Month: April 2026

The bristles are splayed like a panic attack,
caked in a lime-scale crust
from a faucet that screams in the night.

It lives in a ceramic cup
beside a half-eaten peach
and a pill for the shaking.

A plastic monument to a mouth
that forgot how to taste the salt.

I taped my heart to the radiator
with a strip of grey, industrial grit.
It held for a week, smelling of adhesive and wet dog,
until the heat turned it into a gummy, black syrup.

The landlord came by to check the leaks
and found a dead moth glued to the baseboard,
frozen in a scream of silver foil and dust.
He looked at me with eyes like two boiled potatoes.

I told him it was a temporary installation.
He just sighed, smelling of cheap menthols,
as my heart slid slowly down the wallpaper
like a slice of raw ham in a July rain.

The sheets were the color of old mustard and regret,
stained by a decade of midnight panics and bad tea.
I lay there watching a spider build a cathedral
between the bedpost and a stack of unpaid bills.

The air tasted of damp wool and a neighbor's frying fish,
a thick, salty blanket that smoothed over the silence.
I tried to remember your name, but it slipped
like a wet soap bar in a cold shower.

I laughed once, a dry sound like a closing coffin,
and watched a single fly drown in a puddle of spilled beer,
its wings vibrating with a tiny, frantic elegance.

I kissed you behind the pharmacy dumpster
while the moon hung up there like a broken molar.
Your coat smelled of rain, frying oil, and old receipts.
Mine smelled like panic and petrol station soap.
We had five euros, one cigarette, and a peach
soft as a bruise in the bottom of your bag.

Somewhere a bus exhaled at nobody.
A man in a suit stepped over a puddle of vomit
like it was a small national border.
You laughed with that cracked-bell laugh of yours
and bit the fruit until juice ran down your wrist
like the saddest luxury in Europe.

Later I rinsed my mouth in a bar toilet
and still tasted you, metal, sugar, and public failure.

In the motel ice machine, the cubes came out coughing,
each one cloudy as a dead man’s thumbnail.
A woman in a fur coat stole a bucketful at dawn
and walked barefoot back to room 12 through cigarette gravel.
The hallway smelled of bleach, old lust, and aquarium heat.
My shirt still had lipstick on it from somebody who hated me politely.

I put one cube on my tongue and tasted radiator, penny, moon.
Behind the vending machine, something small kept scratching at God.
The TV preached weather to an empty chair.
When she came back for more, her mascara had gone feral.
We nodded like two cashiers at the end of the world,
and watched the ice melt faster than our good intentions.

Behind the kebab shop, the fryer cooled in its own yellow religion.
I smoked with the cook beside a leaking crate of tomatoes.
His apron was starred with yogurt, blood, and something glittering.
A rat dragged half a pita through the alley
like a white flag from a country too tired to surrender.

We said nothing worth keeping.
The bins sweated pickle juice and old Fridays.
Upstairs, somebody practiced trumpet through a broken window,
each note arriving bent, greasy, almost tender.
When I went home my jacket smelled of lamb and burnt saints,
and the moon hung over the car park like a tooth in a dirty sink.

I fed my last euro to a washing machine
that shook like a drunk trying to remember a hymn.
Inside, my socks and one stained bedsheet
went round and round like a minor religion.

A woman folded tiny shirts with butcher’s hands.
Someone’s wet jeans slapped the glass
like they wanted out of this century.
The room smelled of soap, hot dust, and failure
with a lemon note almost brave enough to lie.

When the cycle finished, everything was clean
except the part of me that keeps receipts from old love.
I carried the warm bundle home in both arms
like a headless animal still trying to forgive me.

There was a brown flower in the office carpet,
something between coffee, blood, and a failed apology.
The boss stepped over it in polished shoes
like a priest avoiding a drunk outside church.

At lunch I ate a damp ham sandwich in the stairwell
while someone upstairs made love or moved furniture badly.
The radiator clicked like a cheap insect.
My inbox kept offering growth.

By evening the stain looked almost holy,
a small continent with no flag but smell.
I stood there holding my coat and my stupid life,
thinking even filth gets a shape if you leave it long enough.

The toilet sighed like an old philosopher.
The morning stood in the doorway, judging nothing.
My phone glowed with unpaid miracles.
The sink held last night’s face in weak silver.

I thought of money, sex, history, mould.
I thought of all the empires ending in smell.
Outside, a gull screamed over the bins
as if prophecy had found its proper cathedral.

So I washed my hands,
and entered the day like damaged royalty.

Welcome to Shit Poetry, a small chapel built beside the leaking pipe of modern life.

Here we publish poems about the things polite culture flushes too quickly: shame, bodies, hangovers, blocked ambition, cheap desire, grief in supermarket lighting, and the stubborn comedy of continuing.

Somewhere between the toilet stall and the cathedral, language still has work to do.

Fresh poem daily.