JJ Jackson, Xaymaca 60

Xaymaca 60 (List Poem inspired by Allen Ginsberg)

JJ Jackson

I have seen the best minds of my generation writhe in their miseries and stoop to labour in the dunged dirt and squirm in the faecal filth and dine in the manured muck of another like cowards, taking flight and lusting over the putrid pods of pigs like prodigal sons, but too prideful to be poised for a glorious, patriarchal return

who sacrilegiously strain their consecrated bloodlines into grimy buckets of diluted Möet and white overproof spirits and the THIN platelets of their mothers, and gasp greedily, slurping it to their chapped mouths with dirtsmudged hands and work-cracked palms and grime-lined fingernails unto a wretched kind of numbness: Disappointing Drunkenness, Stumbling Stupors, Blind Bacchanalia

who spread their brains out on the dilapidated pavement of the aged concrete and SPREAD THEIR LEGS to scrape out the remnants of what is left and stumble through checkpoints and cheat for survival; entirely scamming subjects and stashing phones in dark places, sloth sludging through their streams and exiting only through sneezed rags of snot or slithering through intestines and crawling out of cheated appendixes

who, today, frolic like finches and fête forgotten fineries but, tomorrow, fine-tuned the finished polishes of their frowns; forever finicky and floundering farces, but two-faced, refining the “I’m fine” while harbouring the “I” AS FOE

who loiter on the street sides burning holes through the middle of their palms, licking letter-less envelopes mailed to no one mailed to blurred skies,

temporary highs, and overwhelming lows, bloodshot eyes peering over the darkest hours, and dark lips staining the countenance of their corps

who bend over backwards with battery-powered beatings, bulldoze bellboys bustling and breathless in blind corners but casting the first stone in bold blows with beams in their eyes, refusing to lower themselves in the presence of their women and boast spurting Belloite jizz in Her faces, their evidence stored in soundless films rolling on and on and unseen, its script rewritten in illicit servers with HER-NOT-his-NOT-THEIR penned apologies to follow in from nuns’ frowns of excommunication

who canter over with foal legs strewn together too tightly wrapped in gashes of denim, tartan ripping at the seams of overlined linen, and they’ve fried what was STEW and CURRY and STEAM and ESCOVITCH and BAKE, rolled in TURMERIC CRUSTS, across state borders with Bluegrass spices lines of engines on the Sabbath a coiling ravenous snake

Who dim their ears to the tolling of bells and whet their defiled lips on the wooden flats of an anche, purring hymn notes with no conviction and placing the wafer-flat pad of their index onto hallowed tongues under the watchful eyes of their Genesises, and fall back, hand-crossed, into boiling water; skin peeling, heads lolling, EYES-ROLLING BACK, occultists pushing them around the rims of a golden goblet that has touched the mouth of gOD

Who crown Miss Worlds and hire bank tellers preferring more milk to coffee, weeping blue teared mountains with white matter crusting in eye-

ducts and crushing the souls of brewed dust, patterns AB BC but no CC, paper bags and hyperventilation, unknotting locs with broken combs and rubbing out at that damnéd spot in feverish anger when everyone tells you to ‘LIGHTEN UP’

I have seen their minds implode, what a sight it was to behold.

crazy eyes

Amal Surmawala

once upon a dream i freeze in terror as a stranger’s crazy eyes meet mine through the glass window. i never thought i’d be terrified of a smile. i scream, run to my brother, to man to protect me from man, and he leads the stranger away. the stranger smiles triumphantly; i shiver, go back to my room. and already he is replaced. another one stares through the glass window and this time there is no one here but me. i fight, fling his hands from the windowsill, watch him fall to stone pavement, wonder if i’m now a murderer, but he gets back on his feet. people are shouting encouragement. he looks at me with eyes that are even more dangerous than before.

and i know now that this is a dream. i know this is a dream. those windows so white and easy to open aren’t mine; my brother would never have left me. i scream at myself to wake up and i do.

to darkness and silence and bars on the window and locks on my door and a window in the bathroom that’s too small for anyone to climb through. Allahu la i-la’ha crosses my lips along with a string of pleas. i ask the divine for help because there is no one else, no one else to save me, protect me from what i just lived. my racing heart slows. i can now hear the fans whirring above me, see my little sister sleeping on the bed near mine. i pray for her too. i still can’t get the stranger’s crazy eyes out of my head.

because i know that this dream, this nightmare, is real to some girl somewhere.