the many men so beautiful
my ten to fifty sexual partners
ghosts of orchiectomies
singing
fairytale of new york in 2009
justifying the lie
no one on the coast sails
boats are an illusion
conjured
fantasies of grandeur
sage sails whickering
everyone here gets fingered
in the train station at dusk
we love it!
proud tradition
nobody enjoys it but you do what
you must no exceptions
everyone here writes
isn’t that enough
shitty stories
therapy on an oriental rug
smell of someone else’s dog
you feel alive(?)
once, listening to cocorosie
wish fulfilment exercise
his hands
untouched a red wine glass
(his hands,
though!)
in which the future
shreds my puny genitals
highway sign bulletholed
ebay antique
in the house we’ll never own
all the money pours away/
cakes the walls
hiding things as sign of trauma
smears, eye contact, broken books
metal detector
walls of doctor’s office blue
memorise apologise
watching porn on the family
PC late night hook up
jack off
what a thing to say and I
slimy thing alive
dum spiro spero
every single day someone has woken up next to someone felt the rise and fall of their chest
can you believe that there some people who do not believe in God or think that Donnie
Darko is not a good movie or do not like dancing
it is unsurprising that i am well liked i travel in God’s bright
corridor
there are places we can go they have abducted the petrified remains of protohumans for the
purposes of some recondite lesson about ~insides
and you would imagine this was a prelude to
romance, right?
it isn’t! there is no archive of these everyday flutterings, no map of the bogs and deserts
where every day someone slept and breathed and made protohuman love
there is only the stone tell
there are stories of certain spiders/crustaceans etc that trapped in rocks foretell doom
and i wonder if they (at least, the ones who have not yet been rendered and cracked into
petrochemical strands) are happy with what they see spanning the universe with their
infinite webs regarding all with their infinite feelers, knowing all crawling life
wakes up and breathes
if i ever meet one i will ask
this is why you give oysters to your beloved and it tastes the same as the bile in your throat as
you vomit over the curb and nobody makes it far without knowing the taste of their own
blood
its why harming birds has always been illegal, if you can believe it
its why they try to make
you think old bones are all that lives inside all that persists
its true
you have to get out of bed in the morning
Cleo Madeleine (she/her) is a researcher, linguist, and writer. She is in the final stages of a PhD on queer time, she is one half of the trans comedy podcast pronouns in bio, and she is a passionate and inexpert dancer. You can follow her on Twitter @quidtumcicero, where she will enthusiastically join almost any project if you ask nicely, and you can listen to her podcast @pronounscast.