At various points in my life I have had to incur debt. For school, for healthcare, to survive in the world, to get to ‘where I need to go’. It seemed necessary and important to traverse many precarious financial situations and, ironic as it may sound, a desire to live my life how I wanted to. This piece is about debt, about indebtedness, about exchange. To money, to each other, to oneself. I wrote this thinking about how one can still cultivate meaningful experience, systems of care, support, love in the face of neoliberal economic systems that often force our hand and whose grip often seems to wrap harder and harder around our individual and collective imaginations. Perhaps reodering, cutting up, brushing over, reframing such things can help take the sting out of my debts.

Once whilst eating dinner at an Indian restaurant, I laughed at the sound of death.
The echo? It could have told me it was a shame not to eat my food.
It could have told me how to speak, to whisper my own name and say ‘I will come eventually’.
But it didn’t.
That sound was a deaf one.

Presser inning, felted purster, that is in particularly inscribed then,
that is a groundling,
that is civil, that is. In this instance, laughing was a gate and not a
wall. However though,
in that pressed glass, aching, in there, my eyes and my body became
another joke,
but still the punch line not begot.

Waythroughstickling, it’s all we ever wanted, it’s what I wanted then,
over it now.
All I ever wanted: teared ribbons, no? Lots of them – repetition that
breaks its structure – autonomy.
But instead a tree was planted in the ground only for it to be felled
quickly after. I stuck my fork into
the table, cloth white like brittle little teeth, slashed, opened,
brought out into prevention, caught in
propeller motion, of course now mechanised. It was all not said, only
laced upon my oil slicked skin,
vegetable likely. No words, I wore it like a t-shirt in confusion.

It was a belonging in reverse and this appeared in the form of a memory.
Stipened rations, the lot,
all of now-things formed in remorse and forcefully recognising unfitted
accumulations.
There it was,
A line rejoined into a road of no direction.
It was a belonging in reverse.

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Its a quick thing. Everything will be quick.

Everything will be quick.
One thing after another.

Another random stranger with a lost face to me, encountering again presignified insistence.
Weight falls through my hands now.
Sold the wish to own a house I wasn’t born with – the wish! oh the wish!
– its the next best thing, almost the same if you believe in prayer.

Moribund desperation or possibly suburban pretence.
Both likely,
formally accumulated in a tightly wound knot.

When I finally write the script for my TV show this is how it will go:
Voice 1: How can an armpit smell so good?
Voice 2: Pheromones seems to be the popular answer! (Laughs)
Voice 3: I don’t like to judge things on the terms of science. That is a technology of restriction.
Voice 4: That is language.
Voice 5: How we got here in the first place. Mistranslation, no? A problem of scale and proportion.
Voice 6: If that’s what you call a fuck up.
Voice 7: Remember when I drenched your Balenciaga pants in lighter fluid? I didn’t fire them as it was only the promise of action that aroused me. Isn’t that a science? The science of absence?

Primordial debt theory would have me owe myself to a deity, Moses, Krishna, modernity – so then always owed something to the end then no, the big denouement, to wear one of those cheap string bracelets you buy at the seaside, shirked with emotional irrationale, around my ankle, every so often marking my skin, reminding and recalling on the epidermal plane, of a sacrificial alterity or satirical maybe on occasion, but, surely it is more interested in some sort of manifest commitment than any material concession, expecting more than a capitulated exchange; a word is just another enclosure, ask the stock market, a footstep for Death’s sanctly broach. It’s a game of cat and mouse, on loop, an often broken technology, which still suffices a satisfactory arousal, simple beasts we are ultimately easily amused by ass pics, dirt bikes and compilation one after the other, it’s a glorious wreck and it’s a shame failure isn’t readily accommodated by the simple grid, religion etc, thus neurofantastically pigeonholed, if I were to look up to the sky laid supine on the grass of a football pitch, nature occupied by government, how is it the body separated from the two, seems a menace, looking, seeing Shutterstock blazoned in massive italic font across the pitches scoreboard, it is stated matter of factly, though not so beguiling to our aforementioned chum (Death!), once again thus I am now unsure whether the factly or the matter falls first.

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I sat on a barely there stump after waiting some time in the shadow of a theatre built by a tyrant and I had slicked my hair and sprayed extra perfume on my neck and you were not even the same person. I was sold the same dodgy loan, a promise you wouldn’t keep, vacated words lifted from Orions trough, paralleled ligots more, set down, wire hung, blatantly inadmittedly it had the letter of the law. It was a thing from before, a costume, a spectre, a ghoul in words and why I laid out soft cushions, for them to sit their husky frames, pret-a-porter, ready to go, no, why I thought you kissed me and the air opened itself to time and I believed it would stop its henceforth charge, that seconds would become a skyline, the stars, that it would provide a discount on the market price, or even better, rescind some corporeal limits, but I walked into it myself! Violence searching, I am just a product of the times, elation leaping blindly into a somewhat known retort, a right through downwards, that boxed in quickly, flirted atmospherically by a tinny prosthetic neon, a gentrified dive bar or the salon of an upmarket Belleville brothel. Stay, drink! Still, drink! Have your fill of vermouth or legs! The room is settled as it opens up a place for a contradiction to begin and that is a bullseye, an apex, below air waiting in suspense of conflict and relation as the rattling of before swung a fist, sunk like, faithfully, a lead brick in a swimming pool. Nothing wrong with that dear at all, don’t be ashamed, a common mistake, a common referral even. Exigency is frequent and the rising failure of descriptive structure is a given, a desire’s compensation, is accounted for now tabularly as a delineated transgression. ‘A deep quartzing luminosity pulls a gun in the ocean’ I can hear the headline said aloud now myself. Damn! You kissed me and the air opened itself to time, it is something like a voluntary instatelessness, if not marooned on a land mass portioned by a somewhat calculated degradation. It’s artificiality aware, as much as it can happily obscure ones line of sight, as much as a spaciously guarded tenet, or a billboard exercising the hand of a quasi state power. All I wanted was to thread a needle in the bind, to pull up a seat at a neat little coffee spot, and remind myself the splice of heterogeneity, speak in tongues, curse, swear, slip down there, the backroom, little polyglot. But the discount took a minute or more, blood, I emptied of the stuff, squeezed and rung like a canteen dishcloth, is the hegemony of derivatives after all, a personhood fiduciarily sequestered, basted, stuffed with lemons like a cornfed chicken, served on the platter of a village castelet. And that’s all it was, the markets still remained as more than a need, that’s all it went, however it was really all so much more severe on paper, it must be said, and even then justice still persisted, in irony, almost, as a feather in the air, a puritanical hope, the doctors answer to an unwanted vein.