look 📼
poem 6/10 from warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021)
CN: AIDS, suicide, violence, addiction
look
I.
cheap wine spilt on the steps of a church.
a small tent of hands shield a fresh-lit wick.
and sputtering truth the young
priest releases incense.
on the bottom step I confess
I want to paint a mural
on the roof of my mouth too.
I want to crouch down into a choir
of yes and open myself to the holy.
put the moon out with a cigarette,
make it day again. grind polystyrene
into snow and feed my pity to the pigeons.
break free from the fingers I am peeking
through. this urge to look and to not.
II.
he pointed at the red brick steeple through his windshield:
tower where the priest had thrown himself when he found
out he had AIDS. my eyes dropped the distance to pavement,
feeling the one long second it took for him to fall there.
I was sat in traffic with a vicar I’d met a few months before
on an app, who kept his flat unlatched for me, after my shifts
at the last dive open in the city – stairs into earth, gay underworld
with a pole on a stage in the middle; glitter on the curb
from when a girl slashed another girl’s leg with a glass.
that night, with my butch friend Becky in the back and me
stacking lemons on shots of tequila, I’d lean closer to hear
the stuttered words of a body sobbing into a double brandy.
III.
I wanted a compass to god but only
got pointed back to my country,
downing gin in a doilied living room
with the monarchy on the mantelpiece.
I wanted a window: wisdom. got a mouth
reflecting my own addictions. I needed
those big hands around me, my name
on his knuckles. instead, I knelt naked
in bed with a man too fucked on wine
to fuck me. I knelt at a candle bench
with a broken lighter and no matches
to turn to: the panes of men’s faces
sliding free of their screws until all
that’s left was the frame of a house
I was running from in the first place.
Shaun Hill (born 1996) is a poet, somatic educator, and working-class survivor of decades of multi-agency failings, living in the British Midlands. He’s the author of warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021), A Mushroom Wastes Nothing (Substack, 2026) and the developer of Loop & Line: Experiments in Physical Thinking.
He’s over 40 poems into his second full-length collection, And Now The Body Speaks. He writes for the voices who will dance medicine twenty years from now: a taproot decompacting the soil of the unspeakable.