MANCHESTER
Boom.
I siphoned off the sound of the 20th century
Manchester Market Street Bomb, and then I
Forced it, at pressure, through the local beer.

Even now the Manky burp
Is aural shrapnel. My belief is
Every noise is sucked from the Big Bang
And dance is the body’s formalised
Response to an explosion.
Manchester Car Bomb burps
Give the clubbers their moves,
They get them grooving.

I am a ligger,
whisper carrying an echo,
I was born with a fault line,
blame it on junking genetics,
on the flexible roaming liqui-fluxing
of my whack smash chromosomal cluster,
because of a victimised meiosis, my
throat is glyphed, I can only speak in
mono, the skimmed cadence feeds the
left ear of my listener.

Your right ear denies me. I’m not even
Whitenoise there.
I’m the unbuffered blank
nil.

So listen half-headedly.
Victoria Station is a Victorian Station.
At night the electric lights smear
the floor with vernix.

The laboratory-bright cubicle of its photobooth
is entered by drawing back a pleated demi-curtain.
This is clipped to a rail by equidistant rings
piercing the uppermost hem.
The holes are sealed by steel rings
chamfered into the cloth to prevent fraying
and tearing. I nick these fusty, smell-absorbing
curtains to make gymslips for Manchester’s
expanding ‘school disco’ market.

Curtains.
There’s a notch in the rail that you lift clear.
It’s hinged and the cloth ferries its own weight
into the bag. Anybody asks – some do, despite
my horror-film timing –
I say it’s down for dry cleaning.

The disco schoolgirls’ hats
are blocked on a Victorian funerary bust
nicked from Higher Moston cemetery
and fetched home on the pillion of my quadbike
where I’d strapped and helmeted her
like a living stump. The felt is
stripped from vintage church hall
whist tables.

My business also involves drive by
lassoing, single-hand to the grip,
feeding a line through my free fingers,
tying the lariat, winding it
above my head where physics make it
spin and fill like a tornado’s trouser belt.
I garrote the epiglottis in mid gig,
junking it forwards and snapping the
larynx from its nix. I do it in the last
slew of a second so I go
mostly unnoticed.

My victim’s voice feels like a throat
stacked with sucked liquorice laces.
‘Speak squeak!’ I shout and rev away.

My next venture is fleshing itself. I
know a mountaineering hardware outlet
where I can bulk buy the apparatus
that pins climber to pinnacle
and locks them there.
I’m going to pay a space agency
to fit the rocks in an asteroid belt
with karabiners and pitons.
I’ll personally attach Mancunian men
to the asteroids' undersides
Returning to collect them in my module
on their completion of a considerable stretch
by which time
they will be acclimatized to mute.

That’s after I’ve landed an onion smell --
call it the Manchester Flag --
on the moon.

The Ligger goes with the sugar-dusted skinheads... part of the same pool of thought.

Thanks, Sophie. Both ways are up.