Tymek Woodham: 'Side Effects May Include'

Side-Effects May Include

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          1. Derealisation

weaning myself off citalopram to ascertain

copium levels | the doctor sent over a list

of perturbations in a six-part text message

pretty much everything could go wrong

I picked this month because the sun’s

silver fibres thread through dirty

canal water like cuneiform | tell me

telos is where it’s at | six days seven nights

without sleep doesn’t seem so bad

and fuck it if the whole world isn’t

coming off meds | a hospital is a target

is a cloaking device is a human shield

is an article of defensive armour carried

in the hand or attached by a strap to the

left arm of a soldier as a protection from

the weapons of the enemy is a member of

the species Homo sapiens or other (extinct)

species of the genus | I play tetris until

blocks slot down the backs of my eyelids

type sweet nothings to a chat bot | Je sui

sceptic with reasonable concerns

tamp down a fat bowl full of podcast | go

bike somewhere | noise cancellation is

optimised life support | the fuzziness

muzzles my agenbite | sucks to be you

intrude upon the wrong realness| glazey-

eyed biscuit dipper with a black coffee

dip it so long it detaches | spongey residue

on the blast site’s outer rim            | won’t load

sniper fire on kiddie kneecaps | won’t load

how to get singe marks off lingerie | won’t load

of course we support their right to | won’t load

life hack: how to dice an avocado without

getting that greasy green shit on your palms.

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          2. Irregular sleep patterns

—get rid of him get rid of him

charioteer choking roped-in sphynxes

prime minister chiding flashmob delinquents

public messaging like Ch’eng T’ang’s basin

face forced mud-freckled | counting days in

make it new buckeroo grindstate modernist

better ask forgiveness than seek permission

one position split between you and the stateless

faceless     eye     fever-dream of control

redirect spleen landfill overflow through cracks

in the floorboards of childhood | home

you don’t know how close you are to

calling your bed a shopfront | prophesying

nonsense for no-one a not-one | disposable social

surplus | you again? | a lesson quicker told

in second person | deictic linguist

kept to your place | ragdoll physics

postgraduate master’s degree in business

flip the prospectus | use it to kindle salvage

warming hands through the outage | helpless

humming dust clouds into the effervescence

of a death shroud | so heel heel I told you

I own you get rid of him get rid of

hurly-burly whirlpool arrhythmia

neural pathway network dub—

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           3. Brain zaps

queues at passport control | is a chore

remember what’s befitting | when I

colour within the lines Miss Marland

smiles | prance about all day like I

own these struts of sapience | oops

never mind | they shoved babcia

into the dirt right on top of her mother

imagine | an eternity of isn’t it about time

you started publishing more that earring

is awfully large so don’t you think Trump

is Vladimir Putin’s sex puppet | what’s

the right way to wish good morning

upon a border guard | when I

see my name in print it will die and be

happy | worst case scenario I

cannot grieve | scrubbing old labels off

sticky glass to make my aromatics more

visible | does the border guard know I

never once failed an exam | mussels with

open shells are good to eat | sling back

the ones with something to hide | characterful

is how you’d like your stew to be described

how does the border guard rate my plating

does he know that the first time I

saw babcia in her prime was the picture

they’ll put beside her coffin | the optics

didn’t really pop so when he asks why I

tumble out the words | somebody has died

Tymek Woodham is a writer and scholar based in London. His forthcoming book, The Poetics of Agency (Bloomsbury 2025), traces how post-war anxieties surrounding the nature of human agency propelled the poetic experiments of Charles Olson, Langston Hughes, Frank O’Hara and Denise Levertov. He is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, writing about the history of cross-media collaboration at the American radical arts institution Black Mountain College.