‘Yuck’, Said The Goldfish

Welcome to the Goldfish Bowl

You have no rights here

No training

You are, in essence, fucked

But now you’ve fallen in

You’re public property too:

God forbid you mature…god forbid you don’t

If you change you’re going mad

If you don’t change you were already mad

You must be nauseatingly nice

No matter how many people shit on your shoes,

No matter how perilous your life, your health, the world –

Every word and expression will be taken out of context,

Distilled into a drug

And railed by the masses

Eternally salivating over their next hit of Better Than Yow, or, I ALWAYS KNEW THEY WOZ SCUM!

Endless toxiforums crammed with bile and crowing and burning, psychotic, obsessive hate…

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‘Regard art critics as useless and dangerous’

Regard cupcake people as snakes in grass

Like walking toenails covered in strawberries,

A bile-sac ever-ready to burst

Sharpening its claws beneath the frills of its skirts

I nearly died to burn you to the ground…

But no one has the freedom to say what they want –

Populism is not just a rampaging political idiocy

It is a mass idiocy now

Compliance will be forced

Then forced smiles will be criticised, for looking fake

(“Can we not botox them into pleasant submission?

Can we not carve a Chelsea smile into their cheeks

So they grin while they munch our shit?”

Tweet tweet:

The Human Centipede is your daily life)

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Everyone must think the same way

There must be no diversity of human experience

Everything must be relatable

Everyone in their camps

Nothing must be shared

There can be no lending of sugar to a neighbour 

Lest it was appropriated sugar

Until

Minority businesses need to thrive

Yet cannot sell to other cultures

Because of this circlejerk of white faces

White voices riding the high of Being Right, without ever asking a minority member what they think,

What they need

Just nodding, nodding, censoring, nodding

Nothing is subjective, no thought is your own – everything must be pre-agreed

Taste is policed

Taste must be tasteful, by agreement of the High Council of the Ever-Throttling Noose

The dullardry of 1970s London high rise flats

Everything must look the same

Inside our brains

Until in the decades that follow,

People look back, realise how piss-eyed miserable the whole world looked

How stale, how uniform,

Only now that’s your brain:

2040 will be Gattaca or a rainbow explosion

Generation Z will be abhorred by their children

Who can rebel in any wealth of beautiful, or abhorrent ways

(The path of least resistance is usually abhorrence)

Meanwhile,

Strange people find endless entertainment in picking apart every word of an online stranger

Blind solely to the words that matter

Fanfic was its own weird era – now they dissect the living

Vivisection of the soul, and

My soul is public property

I don’t recall selling it

But I feel the footprints as strangers trample its length and breadth, dropping popcorn kernels, criticising in broad yankee tones, too thin, too fat, too triggering, too saccharine, too mad, munchmunchchewchew more popcorn ground into the fabric of my soul by staring, boggle-eyed strangers

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Davie Bowie said goodbye to me, in a dream

Only person with the courtesy to bother –

Was he reclaiming all the splinters of his soul?

.

You can be rich, or you can be liked –

Attempting to be liked in a reign of social populism is folly;

‘Arsehole’ is the smartest career move

Better for your blood pressure

Than snipping, slicing, excising pieces of yourself

Until you fit inside that ever-shrinking palatable box

With your Chelsea grin,

And shit on your chin

And your scent of nothing – the absence of personality, the abyss of joy;

That’s ok – you’re a decoration, not a person, overstuff your lips – that’s the edge now, as far towards real or controversial as you may step

And that Chelsea grin, to make you seem pleasant –

For you must. Always – you must.

No matter how many people shit on your shoes

You must wish them a lovely day

Like an American sales rep,

Going home to blow his own brains out.