hacked lung,

City streets throbbing, sprawling, twisting veins chockfulla jostling cells frantic to get somewhere, all hurtling together and alone around and around and around,

Deep breaths, deep breaths

Clattering into architecture solid as bone, terraces bathing in and sleepy from nostalgia, looking best, feeling right, in those sunsets made rose-tinted by pollution,

Think of ur mates cos it helps

Junctions clucking like over the fence conversations, kitchen sink gossip, this is real life, he really did run off with that hairdresser, I really did buy a new lawnmower, you really did hurt her feelings, you really are a bit nuts,

Thanks brain, where we goin now u shithead?

I wish I never met you, or at least never got acquainted

I used to get by, oblivious to your inexhaustible freneticness, I used to sit down and lick an ice lolly and just enjoy that but now its all e numbers are bad for you, you won’t sleep tonight after all that sugar, you won’t sleep tonight anyway,

why not?

I wanna sleep,

dont know, I do know, its this reason, its this reason, let’s think about this, let’s talk about it brain, me and you

Oh bloody hell there u go again, charming me you perverted magician, you creepy kids entertainer, box fulla tricks and paedo boner,

Oh sweeeeeet, don’t worry, I kinda forgive you, now we’re in a pub or a house or my house or a club and we’re having a drink, that’s nice, that’s nice, too nice?, no just nice, this is a habit, this isn’t a problem, just enjoy, just enjoy,

This beer is dull and that is great, thank god

This song had a predictable song structure – I really like it

Brain has got drowsy on beer, he’s slurrring and languidly gesticulating and is letting up on me a bit, telling me a silly little joke about a chickpea, hahahaha, nice one, now we’re both admiring a girl who has boobs as bouncy as a pornstar,

maybe we can go round together after all

At a saunter,

Whistling a simple melody slightly too slow and out of tune,

Eyelids hanging over my eyeballs, not afraid of the darkness of each blink,

Dumb dumb,

Half drunk, half drunk

Numb numb,

What bliss,

Stupified freedom

What goes on inside me

Try make sense of this

I find it hard

But I think I’m just a slave,

I’m just a slave