Three Poems by Francesca Lisette
we are all just person-people
in a fucked-up universe
wake up. good
morning is the same as night
unpick stealth of wool & teeth its knotted in.
let’s start again, because gender theory has been
inadequate unless lived inhabited as part of daily drum
roll that reaches forgotten angst you can’t itch.
like this could be a rinse of past life, wiped out
by the sink of relentless impasse & begin again,
too cool for memories eyes flick over a split-level
dust cloud who have we been where we’ve fucked
or not eyeballs to fluid it caves in because don’t
straighten this acceptance anything not goading it
isn’t, doesn’t exist outside the prism of illusion
words carry in a string cauterising your ear
to my lip just south of London & could the
cabinet of affections play with provable value, at
what point does the refusal of bourgeois morality
become self-neglect, those who can think about
deprivation are provided for, & how percolating
these disavowed hands make the cross, scuffed w/
poverty dis(-solution/-illusion) compression it all
acts to the same breath telescoped thru your vigil as
you rise to shave hued vassal in morning light
have i ever cared enough burnished to distraction
& the echo of endlessness because raw, prescient
as smoke funnelling over Wordsworth’s mystic
house and past lives are gone and scream because this is
true economics slide by oil-black ______ are never
coming back the opportunity to be free of prose
return to basin and strip the head’s colour-swatch
to this premise we’ll be rid of tomorrow 25/01
SLINGBACK RECIPROCITY
Gross embarkation more or less shrived the image.
The dialectic of feet
they loom always, fat & ectoplasmic
nixing gas of essential foetus // dumbly demanding cauterization.
Girl observant wears catacomb in hair
exchanges frangible wafers for
sprouting party of flesh
Duellet image : praecox : disjecta
Inquire by scattered knees
faithful black tears fumbled iron in scraps
-- but why trail your scent downriver?
I’ll not fetch gouged trim of this sermon /
nor be prey to a fool’s writ --
Much as would call for
craven desire in the frozen aisles,
matt peas on the shelf.
Surprised, only be penniless
for a minute tented as fever, costly while afternoon sticks
to my orientation, limb-socket jams in th’ bud.
Flavourless run-off all bellied & boxed: an equation intended
to express equivalence produces the effect of
uncertainty aka, does the snuffbox know what
the knee pit is doing? emphatically not; rather
the relation is gun-jumped & shy.
Prolong our leap to its rescue, say we’re proud of this
nation & its discontents, yet nothing’s pandemic that can’t be
rendered LOSSLESS/ pilgrim in the smooth blue flash.
The eyes are for flowers.
Under a dream of shelter by the sky
do not preen invisible
do not rock window dollars
do not plaintive pigeon shit shine
do not “Jane’s-in-the-country”
morose tackle hold.
There are some things better left
to the girl with the rose-gold apple.
You’re not a definite gap in sociology dreamboat
or a tumescent wedge leaking.
Bear the green springs and shot fire lights
bald marry in shave-down literature.
One is always becoming what she isn’t.
History crumbling like cake.
Is it you on the
dial, or Venus
