zkthepoet

this coon 

this grubby spear chucker 

this fuzzie 

chip-on-his-shoulder pickaninny with navy gums 

this lemon-eyed teapot 

musical wog 

this thieving zulu 

blubber-lipped savage, swinging his shlong 

this midnight 

chocolate convict 

nig-nog gorilla and golliwog 

jigaboo dancer, chalkie, tar 

negroid shadow-face 

darkie, spook 

nigger in the swimming pool 

in his monkey-suit 

uggah-buggah boogie 

nig-jig ape 

jungle bunny, african 

black, black, slave… 

but I don’t mind niggers 

a nigger’ll buy a round 

                 it’s these ungrateful, rag-headed, racialist pakis I wanna skin alive, torture and set alight    now  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This was a poem I wrote in 2012 that won the Stephen Lawrence Poetry Prize presented by Doreen Lawrence, Stephen's mother.

The words that the racist gang that set upon Stephen that Eltham night shouted were 'what, what, n****r!' This piece squeezes all of that vile energy, finds its many incarnations and ends with the directive of later discriminatory language.

for porcelain shards

She craned to casualize the recollect of his comment

                                                                       tissue, dab, corner-mouth

But heart bobbed in pharynx

vowels hummed with lubricant

And the vertigo tilt of her Scot grandpa's nose snagged betrayal

Like swigging air would stymie another knee buckle

at his auburn stars

That battery acid arousal crunched between her word palate

as if the quip was the unobtainable SMS reply

                                                                       treasure in her ear

And now, fifteen feet from here

walling her periphery is a neon apparition of ejaculation, live vinyl stammer

sweet-suited object of banoffee promises, facebook pleas – dainty jaw again

That is why she sucked me

to come rummage in her shroudings, disprove the pining

+ equalise the prize on his arm

                                                                                       bridal kin

Leftovers is alzheimic

to the witch knots in our ventricles + angelification addiction

                                                                      my wicked tongue brothels me

                                                                      shatters her mascara

But I can taste the frenzy for him

in the lethargy of her nude-with-me's

he had to strut into the path of my father and smash him, fied

or he would never have stopped cunting

ensnared to right-hook,

               davidian catapault,

                     heriditary forearm x 'Orvil'-side

and plant the old man escape

      on that hematoma-sod of jaw

he needed the daubed dishes clasped to clatter-kiss

                                                                          witness wobble

                                                                                and sway

by baking shock in the branded blues. but fray

                                                                    shied in the kitchen, superfluous

                                                                    waiting his eldest away

grey with cruelty (like Chrissy's crashed ladder)

      narcissistic

      resentmental

      recrimination

      infanticidal

      fantasies

and Peter to all but Grandad's puntings.   ...“It was nowhere near as bad...”

  my daughter, ever bridal Umayyah; I punched too

fed a fist to her taut gut

innocence bear bait

where her pink post-it stay pleas

slid beneath my door

Now I know you hoard cinema ticket stubs

warmer than magic number sperm

belch “not boyfriends” and grin loftily at their memories

of ale-breath lust and Westfield promise

Fourth occasion you’ve colourized me sick

The first; Ronny’s friend’s “piece of me”

A second; swank for Vince, prior and prettier than I

Third; the dearth of sentiment in your goodbyes; I wave at backs of heads

By the fajr prayer I’ve gone

inside again

where I daren’t tell if I love you

I want to ask you how many men you fucked in Benidorm

doodle it

stencil their arms from rap fetishes or scouse bravado

contours carved over your faming back chops

grinning evanescently, smarm

clink the tally of drinks they worthed you

if they held on their hat for long

and I think you not cheap

but miserly graffiti lines win you

tender your glass for a spike

I call out the bake of their speech bubbles

the yank on your weave

pull me how much tongue you took them

to spread their smegma cheese

we credit gestures for what we cannot count

but can we count the penises inside you?

the breaths on your earlobe

virused sperm in the rectum

paw-print sweat perm your hair

let me see the lipsticks you packed for Benidorm

tones of intent

for how much tanned-up germs I ingested

dry tanekka

bimbo for a vow

there are cut tears parked on the wings of your butterflies

pollen of reckless requite

so scott and rich treachery wedge now you press out, pretend to cry

and speculate infantile on the apostasies of love

wheezing show into the virgin bed-sheet

pitch of no warrant

calling me by other boys names

and I heard you spell police again, J dry tanekka

you cannot catch it from me

javelin salt-drops

and climateless blocks of ardour

how tempting it is to regress here

derange from the figmenting

I am the first toy out your pram

tyrant litter stairs

obliterate tweeted testimony

repent facebook tomfoolery some days

in these shoe-high confines

it is solely babyvoice and switchblades

bunkers of rage and ruminate

and then

by work end

I am wearing your contact lenses woven

one bronze midnight we guffawed together

noses pointed at the lemon butterflies

of youtube stand-up

one evening our belly buttons printed onto the duvet of an unused double bed

and it was that you’d never hurt my littler sister

or pounced the pigs on me

before I’d crashed you into the Asda of my fiction,

and snuffed our religion

another evening you carried the laptop to my daydream

on the couch of student loaning

                                                                        as if

                                                                        you’d discovered

                                                                        that solitary fork

                                                                        I ate with for months

                                                                        in Shadwell

                                                                        before you came

foraging the browser history

and tried to have us recover an old laugh track

I wouldn’t give you anything but six inches by then

as I scratched barbarously at the dense of the door

and chased amys

today she and I melted into Ikea

a place I’d never been with you

by that snow-funnelling March

I had ceased praying

and gyrated my rotting worship to a songstress

who terrifies me with white noise

like God never would.

I’d shorn my kufi to admit her longboat fingers

my nosebridge

swopped blanket rugs of war

for xxxxxxx.

I tip-toed into sleep, daring retribution

couldn't even accident His name.

I let her deplume my beard of solace fuzz ugly

and tease for the silver whiskers I caught from witches at twenty-five.

so one dusk I ran from her

unbuttoned my phone with battle sulk

having dripped mutton sweat onto her baking tray

and smelt the growl before the screak

on the touchscreen pad.

inside anew

I slotted between the musaleen

in a pensioning teacup of a mosque

prostrated aground

rotary-dialled back in (‘subhan rabbi al-a’la’)

but couldn’t even hear the old pulsing

                                                    on the raddled whistle of the other end.

then ambled back to her with pineapple punch underarm

                                                                                       post-pizza

Pouted on your living room floor,

alone with me and masturbation,

are the leather coil heels that squeaked

that I knelt at and slipped from your ankles

and replaced with the colour I talk at as beige

Beyond this door

in the half-room of dolly mixture garments

slouches my borrowed suitcase

zip grazed open

bewildered there

confused like the babies I absented in Millwall to come to you;

the pair that pushed me post-it note pleas

like that suitcase, dragged here

                        then dragged, scraped, hauled to the launderette of portly landlords

                        where our socks cakewalked together aboard recycled heat

but I bullied it closed again

with the spring of your cat-calling, asterisk blame

and shuffled toward a cross-country storm-out

before finding your kitchen counter eyes,

your stymie of bloodshot coral

redecided

biting the arsenic of my wooing promises

In here,

sparingly heatered,

when the lids peel from our drowsying smiles

we inhabit oblivious exes

and centre ourselves in ourselves, slugging

to schedule a trade off of saline fluids

for equal parts nothing and always,

equal share solid and shattering

When I am an adult petitioning you with my juvenile whims

you do a tot with grown-up concerns

and I ask to smash your rasping door

a safety catch is a mechanism used to prevent the accidental discharge of a drunken firearm

  my heart is on safety

clamped into the lever

pouring into fingers ringing thin, sweet hair

  and so the race is then to infect you

to pervade you with the excess of me

for you to sing

  it is not that I will love you,

although I will not love you*. I promise.

it is that it is your age to be princessed, chinesed

and held.

  I desire little more than to be the one to dispose of your porridge-packeted bins,

to top up the electric, run aromatic into your bath,

escort you tenderly across your cyan party bridge, wiggle my bum up the stairs at you

then kiss you into the goodnight

  I cannot love you*, but it is not that;

it is that you are broken and must only be broken again

in a night before my rescue’d drifted rowdily into wastage,

ahead of a limehouse police cell, your emergency lock changes

and grubby slags of sister-in-laws dangling street violence

  us two windowed maghrib snake-charmers in the museum screening room

where you winced at the allusion of perfect sodomy

as we sucked clock-hands for the exorcist to become ready,

bordering Velcro glances, weighing the barren planets between us

  his admissions of shavery,

epiphanous slurps of laughter

and campish hesitation

betrayed

more than cowering before psychiatry or coincidence

  but it was the cardboard simplicity of his formulas;

the edible ink and paper

photo-copied onto the ethereal.

vowing the scripture-lit water would scorch us inside.

though he would not incur your witching story in his calibration –

                                                                          the form said evil eye /     

                                                                          the form said evil eye.                                                                                              

mumbles in my slumber were incensed demons,

the stiffening exit from dreaming was the devil’s pin,

jinn had bunked in your dirty blood, he swore.

you bought everything haggle-free,

especially the possession of my ego

and paid again for him to rap quran behind our cut heads

with notes we owed away

  how we configure our bribery for blamelessness;

stubbing woe out on impalpable,

snarling the scorn into ogre huts.

  I mule-gobbled my father’s privacies from the tease;

          letting believe that I’d never slept in the indoor ice with lost hookers,

          seen Dad turn agony to white wind

          or heard the unlit back garden screeching my name blue;

and almost had you trusting that this was cure.

I have a girlfriend. I seem to’ve always had this black hole of a girlfriend. We burrow together in one prickly noose apartment. I don’t know when our cohabitation began or even who moved in with whom, but I’m certain it’s been approaching eternity because all the viable hiding places are covered with boxes of unlabelled, anonymous crap now. At one point I used to tally time by how crooked her teeth became. Night pins her in perfect parallelity to my reading position, where she mimics a creature that has newly discovered their fingers and who cannot conjure a thought that isn’t plastic. All of our non-essential dialogue has long evaporated so she stakes her options on some pitiful memory she saw me coax once. I do not need a lazy blowjob anymore; I have a powerful, self-cleaning shower hose I can lock myself away with.

I recognise how to shake her off, but previous experience teaches me that application of this swift technique soon means I’m forced to endure the sound of inflated sobs that five walls are unwilling to muffle. If only there were some words to share that we both could indulge in. I tried reading aloud to her a few times, however this merely reaffirmed our calamitous extrication when she laughed well before the punchline and then clogged her explanation with fucking lies. She is a moron.

When I converse with genuine women – and recently this is all I do – I am a gluttonous listener and the bloody heart on my sleeve seeps uncontrollably. It is just that there is nothing I care to share with this girlfriend. I’ve fantasized a thousand punches for her face, yet the only one that in reality ever connected was entirely accidental. I miss that punch more with every washing cycle.

Tomorrow afternoon I shall kill her. We plan to drive to the supermarket for another argument about acceptable ethnic foods. Years of observing her irrational driving means that I have been able to calculate the precise point in our journey where my hooking the steering wheel sharply will cause us to collide - driver side - into a beautifully thuggish concrete wall.

It is not the first time I’ve fallen in love with another during our relationship term, but it is definitely the only occasion that I’ve felt so amorously about an idea. I’ve got these gigantic butterflies.