Knap Poem by Alexander Hawkins

Solemn manoeuvring toward anticlimax.
It's closer than they think. Along the way fantastical drama
from outstanding outsiders will, with partisan thudding,
encourage great mayhem, rendering queasy quotation marks
and some suggestively pocked sepulchral squish.
Nestled in gnarly neighbourhoods, we gag through dripping nasalplasm,
where between swirls we see supposed mess.
This is the country that can do no wrong.
This plethora of different names for the same mistakes
only serves to highlight misanthropy.
It's very much a giddy gaggle, an unripe coven
that congregates between calcium ridges
and confessionally cedes the not so gradual decline
of verbose otherworldliness. Such is the lazy clamour
for crowd gazing that the chill rattle of sparking rails
fails to stir this reclusive committee - a word where
alphabetical doppelgängers dwell crowded
together and shrouded in pessimistic murmurings.
It's easy to forget where we were then.
Conversely, it's easier to see where we are going now,
succumbed to the moribund.