AM

The mattress is a bog, a wet-rot trap of cotton
and stale sweat where I’ve become a tectonic plate of pure inaction
My ribcage feels like lead pipe,
pinning down a heart that’s too bored to even thud with purpose
Outside, the bin-men are screaming like gulls over a carcass,
tossing glass into the maw of a truck, a fanfare for the productive and the damned
I’m staring at a water stain on the ceiling that looks
like a map of a country I’ll never visit because I can’t find my fucking trousers
The kettle downstairs is a distant siren,
a screeching ghost of a routine I abandoned when the sun hit the curtains
I am the King of Nothing, draped in a duvet of apathy,
watching a fly die against the glass with more dignity than I can muster
My phone is a buzzing insect,
a black mirror reflecting a face that’s melting into the pillowcase like soft wax
Everyone is out there, vibrating with a frantic, pointless energy,
buying bread and judging the clouds, while I’m sinking through the floorboards
The air in here is thick, a soup of dead skin and old dreams,
smelling of last night’s kebab and a refusal to acknowledge the clock
I could stand, I suppose, but the gravity in this flat has doubled,
a localized anomaly designed to keep me horizontal and useless
I’m a character in a book that’s been left open in the rain,
the ink running until I’m just a grey smear on the page
The radiator clicks, a mocking applause for my failure to engage with the light
I’ve got a list of things to do that’s long enough to hang myself with,
but I’d probably just sit on the stool and forget to kick it away
It’s the British way, isn’t it? To rot quietly behind a venetian blind
while the world turns into a series of adverts for things we don’t want
I’m not tired, I’m just finished,
a biological error waiting for the moon to come back so I can justify the darkness
My limbs are made of wet sand, shifting and heavy,
refusing the command of a brain that’s basically a bowl of lukewarm porridge
I’ll get up when the walls start to peel, or
when the hunger becomes sharper than the shame,
but for now, the duvet is the only god I recognize
Eleven thirty now, and the silence is a physical weight,
a thick blanket of “who gives a toss” draped over my shivering soul
I’m a masterpiece of inertia, a monument to the Great British Slump,
dying in slow motion between a flat pillow and a broken spring