The expanded Wembley Stadium is a 10 billion year Mahayuga
erecting its stature on congregations of moody builders.
At the beginning of Kali Yuga is a simulational US Navy
ocean contained within Wembley’s bowl,
filled up with floating coffins,
the coffins a Sri Lankan dowry for a bride
coming from the East Stand right corner
flag to the left West Stand corner flag
on a golden gondola with
her parents to be her husband’s slaves.
Steady locomotion through the choppy seas, propelling well, like this bull of
dharma had not been hobbled to one leg.
Like blanche young men, the delicious creatures, especially edible when half-dangling in
sunlight,
may I add fucking fatally when
their mounted buttocks are cast in skin-destroying sunshine, who once arrayed themselves
in anything but garrotting machines.
They are on gondolas too in the rippling hub
of Wembley, the ocean at the centre of the world.
While joining to other pedal boats where iron-man-level cyclists tighten their marlines.
Every gondola bears a dragon-shaped prow, in sleeting
rain which often besets the killing field construction site,
it can strangely feel like real fire is breathed. And so the subcontinent meets
the whitest spray, an umbrella for rain
for those from Colombo and one
for sun from the boaters who love their bodies.
But don’t think this red planet of seats, bowl and all,
this pulpit, can allow you to forsake what we all know.
That every new invention is rejected out of your mind.
That you make the notion of man intelligence,
Homo sapiens, feel like it’s ran its day, that
there never was an original thought
and now doubly there are none left.
Don’t think this pulpit of makeshift mariners
come to pay their fishing licenses for the lane
at Wembley, represent overshoes
for your brain leaking of thoughts.
And don’t forsake, don’t go, don’t forsake in tow with them, the bottomless resellers.
Don’t unhook your wire mesh from the flesh of community,
having snuck it through the chest, down and lodged it into the bowels,
coat-hangering it, only to pick up and leave.
Jonathan Meades, God, is cut above the bowl of Wembley,
with only his shoulders, neck and face.
Dark glasses, heavy entertainment, no pander.
Wembley’s breeze collides with his face,
the slanted side of which is a church roof
and he is lined with sandbags and
his face has been so since LSD as a teenager.
Meades' rolling glass eyes under his Blues Brother's
aviators cast over the entire country.
His peripheral is beaching whales from the Bay of Biscay,
an undertaker with a coffin on his back in Essex,
walking ride and furrow, land bitten holes into,
no body in the casket, used once for an especially
esteemed slave, but an arched sword.
He carries it on that cache of cliches of a county,
the loadsamoney plumber unscrewing a Victorian pipe
in Wimbledon and flooding someone's carpet
with turds in Hackney, the undertaker walks
to a shallow sandbank and cuts open the whale.
Flensing it, pouring out so much, such heavy
anatomy as to drown in the accumulation
of low-tide sandbank stacked on top of blood,
so much guilty blood and gore until inarticulacy.
All to find a crown it swallowed owed
to a Hindic husband. Meades speaks in a vocoder
to boycott his own voice for a prophetic robot one,
looping it over itself. Like the sun, like his eye
studios concealed by glasses, he oscillates to the
rear of Wembley looking upon the unzipped parts.
The parts toppled and hardly worked upon.
These parts are dental records.
Or darts that have torn the building to look like teeth.
There is no solidity unlike in Coggeshall Abbey
that Meades stands in front of, relating its
Teutonic, folkish quality that is the real
architecture of Nazi Germany.
If the sun still touches you, you in the boat
this morning, your throat in a pulley,
if you cannot preserve your flesh in baby oil,
your teeth will remain for imaging.
And you, girl, you remain in the Baltic Sea
region of Wembley's world ocean,
your father enduring the gulls with his
magazine-gloss flesh.
He was a bear fur mercantilist,
now he's laid out, prostrated as gift exchange.
Never thought he could fall,
but there was a greed that out-passed his.
Your daughter's feminist, blameless separatism
could fall, could fall just as well.
You remove it with a magnet pressed to her cranium,
and use odontology to dispute it ever was. Meades closes out on
a mocking African American Vernacular,
then lies on the grass with ankles crossed
like Shelley.
Tempest Miller’s work has appeared in Swamp Pink, A Thin Slice of Anxiety, BULL, Blood+Honey, The Gorko Gazette, and God’s Cruel Joke. He is the author of the poetry collections YOUR SON WILL BE A MURDERED POOFTER, Destroy Dennis Cooper, and England 2K State Insekt.