Poetry by Nicks Walker

                  ​Torsten Behrens CC


​

All The Way Down

I am nothing 

I am my hands 

I am my mouth 

I am being raped

I am the collision of bodies and dark-white behind eyes

I am only existent in this precise moment 

I only exist in this precise moment 

I only exist in this exact moment 

I can only exist in this precise moment 

The person who wrote the last four lines is dead now 

The person writing this line is around 10 seconds closer to dying, now

The person who wrote the line above is dead

The person who will write the line below doesn’t exist yet

I am concentrating on my toes

I am copying a poet I like more than myself 

I am not sure if my being is separate from what I do

I am not sure if what I do can be separated from my being 

I only like words about me that are verbs 

I don’t enjoy the word me 

I do sometimes enjoy the word you

I cannot deny that someone has read these words before you

I am agnostic on the issue of my existence

​
I hope you can understand






I cannot even remember if I called you Sir or Master

I was a machine for keeping her alive

A shop run with mold hands

Toy thrown out the pram

Pulled back in, and thrown

Part girl, post-lesbian

Not enough of a man

To scare her enough

And you were an academic lens

With a scalpel

I lay down on your slide

Let you capture one long thin slice of

me

To keep in a swollen wooden drawer

In the geology department

And devour

Disgorge

And devour

How many times could we mash

The same body-scream into our phones?

I will hurt you

I will penetrate you

I will be penetrated

I will do things for you

Do this thing for me

I have done it

I will penetrate you

Come over

Come over

Come over

I will come


It was rude of you to rape me

It felt rude of you


I walked backwards 

Into you

Looking at her

Trust-drunk

And already so far outside my body





​
Eye-Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing 

“It’s the first day of this festival,

Well, it was the first day

It had been the first day, the day before

And I haven’t gone to bed at all

I’ve been up all night 

With a smaller and smaller group of people 

Filtering off to get some sleep 

I’d just arrived with this mate -

Now one of my best mates, my best mate - 

In his car, with the sound system in a trailer 

These naked people ran up to the car

To give us beers through the window

Except we’d slid halfway down this hill 

So I jumped out

And it all becomes a bit of a blur, but, right -

It was the first day 

And the sun was coming up again

And I’d just walked this other friend of mine home

And we’d been making out, up against this giant cube

Some piece of interactive installation art

We’d been solving it, and then, just -

I’d followed them back for no proper reason

Held their hand on the way up there

And yeah, the sun’s coming up 

And I’m stood at the top of this hill 

And the grass is really wet but it’s already hot

Maybe 6am 

And I know I’m about to just

Run
               down     
                              this
                                                           hill 

I’m going to leg it full on like I used to do every day
​
Down the garden on my walk home from school 

That big shared backies between all the houses

Like those little narrow council house gardens?

But someone took all the walls away

I used to run down it so hard and 

It was the best part of the day

Like this special little second where I could imagine anything

If I could fit it in while I was running 

So I’m about to run down this hill

Towards the lake

And the sun’s coming up

And I’m so - 

I think I know it’s the best day of my life, you know?

I just know it and that’s okay

It’s wonderful.


So yeah, that’s the memory I want to use.” 

​

Nicks Walker is Scottish poet and queer trans man, currently locked down on the Southern English coast.  A small witch of his appears in The Speculative Book 2021 ("Her Over There"), and you can find his work on grief and furbies in Qmunicate Magazine ("This is the whole story of The Furbies").  He has four rats and autism and tweets @nickserobus

---