Match My Freak by Fran Lock

i gussied my lungs for u, i lowered myself through an amulet’s eye into the hotel hot-tub

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Match My Freak

by Fran Lock

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says the song. and here, amidst this counterfeit of family, by détournement and fiat, i declare myself legally dead, reduce my name to a somnolent noun, yr mouth mauling the pale inordinate freak of it. kick in yr head, dig in the rubble, excavate an alibi. i wonder what it means, the body: this ecstasy of last resort. i gussied my lungs for u, i lowered myself through an amulet’s eye into the hotel hot-tub, i hung my arms about yr neck in aggravated garlands, i staggered my slutdrop in matalan heels like: am i fun enough yet? tinashe has been nasty. nastiness accumulates inside the hot thrust of her work-ethic. her scuffed thighs part to reveal a genuine hand-tooled calfskin wallet. sex has been thoroughly costed. sex has been reduced to clear, its belly yellowly labelled. which is not really nasty at all. i am the outsized spider in its bandolier of boiling eyes mantling out of the plughole nasty. the jaundiced rejoinder, litany of slits, formidable imposter, medea roided out and raging into the backlash. nasty like bin day in tower hamlets at the height of summer, and nobody wants to fuck that thought. match my freak, says the song. youth was a misfit’s grift, the sky inside my silence knocking to get in, scratching to get out. a girl is full: not of rooms, but of corridors. not of doorways, but of arches. i was sewn into my own breath. pleural residues, aspartame and abscess. sewn inside a hacking cough, a scrupulous refusal of joy. when i was nasty, i flicked a lighted splint into a hood and i climbed the blaze as the blaze also climbed. ben howes with second degree burns. when i was nasty, i was the cobweb part of archway, i was the cobweb part of cunt, strung across a gothic tear in any given window, in any given wall. i was the nemesis of frenzy, friendzone, yr frenzied nemesis. there were pillowy divas, a woman dragging her knuckles through a cupcake, women writhing in the earworm of availability. or there was us. we were nasty like the land, colonized by lichens, haunted by flowers, a flower defrocked, its counsel of collapses, the politely stricken lily, the perforated hide of a moulting rose. match my freak, says the song. in the video, tinashe spasms and thrashes. in the dust like a landed salmon. at the feet of a man. who stands over her. as if he’s about to –  unzip himself. and piss. tell me again about expressing my feminine sexual power. go on. i dare u. and here we are, as if love were a version of nandos. my body is rolled in desire like a piece of breaded chicken. i am whatever sticks to me: yr darling logic, the imprint of police, anything tasteful and fake, preening and cheesy, an idol of cheap luminosity. a girl. what would it mean to meet myself half-way? to meet pleasure’s reprieve in a mouth, a mind, a body not my own? to be matched – a perfection so extravagant that it becomes perversity. extravagance a trapdoor to some ecstatic country where devastation is not defeat. give nasty its grandeur. a monster just like me.

First published in ONLY POEMS (December 2024)