Shit Poetry

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.