Will Fleming: Two Poems

life thou art a great command

how did the rump die
has dust changed
            is dust different

maybe the world’s just
peachy
lust after her stretched middle

bike
                         she
            fat
monkey  +

i / can take
his eyes
            my diabetes

wood pigeons scavenging in the guts of
an opel astra carwreck

in this household every day
is national poetry day if
you’re quixotic enough, Father Leavis

the vermin got all the choicest nuts again roundly
saddled with silent ASBOs

red on the weekends
it's 11am on sunday
i’m starting work and somewhere
someone is beginning inevitably
his valiant
                karl marx
                           walking tour

grandpa keeps chipping his teeth
on the Ai Weiwei Unilever Series Sunflower Seeds (2010)
does that make him a bigot
or this
sexy

arteries clogged with lime bikes
imagine responding to a question about
the perpetration of war crimes with the verbal tic
‘so…’

this is my polemic about
HypeBeast ruffage
fibre junky
jordan peterson charcuterie board

imagine being this
gaslit cuckolded
by your own representative trade union your
own democratically elected government your
own beloved sugar dad

hear me out
the strike weapon of mass destruction
explosive device improv night

indestructible plush toy
what does a
             freud
woman want anyway? how big
the big bomb?

deep down we’re really all
the same all the way through
except for my guy
                                             seagull with the FitBit

my urinal shy
            toxic trait

—three young men reenact the allegory
of the long spoons—

congratulations young boozer
              where are the wives

a hopeful report on masculinity from the penal colony

is baby
all bone?

the book of love


a fifteen day junket around
the promenade of dreams

this is just the poem to give your sister—
if she’s a loud, dirty, boozy girl

greggs pastie and foul snail
just as easily a dead man’s rice
as mine own

losing, endlessly,
the In Our Time drinking
game
         forwarding mum meme

seeing all my dear english friends affronted by
the wexford coke trawler scuttle
            turning down the Saudi fringe fest

which is chicer: personal or societal crisis
the split ‘I’ or the fractured ‘we’

not a wall in town against which
to hoist my petard
turns out an XL bully won’t maul you if
you
wear 

             the poppy

                                    boldly

just as easily a deadman

there might well be a way to type the
classic shrug emoji in two seconds flat
but well

they’re making bagpipes without
the bags nowadays/

they’re bombing fuck out of hospitals
so

\_(ツ)_/

still waiting to
be fairly
recorded in the book of love

recount the tale of the archive
restoration project again,
like a bedtime story,
on the superhighway of dreams and
multidirectional service stations
          of dreams

my brother in
HotWheels

Happy Birthday, Peanuts!

Will Fleming is a poet and Teaching Fellow in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin. He completed his PhD on Irish experimental poetry and economics at UCL in 2023. His poetry is published (or forthcoming) in The Stinging Fly, The Stony Thursday Book, .pdf, Gorse, Icarus and elsewhere.