CUSTODIAN

1.

the remit of this thought

is a domed citidel you just woke up in

English Yokai make themselves known easily

elucidated by a slurry of rainbow in an oil slick &

just as every onanistic dalliance of the heart felt peculiar to you

every half-demolished retail park contains a glint of the social

in its soviet of slumbering monsters

you are part of the programme, the sludge vortex

a cloud of ash or finches or whatever screeches

on a septic horizon

this is just how is it is

my unassailable context

my squelch of animal

my denuded

psychic fecundity

who knew a murder of lads could be so easily bifurcated

by market values by branding avant-gardes

a perspiring superstructure of acne scars and rhetoric

a sticky torso bristling in its chore jacket

tomorrow the ache of something beautiful

waiting to devour itself like a senile reptile

2.

things are getting lighter everything is lighter

a lighter getting at the alloys of a bus stop

at the edge of every town you’ve lived through

an engine working at

everything you never asked to be

a lilac sky you thought yours alone

remains a wallpaper setting on a flip-phone

glitching in a field somewhere trashed

by cider and morning dew

by way of youth a callow argument

brought back by a lick of cheap speed

you can’t get by on foetid magicks alone

so who speaks you now my sloppy data feed

of blue movies and dead notions dribbling

in this glistening polis of unsettled invoices

and punctilious or pornbrained theses on sex

men remember nothing of boys beyond

the song of a friend’s distant fucking

a mutt curled up at the foot of the bed

  grateful for approximate warmth

3.

the human is nothing

if not a refusal of the coherent

invasive phrasing

whirrs about the cranium like a sparrow

ready to destroy itself against a crystal-clear window

this is why I don’t take your calls anymore

or can even bear to think of you

as I need an account

that excites the gelid viscus

of trend forecasts

so when I say, I miss you

I mean a drive

more organised toward

soothing

the alienated rattles of cultural executives

who will not abide a boy whipped up

by his insular and brutal vernacular

stop staring at my cock, you said

after you got it out & waved it in my face

4.

trauma arouses economics

but what of terror

colored by delight

the docile I

revived by the dream

of you inside it

some old god somewhere

of unproductive english mud

the god of the shameful wank &

loaded glance between sullen lads

some chthonic sub-bacchante

with loathsome rites writhing

in a gut for decades like fate

I think of you when it hurts to piss

or am struck by a ghostly cocktail of excessive cologne

feet and mossy caves and sweat mingling

in the spare room at your dad’s house

a furtive god of the formerly soft

of the hot to the touch,

a heart needed

like a lump of raw clay

Distance, well this distance

too throbbing & huge & angry

I’m getting at something brand new here

that’s all there is to be said of you my uncertain thesis:

the erotic is what never happens.

Al Anderson is a writer and scholar based in London. He recently completed a PhD at the University of East Anglia in Creative and Critical Writing. Recent poems have appeared in Mermaid Motel and Lud Gang. He published a chapbook with Blush lit in 2021, called Tenderloin. He is currently working on two longer projects, one is an autocritical expansion of his PhD thesis, provisionally titled ‘Return to The Vampire’s Castle’. The other is a novel about a young man who comes to realise he is a re-incarnated John the Baptist.