[Verse 1]
Jacked up just the other week
To the loss of an oxblood velour tie
And a Handmaiden DVD
And some condoms the midden
Wouldn’t even fit in, yet
If he’d run me through
I’d have been in his eternal debt, albeit briefly
Tape-handled blade, its wielder scared pissless
Past townhoused rows he ran, to the neighbouring estate
And there I stood alone, absent of any cavalry
Death having proved so reluctant to me;
Not for mе to be a gallowing undertaker’s day’s David
Oh that lifе should always be so exciting, so profuse
With such meaningful communion, and mind
Always have cause to run amok with thoughts like purchased
Soldiers, barely a single worthy shirt among ‘em
Save me trying to make like a man
Whose brain contains only maids in habitation
Thinking how their languor might be enriched;
For in my room which, though
Its T is V’d, I’ve learned to heat without gas
I’ve long since failed to meter if my isolation
Was bought, or is my gift;
And if it is my genius, then such genius
Is also a plague, borne by surfboard on the sea
Spread like to those estatees whom
Surround me so completely
[Chorus]
And how’s that for tragedy
All those thousands around
And still, no one but me?
And the crowd goes mild
[Verse 2]
I hear their words they themselves know not
They speak: “Look at him go
He’s not a boy, he’s not a man
He is something that he’ll never understand.”
Time’s as tough as the dark beasts’ hide
That graze as novas gaze on these silicate fields
Between suited second gen Ghaneans, and what look
Like shepherds, ain’t got no interest in sheep, but that
Those sheep be exploited labour, fit for Peep’s reap;
All history’s taken for nostalgia here
Raw ore to be refined in timelines belching toxins to the sky
And in such a locale I can have no hope, merely will
And yet shuffle I by the factory, as though I had the former even still
Dark as my spirit may be
Still I am happy
If queer I seem to you
Imagine how queer I seem to me; and how queer seem
All these elaborate philosophies they
Build to excuse their discontent
Their art be designed only
For the victory of the party;
They have no joy in values as lived
No warmth of thought for ordinary mortals
And in seeking in vain to seem so rare
They prove the most ordinary of them all
I’d be following their only value to concede I’m guilty of that too
But, though no one else has proof, that’s not true; and what is true
Well, that is all I have, which I once guarded jealously
But which now I wish to share with you. If I seem
Too eager to humble the pride, observe if you would
That there are many worse faults, and that as you bid curricula decolonise
And cultures ghettoise, you do so via devices
Whose barcode is Uyghur prison bars, their blood the price’s ink
And who cares? I can only believe, no one but me;
No wonder I am, time to time, found hard to receive
I was derived with unique purity from memories
Such as cannot be lived with, only transcended, or
Otherwise made plantation; a world laid in
Invisibility by the touch of light, so
Only with eyes closed
Does my self come into view
It’s both a truth, for my generation
And the curse it will gift to the world
[Verse 3]
In those casks where memory is housed
And occasionally brought to task
The contents mellow to a richness far
Removed from the moment they concern
And experiencing this wine, all the richer with time
We cry “Man, to but have that time once again!”
When in fact, to pass it cross tongue that’s tasted much interim
It would not taste so rich
I can take no pleasure in what is, merely what was
That isolation’s not gift, but sentence; so give me
A keg of past’s grammar and let me drown myself standing up
And that’s what happens when you’re
A human archetype destined for immortality;
Among all the ruin sowed is left
No one but me, and so, hell, and hell only
Perhaps back’s the beast of old, the feel of
Its fur’s sure familiar; it’s heaving in breath
Perhaps in anger of the trophy hide I skinned
From its mate, which now I sport me gainst August cold
That hide, and these faux Flu-12s, for carriage bifurcated
And the tunes by which I’m ferried, hidden, and exlocated
The heat of a song, so outrageous
That it turned my brain matter to glass
My every thought, clear, too clear to recognise
For the first time
I woke up to find some kids using
My ears as a telescope
