BRITNEY SPEARS

Nobody gets to wrap me in their manly arms and drain those fantasies it took years of abject

poisoned intimacies to colour in completely.

The stairs are steep when you forget how to walk, friends, and it’s no joke at all when the entire

language slides off the counter and splatters on the floor.

If I can recite chapter and verse from the apocrypha it’s only to prove that my mouth still functions

when I force it to open.

It’s a rare and sacred ritual to pass from legend to perpetual joke for the gods of light

entertaintment. But performances always end in someone getting sacrificed.

And that’s why I live under so many false names that by now I’ve forgotten the one they tell me

was given to me at birth...

Or maybe it’s just summer that turns my head completely and wraps my desires around the twist

until my armature is melted by the urge to run fast on a busy road.

JANICE DICKENSON

Nearly midnight which means there’s just time for one last cataclysm...

Today is all delusions of harmony - the sudden appearance of multiple,

beauteous arms. I will be a whole entire goddess

by the time they‘ve built me back to perfection with spit and soylent,

so nevermind the salad days we all remember best

with our heads chilled perfectly against a toilet bowl,

I’ll wear my age disgracefully and eat my lovers like pages from the Song of Songs.

If there’s one takeaway I’d like to leave

it is this: dialectics

are monstrous at the best of times

and you get kissed quicker sucking blood through a straw.

Love me love me I am an idol, but if you can’t manage that

let me kick your teeth in and walk

over your loosened lips on the path to enlightenment.

Oh let’s not be flippant before we go our separate ways.

Infamy runs through us, makes us, turns us round

and round in thrall with our nemeses.

It’s what passes for comedy when the gods have all

booked permanent holidays on senior cruises

with Mandy on repeat and dementia tablets crushed up

for snorting at the captain’s table.

Is it all just a matter of horror, abjection and blight? Not yet – not yet. Suck it up sweetheart, we‘ll

carry each other in love love love before we die out of spite.