Demolition
A poem about psychogeography, hauntology and working-class identity in Northern England
The roundness of the atom is a delusion, concavity reflected in the interior of the skull
That smaller bubble hanging on the under of the larger bubble, glotted and gluttonous with some swirling affidavit of cheap universe
The dreams about being stuck under the tunnels of the man-made reservoir near our house, the one with the semi-submerged shopping trollies
The Flood Storage Area asking for children to climb down into it
And tear their clothing on jutted painted metal
what is hiding aside that sliver of metal-gridded window in the door, what is waiting at the dark ends of the terrazzo floors and breeze blocked walls of the below ground floors of my old high school, strewn with CCTV cameras and polyester boxes of chips and gravy
I am the hawking radiation
A coil wrapped and painted in layers of uneven leaded paints, flakes of which are falling like dying embers of old universes
I am a blind woman who can only read in subatomic language
An unseen reality emerges from a deeper truth
Collecting the detritus from the carpet like those sticky gel alien toys we had in the 90’s
A concrete basin concaved and soundproofed to mimic the acoustics of the—
Shrink wrapped onto the side of a vehicle, like shiny wax or gel,
Burnt thick at the edges like the remnants of the burnt-out phone booth
mostly transparent, shrink wrapped to the corners, tightened to the earth
The joints are coiled and the wrap covers them
injected with the stuff like the transparent jelly in my dad's pork pies
The lab grown brain cells playing PONG
Remember when that comedian said we all just go t’t’t’t’t’t’ HAHA!
Clegg buried and lain eggs in my dad's flesh
‘Neath the National Front tattoo
Ey up! Down't ketty ginnell
a clot of blooming flesh sits like a pearlescent orb
blossoms from a thin metal
washing line isolated in the sun, dancing as a torment to what you used to be so ignorant of. The deeper truths and relationship with reality and the transcendent. That god is unknowable, a gurgling film oxidising and hissing as it is brought to light, is all you will ‘see’ or ‘know’, but it is merely the residue, the lenticular flash that presents as ‘nihilistic’ or ‘dark or amoral’. The fabric of the nightie twists and contorts as you dance in the mirror, dance in defiance of your mother's abandonment that has translated into an awkward dilemma in which you cannot decide whether you love or hate someone. Those you are in relation with. You crave or reject their validation. A kick off the hard surface into anti/gravity. The washing line hung in the 1984 novel
I am jarrow broke1 stumbling through the rosy fuzz of a Chris Killip photograph
The grainy outline of a milk bottle warms my fingers
Greyscale abhors corrosive penetration
No more angelas ashes in front of the electric fire until the moisture never returns to your skin
the poor and the dispossessed may glean on the fringe of each rubric what is the center anyway here between the split fields of farmers of old
Phlegm gathers in-between centrifugal layers
the chairs of the bus are made with that polyester fuzz, high vis yellow and green shapes suspended in grey, some lighter burns have melded the fur the chewing gum holds firmly hardened
You made me burgle when I was ten years and two weeks old, and I know my exact age because you had to be ten years old to be arrested
And then I saw you in jail you shit yourself, you tried to laugh it off, you made a big song and dance when I was trying to do my routine of secretly spitting out my meds
My parents worked, my brother hasn’t been to jail, I don’t know why I ended up this way
Did that lass move just move away from us, I ant seen er get off?
I’ll go see
Did she move away from us cos I was talking about prison?
Go an have a look
She’s downstairs, she might be waiting to get off
consciousness fills this shapeshifting vessel, stretched out through stretched time
spread too thinly, with great pockets of unknown sound and sponging gore
in the cold dark corners of brown warm death, brown sphere, golden-green gyroscopic rhythm
The laying down of a concaved cylinder at warp speed whips and frights
the interface has dried out
the cylinders stay heavy in their casing, to-and fro-ing like a dazed fetus in the wet of phlegm
They turn face and rupture
and fire engulfs the polygons
inhomogeneous gravity pulls at the identity sphere and now
I am falling down a curb into brand new splits
A previously totaled car
The bias of the fabric
Sewing is archetypal
The threads are frayed and
Aeviternal,
Endless morgue
End, over, more
30-year-old fetus
Hanging from the ceiling
rotation
endless glimmering
Nerve endings split in all directions
Ground down and spit on
A sagittal snicking
Lazer melting until cerebellum
A concrete filled stratum to be less or more ensouled by the latent voice of the demon in the mountain
A woman of two halves
Seventeen ways to lie to your university peers about being on Universal Credit
Are you one of those dossers in dressing gowns being covertly photographed outside the ASDA in Hull, to be sent into HULL LIVE news website or the Daily Mirror?
No more working-class journalists
Better scutter since the moor is burning
The man’ll come shooting
I had dreamt that I didn’t want to see it,
to see my dad's suicide,
that it was offered to me and that I didn’t take it
Until the scabs upon the interface fell down and revealed the nauseating surface scum that pops and hisses
a meandering swell of cicatrix tricked me into knowing
Bloom out from a birthmark that never was
Flung out bilaterally the bones click into place
Grown out from a gape
The bias of the fabric
The insurmountable hole
who are you?
A deep crease in the under-mind
Hidden beneath the thinnest of scar tissue
Seeing the blue cube through yellow glass corrodes some oval of reality
And the fungus that only grows in the aftermath of a forest fire
And the fungus that only grows in the deepest of the creases
Moving away from empty nostalgia, the amnesia of positive memory
Like the skeletal polar bear looking for food that isn't there anymore, that never was, this doesn’t make sense
I won’t ever know if she doesn’t know or doesn’t want to know
Can’t know who someone is in your head if they present themselves as avoidant
Avoiding an identity
can you skip over three or four adjacent train tracks in a tightening tunnel as reality heaves and boughs in the coal dust and still make it, still make it
Still fucking make it to other side without a scratch with your buoyant parallelism
With curved interfaces splitting and dividing
Fragments of the interface fall and form the crosshatched surface that pricks and pulsates
Sticks piling on, moving you upwards and away—
The cigarette end put out in the ashtray circles and
Between, on and through all mirrors all facsimiles of reality and present me with a synthesised airbrushed postcard of some apology of what you said never was
“I’m sorry for everything, Kay”
There's a tightening gap to squeeze through
and scouring the deep recesses
I'm staring at an auto-stereogram in the back of a teen girl magazine in 1997 watching you thread through the circles of yellow orange red
The plot points of the building open up like latticed skin
It falls like a
It crumbles like
The buried spine of the corridor becomes detached from the school
And the doors cave in like teeth the way the stomach arches the spine
In three — the fragments fall releasing their corners
A pointed wavelength with its peaks and troughs dissevered
Wind bitten with metal rods exposed like gaping jaws when sleeping
Like the worms that will crawl inside and get me to ring up Samaritans when I’m drunk and ask the call handler if they’ll be my mum
cos’ a di’n’t ‘ave one
Felt fabric clung with detritus spins endlessly on the apostrophe
Burns the underside of your arms and trunk as you cling on
Burns your eyes as the fabric releases fibres
Shot up, spinning on loose rays in the darkness
Light refracts each time I try escape a splaying puncture
Displayed and ruptured
Body on a spike
Dead rays
Dead green, frosted blue rays freeze into powdered carbon on impact
Circular tunnels underground lead to deep sprawling factories where a singular water drop drips through and falls from each metal pipe through into the dry throat of tomorrow,
boring out the barrels and razors for tomorrows fallen
Trying to look for the validation from a structure that heaves and hinges and falls like
it wer’
the’ wer’
‘e worked at ‘t’ nail mill
what ‘e called turnin’ the rolls
we were that used it we di’n’t ‘ear it
And when the’ were, when they were doing somet’ in t’ w’rks, we used to get sul’, we could taste the sulphur all over ‘unslet when the’ used t’ be doin’ it. But we were tha’ used to it, it di’n't bother us, you know, we'd say, “Oh, oh they're doing, letting the sulphur out," you know. Things like that. They used to say it were ‘ealthy, but I don't think it were. And then, further up ther’ were the steelworks. We had, uh, we had them all in ‘unslet. All these, uh, factories, you know.2
By Kay Child