#badbettypress

[carminamasoliver]

I read these two books from #badbettypress over the weekend & they are both stunning. Both @jakewildhall & @joelotter are incredible on stage & page - I cannot recommend these pamphlets enough. So rich, emotive, and innovative. I feel so proud to know these wonderful humans. #allthefeels #poetry #poems #books #amreading #buybooks #indiepress #spokenword #performancepoetry

[lit--bitch]

poems for my fbi agent by charlotte geater 

[lit--bitch]

Charlotte Geater, ‘poems for my FBI agent’ (2020)

(Disclosure: I don’t know Charlotte Geater, but as I’ve previously stated I am familiar with Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall from Bad Betty Press — though I don’t particularly know them well).

poems for my fbi agent is a convoluted, multi-faceted investigation into surveillance and our present-day predicament. Who is watching us? Who is watching those who watch us? Every time an advertisement appears boasting a lipstick from a brand we were talking about just yesterday, do we still call this serendipity? Or is it evidence that we’re being observed? And is our relationship with “our agent” a symbiotic one, where we share, even indulge, in each other as voyeurs? Unlike Crispin Best’s Hello, Charlotte Geater’s collection probes more sinister pockets of Internet culture: of spy and spied.  It’s provocative, surreal and deeply disturbing. It’s also encrypted by so many different subtexts and jarring imagery, which makes this a challenging and very personal read, because it entirely depends on you and your experiences. So strap yourselves in.

Whenever I start a new book, I always read the acknowledgements first. I do this because I’m nosy. I like to make sense of the writer, I like to know who they are thanking, where work might have been previously published (particularly if it’s a poetry collection or a photobook). Because beyond the author’s name, the acknowledgements page is the writer’s final note. Afterwards, you’re flung into the book’s meat, and you’re on your own. 

I flicked to the acknowledgements and I had a look at what Charlotte had written. At one point she says: “[I thank] all of my friends, for being supportive when I said, “I’ve started writing some poems inspired by a meme that is already kind of dead.”’ I understood what she was referring to. She’s talking about memes like this: 

It’s interesting to see that we as a generation deal with a lot of our problems in meme-culture (and that is a whole separate conversation from this review). The FBI memes were one such example. They’re designed to nullify and humour our digital anxieties about being spied on. We have developed an acute self-awareness both outside in real time, and on the Internet. We know that we are constantly being watched, whether it’s through cookies or CCTV. Privacy is a luxury. It can be purchased like groceries. We’re not automatically entitled to being left alone. And that brings up questions about authenticity, self-identity, self-integrity. It throws up all kind of worries and fears, as our online presence and real selves chafe against each other. But unlike these memes, poems for my fbi agent doesn’t minimise your worries, it amplifies them. 

I couldn’t always penetrate this collection and hold myself to one specific intepretation; it flummoxed me. I was really confused by the dislocation of imagery, the subtlety of Charlotte’s writing style. It’s exactly how Sam Riviere put it: “a Lynchian rabbit hole”. The series of images, which seemingly bear no relation to each other, is quite jolting. You have to make the connections yourself, you have to look within and draw on your own references to access what certain poems “mean” (I’ll expand on this later). At one point I just sat back in bed and gulped. Because I thought “how the fuck am I going to write a review about poetry I don’t always understand?” And I was panicking because, I thought, “there’s a plethora of ways to understand this work, I don’t have to hold myself to one specific interpretation”, but I was struggling to grasp the imagery and syntax. So I figured talking to my mother about it would be useful because sometimes you need to discuss a book and bounce off one another to engage with it. So really I owe a lot of this review to her and our discussions. 

One of the most disarming things about this collection is its perturbing elusiveness. As my mum said, “I can’t put it into words what she means, but I can feel what she means”. 

A pretty good example of this (and what I mean by jarring imagery) is in ‘my FBI agent is a mathematical problem’:

and not just a philosophical one. if i ask who watches the agent  who watches me, it sounds insincere;  but let’s get down to it in our underwear [...] who does he text when he’s lonely?  who gets to see his underwear, [...]

So far, I’m with Charlotte. I too ask the very same questions. Who is keeping our agent under watch? Y’know, does it become a situation of meta-surveillance where everybody is a threat, even the ones who supposedly work “to prevent threat”, like the agent? Is the agent part of, or rather, included within the same system? Or more worringly, do they sit at the top of the hierarchy, and are therefore untouchable? 

if i type a poem instead of writing it out first it feels closer to god, by which i mean closer to you, watching me and if i am not a problem, are you there? 

The FBI agent and our traditional conceptions of “God” as omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscient, are conflated here. It’s true; the agent has total power and knowledge over everything we do and investigate, even the things we plan to do. The agent can wield time, can document and record. The agent can create business and yet the agent is our business. The agent can defend and attack, break things, read your mind. It’s in the agent’s “god-like” apparition (you can’t put a face to your agent like you can’t with God I guess), and in the agent’s “god-like” power, that we are wholly subservient and are most afeard, because the FBI agent knows all our conversations, thoughts, and internet searches. That access to our personal psychologies makes for an entity like that of God. And it’s all supposedly in the name of our protection, to defend from terrorism or people who might break into houses and axe us out of the blue. The question is: If we’re not posing a threat, or being threatened, where’s the need for the agent? Does the agent evaporate? Do they move only when we move? 

matter changes when it’s hit am i a problem for you yet?  the lake turned to ice improbably fast; and the custard became a rock inside your mouth. 

I mean like, lake? Ice? Custard? This is so random and strange. I sat there scratching my head for ages about this. But I’ve sort of hazarded the best guess I can. And there’s two things. Firstly, this idea about matter changing when it’s hit, liquid states and solid states. So in quantum theory, there is a  suggestion that observation affects reality. So for example, if you wanted to observe electrons and how they move, you have to get them to behave with a proton. And electrons know that they’re being observed when they’re forced to interact with protons, because their wave function changes. It’s horrifically complicated and I don’t know enough about quantum mechanics to really unpack it in detail. But basically, what it means is, simply observing something can change the appearance of how it is perceived. It can have an affect on outcomes. And I’m linking a pretty good, simplified article about this here. 

The second interpretation of this really odd image is a little easier to understand, and again relates to this “lake turning to ice impossibly fast-custard to hard rock” metaphor. So ages back, there was this Doctor Who episode (when David Tennant was the Doctor), called ‘Blink’. In that episode, they were these aliens appearing in the form of stone angel statues, called The Weeping Angels. If you get touched by a Weeping Angel, you get zapped back in time and the Angel feeds off all the energy you might have potentially lived in the present-day. They move impossibly fast. Like they can make their way from a garden into the kitchen within a blink. Here’s the snag: they only ever move when they’re not being watched. The minute you look at them, they turn to stone. They can’t even be seen looking at each other, if they are facing one another, they’ll never move again. 

I think about this episode a lot still, and whenever I watch it, it never fails to get my heart racing. But when I read “matter changes when it’s hit”, I was reminded of the clever, foolproof defence mechanism of the Weeping Angels, which renders them the loneliest creatures in the universe. There were parallels between this and the statement implied in the poem. Is it possible then that like the Weeping Angels, the agent’s movements are rendered undetectable when we try to watch them back? When we catch them in the act, say when our phone randomly opens up an app we closed, does the agent freeze? Or is it the reverse? And how lonely that must be. How alone the agent must feel. It was at this point I became more aware of how I was receiving the writing. When I thought about Doctor Who, and made comparisons from the bulk of my own references, I really tapped into the essence of the work, which is written so cleverly. 

Remember how I said earlier that, to understand what Charlotte’s getting at, you have to look within and draw upon your own experiences, in order to access the work? What I meant was, understanding the random collage of images requires understanding your own anxieties, about being watched all the time, reaching into your own pocket of knowledge, and relating all of it back to the work. Like how I drew upon my memory of Doctor Who. And it’s very much like social media, or Wikipedia. You’re constantly having to manage cookies or accept cookies, so you can continue using the programme. Likewise, you’re constantly forced to share more of yourself in order to access a level of understanding in Charlotte’s poetry. So for example, ‘my FBI agent takes me on a date’. This is Page 28. At this point, the gender pronoun of the agent has shifted. The agent is no longer “he”. “He” is now she. 

and decorates her hair with crane flies  prawn cocktail lips / when i said scare me she listened badly  [...]

[...] and I hate anything with a see-through body  plastic wings dancing no,  it’s the legs are wrong in the air like that  it’s the compartments, the exoskeleton  it’s that she doesn’t know how & she pries me open early  & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure at the cracking / she says i will like it 

that she has heard fear / makes us braver people in the end & she eats from within

You can feel the discomfort, the repulsion, in this poem so keenly. Sentences like “& she pries me open early // & she has teeth that she thinks give more pleasure // at the cracking / she says i will like it”, it’s so menacing. I could vividly picture the clacking of plastic wings, the sensation of sharp teeth, the cracking. It’s just horrible. And when you try to think about what a “date” is, and what that means when it’s with an FBI agent, you get something really odd, intimated by the gender shift of the agent to being “she”... When I read this transition, I saw it as an indication that ‘I’’s conscience had evolved. At some point, we become so self-aware of everything we say and do online, that we develop the objectivity like that of the agent. If I’m to assume that the ‘I’ is a she here, it’s arguable that and that the ‘I’ and ‘she’ in ‘my FBI agent takes me out on a date’, are the same entity. 

I think this poem implies that as we reveal more of ourselves online, the acuteness of our self-awareness intensifies. We become our own agents, we assimilate the role of our watchers and watch ourselves. We become transparent, as we study our profiles through our own focalisation. This, to my mind and my mother’s mind too, is the “exoskeleton” that Charlotte resents. It’s the imagery of self-consumption, the self-destruction in laying yourself bare to the world, where in turn it’s you that becomes the meal, it’s you who dates yourself, it’s you who tucks into yourself. We become indiscernible from watching and watched, and in these inexactitudes, we end up disorienting ourselves. We have to share so much in order to be able to “progress” or access sites or information we need. It’s parasitic. This is what Charlotte means by “she eats from within”. As though we’re the parasite and the host, we eat of ourselves. 

Other perplexing images: ‘my agent, a rational object / the same size as a mannequin’ (from ‘my FBI agent takes a holiday’) I found this image really wonderful and so apt in defining the agent’s agency... The mannequin is like, your anonymous blank slate. You change its clothes, it remains the same sculpture. It’s something you imprint, and it projects what it wears, how it wears it. The agent being depicted as a mannequin is again, another non-sequitur of a metaphor in this poem, but it makes absolute sense. The agent’s identity is subsumed in the person they surveillance. The agent is in a strange way, our personal twin, which is basically saying, we’re bonded. 

This symbiotic relationship is reflected on deeply throughout the work, oscillating between the way we are watched, how we watch, and how we watch ourselves. Take ‘my fbi agent doesn’t like to read’:

i read a lot of ebooks because i am always thinking  of him                           and his lack of access to an academic library  marxist monetary theory  kate millett’s sexual politics william morris biographies  [...]  i like to read through his eyes 

This is a profound image. As if the agent and the ‘I’ here are sat together. Whatever ‘I’ indulges in for reading pleasure, the agent indulges in also. Ultimately this is not a space that the agent is invading, when we’re aware we’re being observed. Like in those ‘fbi’ memes, we welcome the agent in, to laugh, to trust that everything, as uninnocent as it all is, is still ultimately innocent. No harm, no foul. So with that assurance, we make do with their elusive presence, content to let them read over our shoulders. 

One perplexion I do have about this work, and perhaps it’s an intentional move from Charlotte, is the inconsistency of grammar and capitalisation. Most of the poetry is written lowercase, it reads like the way we text. But every now and then there’s the odd full stop, or comma or semi-colon, that just doesn’t seem to sit right, and I wonder what the motivations are behind introducing punctuation at certain points. It’s something to think about when you’re reading the collection. Similarly with capitalisation, the book cover title is in lowercase “fbi” whereas all the poems are in the uppercase acronym: “FBI”. Funnily enough when you type ‘fbi’ into your phone, it will autocorrect it to uppercase. So that was an interesting distinction I found. Ultimately I don’t think this writing is yearning to read entirely like a text message, it is inviting punctuated sentences, grammar, clever choices in the positioning of semi-colons. But it’s not always clear why they appear within certain poems at particular points, and I question the impulse behind their inclusion. The form too, is fairly consistent, bar ‘my fbi agent talks me through my facebook ad settings’ on page 14, which really experiments with sentence length and the ‘/’:

i say: is this how you see me?  birthday in october / close friends of men with a birthday in 7-30 days / close friends of ex-pats / commuters / gmail users // 

i want to know about data in poetry when it’s bad data & i want to know about how you see me in these systems when they’re bad, i don’t mean morally, i mean shitty, incomplete, i mean you know too much and it’s all worth except. except for the ways in which it works for you. 

I perceived the ‘/’ here as not just a spacer. I think of it as an imitation of a navigation menu, the “clicking and loading” from one page of information to another. The writing itself also stretches right across the page, like it would across a computer screen. The best way to edit your Facebook ad settings is on a computer, not a smartphone device. And similar to Crispin Best, Charlotte’s line breaks often occur less than half way across the page of the book, imitating the dimensions of a phone screen, again. But in this poem, there’s more elongation, there’s more steps. For that reason, it really stands out and it’s also one of the more clogged pieces in terms of its references. The random assemblage of information pertaining to the ‘I’ and their profile, problematises the way information is harvested on social media. It’s loads of ubiquitous, vacuous crap which is all vested in the same person, but ultimately means very little. The only connection in having a birthday in October and being close friends with ex-pats is simply in the ‘I’, here. But there’s about a bajillion other people out there who could have the same thing in common. This poem is a criticism of the conjectures that the agent makes based off watching everything about us. What is the point in having all this crap on me? How boring. How confusing. 

I understand now why I lack conviction in a lot of my own thoughts about this collection, and it’s also why Charlotte Geater is incredibly talented. Everything in our world is open to reasonable doubt, even more so with technology. That same notion is integral to this collection’s thematics—we doubt who we are, we doubt what we do, we doubt what is around us and worst of all, we know that someone is recording those doubts and documenting them as evidence. The fact that Charlotte can recreate our digital anxieties, forcing us to think and overshare with ourselves so we can access an understanding, in the same way that the Internet does, that’s powerful. That is a technique. 

poems for my fbi agent articulates something much greater than ourselves, and yet we have the power to dispel of it whenever we want, collectively as a species or simply as individuals. Otherwise, morbid consequences follow (and are already a reality): ‘your coffin / is there / for the rest of your life’. This absolutism of our persona’s enduring presence that remains long after physical death is the ultimate artifice of reality, and immortality. We’re never truly dead and gone, we’re never really buried, when the evidence we lived is always there. 

It took me time to wrap my head around it, and tbh I don’t think I’ll ever totally wrap my head around everything, but I loved this collection, and I’m interested to see what Charlotte produces next. This is an incredible debut with an amazing press.

If you want to read some of these amazing poems in full, you can view them in some of Charlotte’s previous publications here, here and here. Or you could skip the bullshit and just buy this amazing work at Bad Betty Press, and follow Charlotte on Twitter. 

[lit--bitch]

On Tom Bland, ‘The Death of a Clown’ (2018) (NSFW, if you’re at work).

(Disclosure: I’m good friends with Tom Bland. We came to know each other after he published some of my work in his former online zine, Blue of Noon. I read parts of this collection in some of its earliest drafts. Whilst it might seem nepotistic (and a bit late in the day to talk about The Death of a Clown), I thought it would be good to kick off with a positive review about someone’s writing I really love. As for Bad Betty Press, it is ran by Amy Acre and Jake Wild Hall, both of whom I’ve met on a few occasions but don’t know them v well).

Tom told me in a text he sent me last summer: “I stole ‘the death of a clown’ from The Kinks, do love that song”. You can read the lyrics here. It also ought to be noted that Tom did actually practice as a clown for a while. As for the publishers, Bad Betty Press is small, new, and fantastic. I think they’re a breath of fresh air for contemporary literature in the UK, with a clear, unique identity and a really strong focus for what they’re looking for. They’ve published some amazing writers. 

This is a book of moodswings and contradictions. It’s a glimpse of humanity in all its filth, and it deserves recognition for the unflinching honesty with which it is written. 

The Death of a Clown oscillates between serious and unserious. It can be funny, and then perturbing, yet all the while in possession of a certain solemnity. To me, the book’s cover (designed by Amy Acre) is synonymous with the writing in that it embodies similar contradictions: there’s the comical illustration of a clown face with its clown-smile on a gravestone engraved ‘RIP’. Then there’s the title—this juxtaposition of death and clown—an explicit introduction to death of something born to be funny (supposedly). All of this is pegged by Bad Betty Press’s (current) statement livery: black background, white font(s). All these visual elements counteract each other, which is a cornerstone to this collection’s literary thematics. You wouldn’t think it when you pick up the book, but after you’ve read it, you find that contradiction is all part of the book’s nature; a performance which self-negates and wildy flagellates itself, over and over. The cover is a clue, a graphic segue for what you’ve not yet read, which is, (and I’m going to try and commit to the following description) a series of undulating, anecdotal thoughts as opposed to “poems”. And they waterfall as one great stream of consciousness. 

Amy told me masturbating was not the same as meditating. But the cult of masturbation had already found its way into … no one can make you come like yourself … a manifesto of poetic intent. Millions of potential lives wiped away in a tissue down the toilet drain.

There’s no other titles within this work but the book title. Or so I think. Tom doesn’t entitle; he emboldens the first lines, or sometimes the first couple of words in an opening sentence. The book’s pagination is the only indication of a separation, apart from that, I can’t always tell if this is indicating the start of a new thought or the end of an old one. But I guess that’s the point, Tom’s writing is in essence, thinking, and thoughts resist titles, of course they do. So to embolden is an intriguing choice, because it gives the great effect of writing eating itself from page to page. The title becomes indiscernible from the actual first line of the thought itself. 

Perhaps I’ve read into this too deeply but honestly, in any artistic practice, it is so difficult to articulate a body of work under a single header. Even ‘The Death of a Clown’ is both so vague and specific a title. Every thought in this collection considers and recalls so much, so Tom just doesn’t do the thing of entitling every piece. I found that refreshing; we live in a world where everything yearns after a name, and a lot of the time we’re compelled to entitle our work, ourselves, our things, as if that would somehow give us clarity or meaning. But as you’ll read, Tom intimates that a lot of the time, there is little clarity to our thoughts, our perceptions, to anything. It’s only when dragged to the most severe and deafening of human experiences do we then, occasionally, achieve the briefest moment of mental clarity. 

my adrenaline induced out of body looking back at my pulsating limbs; that self-aware speck

jittering or jumping between the two, like being dead/born once again.

Ranting so fast all my words blurred into rapid hand gestures, the very shapes of my early tongue-tied jabbering.

Something I love about The Death of a Clown is the self-awareness of the writing, which I think is inherent in “writing which appears as stream of consciousness”. I think it’s further developed by the scrupulously researched references to things which have indelibly influenced or affected the ‘I’ here. It’s so telling of a person in what they choose to reference, it intimates what piques their interest, their attention. The thing I find interesting about Tom’s references however is the way they’re presented as odd dualisms. There’s Sufism and then The Satanic Bible. Then there’s Jesus and Ted Bundy. There’s Taylor Swift, Edward Erdinger and the disintegrating self, then there’s Fuz Sxx (a sex shop in London) and the act of public masturbation. You would think these figures, beliefs and concepts oppose each other, but when they collide within the same piece, it seems that they elicit the same emotional responses and memories. These things don’t really so much oppose each other, but rather they’re of each other. 

Bob Rogers always began the Sufi circle with, ‘The goal here is                                to                   create and destroy the idols of the self,’ then he glared at me,
 ‘but this is not an apocalyptic vision.’ At first, this unnerved me, but quickly, it started to annoy me, so much so, I had printed on             pink badges, a feminine figure and the words,                   LIFE IS DEATH. I gave the badges              out to the group to their discomfort and/or amusement. He asked me to leave. He said, ‘Sufism isn’t               about death but a new beginning.’ 

I also think these references signal personal perceptions and therefore, options. The array of religions, religious figures, celebrities and serial killers, mentioned in The Death of a Clown, is demonstrative of the many lifestyle choices, beliefs, idols, values we have to choose from. As we investigate through this pile, we eventually come to identify with a select few, most of which resonate in our personal experiences. In one piece, Tom writes: ‘Michelle called pain (her pain) the sun god Ra. / Ra equalled pathos. [...] I remained still, outside on my steps, looking up at the moon. / Sometimes I call my pain Hekate.’ Lines like these underpin the core of this work, which is that everybody’s perception is their own perception. Their choice in what to experience, believe and feel is entirely their responsibility. It’s a bit of a tangent but I’m reminded of that scene in Rick and Morty, the ‘Pickle Rick’ episode from Season 3 where the therapist says to Rick, ‘You are the master of your own universe [...] Each of us gets to choose.’

Living is in essence a kind of performance. Our choreography is sculpted by what we read, believe, consider and feel. It can be a laugh, but ultimately, we’re all still fools. Hence the impetus for the clown’s presence in this collection, or the part of us which acts the clown. In The Death of a Clown, choreography comes through performing in drag, bending sexualities, bending observations, defining fetishisms, reading religion and murder, thinking about religion and murder. The fact that all these things are being mentioned in the work, suggests the profound impact and lasting effects they imprint upon the ‘I’ of this work, the clown’s psychology, who laughs more than ever, and less than ever. 

[...] I

waxed my body, splattering body paints, wearing faux- leather corsets, see-through knickers, and PVC cowboy boots. It was and wasn’t fetishism; it was and wasn’t sexuality; it was and wasn’t perversion; first was the vision, the one in my head, the one I saw across my body, my body morphing into my androgynous Satanic self.

The collection is ravaged by sex, the frenzy of drug-stuffed London, the English sort of realism found in onion sauce, or ‘Hertfordshire surrounded by trees and red noses’ (not red roses), and more pertinently, the exhaustive performance of inhabiting these things, being these things. For me, I feel like these references function as both containers and artefacts to this ‘human-ness’ Tom is unpacking and reconstituting, and how they’re instrumental in self-alienation but also help with self-identity. It’s a bit, “the school of life” thing; whether it’s erotic asphyxiation, or racking up lines of ketamine before doing a live performance, it seems that these various extremities are an education in what it means to be truly vulnerable, and therefore in being able to call ourselves human. 

And yet at the crux of each “poem” lies the ultimate therapy to all of this, which is the safe insecurity in knowing that we are all dying. And what is more human than our conscious attempt in knowing and embracing that? 

[…] ‘Some
 people think the clown is a performance I put on and take off, but no, I must be a clown 
at all times. I can’t stand slipping back 
 into that thing...’

HUMAN.

I read a beautiful review from R J Dent on The Death of a Clown where he noted, ‘Tom Bland lists some of the stimulants and depressants that humans use to dull their awareness of their own mortality: acid, coke, speed, ketamine, cigs, Weston’s Old Rosie cider, and brandy.’ This was the only point I felt inclined to disagree. I don’t think this is 100% what Tom is doing, I don’t agree that it’s a form of listing per se, and I don’t think that we should necessarily believe that the mere function of these substances, in the collection’s case, is a human’s way of dulling the knowing surrounding the inevitability of death. Rather, they’re chunks of detail, which amplify and exaggerate that knowing, rendering the user as used… I mean this as in, it’s not that they’re taking drugs. Perhaps, it’s the drugs are taking them. And in these delicious, and often arduous experiences, a delightful indifference about life and death occurs, where user and substance are locked in mutual indulgence. Or at least, that’s my interpretation of it. I’m just not convinced the clown is resisting death here. I think the clown, or the part of us which acts the clown, has already died and sometimes I find the writing works not just as thought, but as a strange eulogy, sometimes even self-inflicted therapy. I’m still guessing.

About a year ago, I found myself snorting lines of coke, but I hated doing it with other people, only alone. Blue in the face. Breathing blue. Heart racing. Near heart attack. Was this orgasm? Was I even hard?

I loved the intensity of being on my own—

It is easier to attribute this writing, as I’ve already stated, as being a series of ‘thoughts’. Where The Death of a Clown may, in form, resemble poetry, ultimately this isn’t poetry. It defies category. Since I started this review, I’ve felt increasingly perplexed, in that the more I attempt to ascertain what kind of writing this is, the more indecipherable it becomes. 

It’s for this reason that The Death of a Clown is unabashedly weird and it kind of leaves you feeling disoriented. To me, this work is like an endless cycle of waking up with a hangover/comedown and going to the next party. It sticks to the skin like a latex suit. It’s the endless fixing and wiping away of makeup. It ruminates on itself and begs not to enquire further, and then does it anyway. It has both sharp and curved edges. It is literal, it doesn’t sugarcoat or tease, it doesn’t fuck with unnecessary, flowery metaphor or imagery (unlike this review lol). It doesn’t cater to you or pander. It is a deeply cutting exchange with oneself—which makes it all the more deliciously complicated. And I’ll leave you with one of my fav bits: 

[…] I stood perfectly still,   announcing the words I imagined scribbling  onto an A3 cardboard sheet, 

‘Do they really see (in the white of the eye) the unveiling of the whole history of a life?’ 

If you’d like to buy The Death of a Clown, you can buy it here. In addition to this, you can find out more about Tom through his zine, Spontaneous Poetics.

[lit--bitch]

Tom Bland, ‘The Death of a Clown’, UPCOMING REVIEW.