Three Poems | Thomas Whittaker

a language in which things - the hard things of daily struggle and effort - have already assumed the exclusive value of a symbol, of a gigantic metaphor for the world; and the often tragic price of its greatness is that what it says departs from praxis, never again to return to it

they call him ‘the don’ now, nico, hymns a half-light in what the id’s simulacra genuflected as ‘storm drain’. under flustered incense aviation stucco & pubic billboards. peach-moaned telegraph wires prostrate a combated drunk vowing your lick-her licence. for 18 years we’ve made pan dulce here they’ve got a website where you can hire girlfriends for the day the community has grown around our hen soup and pepián. resentment: an socio-emotional blockage without weight in political discourse: dr. gonzo’s antiphon like the sultry frost of a grocery clerk’s cloister souring into st. sebastian’s bluff-dappled pumice. through imperial pith faux-ivied marble & gladio’s rusting pines. grapefruit-shamed mourning doves gridlock the stiffness in her boxers absolving your eve after dark. here we haven’t lost the tradition in yucatan of cochinita pibil and black stuffing check it out baby close up boom close up on that ah hit the light hit that the banks only want the land for new houses for people with money. regret: a material individual restlessness delimited by the historical needs of the collective: zeta’s plainchant like the dust-smelted caresses of a running back’s physic garden bleaching matteotti’s travertine-palmed graffiti. in blushing vanguard waning fillies & oil crisis al taglio. aubergine-charred gushes of steelheads garlic her hushed longing to empty her swollen balls forgiving your playpen. we want our children to be proud of what we’ve built here p after dark we’re doing this on another platform because y’all don’t want this content we’ll have beautiful girls like this one right here it’s sad to leave but we know that god will bless us wherever we move. repression: a power structure hegemonic in its geography of desire: the brown buffalo’s lullaby like the torrid blight of an accountant’s insula fermenting de rossi’s plum-gutted terracotta. they could call her ‘love’, luka, corrals a dusk in what an unconscious facsimile knee-trembled as ‘ruin’.

to call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions

and the glove gets the steal! reign man: kung pao fags burnt the stunk of muscle relaxant. not having raucous sex equaled sorrow, trouble: the fertile sickness of the autofictive: desire’s stevedores alleged alien amidst frisco’s aluminium-misted lumber, flanneled loons mossed like picture brides in a held-frayed sunset. shipping containers domesticate a salmon’s brining. armistice wobbles from softness-gnawed draglines. blanket: chickenshit limbs splintered the spilt of high-afternoon sulphur. an army wife dawned listless at sardis, hope-bloated in the impervious transience of kaiser’s keening cranes & superfund-autumned silos: populism’s ‘going to the people’ for their uncorrupted ‘instinct’ as paternal humanitarians not class scientists: no sales tax across the border. 3 times the rookie finds deep tissue bruising in her rose garden. utility is an afterthought in cherry-blistering afterglow. jealous: chip fat beavers spent the dreamt of ejaculate. gender is the extent we go in order to be loved: the threat of confession: want’s vanguard waxed legible among tacoma’s box-fresh ponderosas, jumpman-spotted owls utopia-algaed like matchmakers foetal in molotov’s pigsty. quiet’s strung-out rupture cuddles in a hard blue caldera. on a signal waning in the breeze the mitten hammers on bitadze like an irrigation of blind faith. she wants to cut her sexuality out of her body, because the problem with ‘abundance’ as a political concept is that it places a moral judgement on the raw possibility of a material quantity.

how can people be represented when they participate in society not on the basis of lending their labour but through everything that they do, know, want and desire, because all of this is within the realm of social cooperation?

spunked in a gothic tenderness. something victorian, like concrete thigh-meat anxious-rodded topping the former site of the used-car garage in tulse hill. a familiar hungry-red sky in yet-half-forgotten mist. she undid her, flies and all. norwood park won’t cable-tie the main-room climax - serotonin-burnt cliche mulching sinusitis-chastened in rubber-band snaps to the wrist - polyestered in autumn’s commodity fetish. this has been a skyline since 1911 - capital disinfected like bare-knuckle-white vans metal-detecting their shit-stained boxers and boy-racers exhausting champagne from laboured balls. ‘millwall & cocaine’ over ‘trans women are women’ (lamppost, 2020). sirened by a traffic light - washing powder, turmeric, toast, deodorant for someone else - from the black sun of the 417 ayia napa’s day-glo blood-feud lilts restless puddled limbs frigid with its serrated dreamcast of moped-fingering & lager-willed ants like a condensation-pitied bar of pastel dykes with the post-halloween shakes bitching about the outsides they’ve fucked in and chappell roan’s watch-mechanism. there’s a complication of legibility in the fact that it’s originally spiked-punch music for queens in new york but becomes the repressed flamboyance of the south london petty-bourgeois, dancehall in november rust, fidgeting in worn-soft sheets on a grey-washed morning to the hush of fag-end pentecost, a longing for the demystification of the material conditions of desire. girls like us are from thornton heath as well you know.

Thomas Whittaker (they/she) is a writer of poems from South London. They write from a queer Marxist perspective about alienation under capitalism in the urban environment. She is currently particularly influenced by E-40's Revenue Retrievin': Graveyard Shift, Alberto Asor Rosa's The Writer and the People and the novels of Mathias Enard. They enjoy using obtuse basketball references in their work. She has been published by Passion of the Weiss, Impossible Archetype, Ouch! Collective, Blow Up Britain and Antiphony among others. They can be found @thomaswithdoubt on Twitter and @acidsynthline on Instagram.