opulent monk 📕

poem 2/10 from warm blooded things (Nine Arches Press, 2021)

May 03, 2026

CN: sex work, drug use, violence

Close-up photograph of the face of a reclining golden Buddha statue, shot at an angle that makes the features almost abstract. The heavy-lidded eyes are half-closed. The surface is worn in places, ancient gold catching warm light. — photo: Mario La Pergola

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

opulent monk

a bidding war for my body between two men on the phone.
he offered more but I want you... I say. then fuck them both.
life gets dirty when you’ve got books to buy and debt to pay
but your sugar daddy’s stingy. Tuesdays I clean a bungalow
where I listen to a podcast (On Being with Krista Tippett)
wearing a puppy butt plug and getting beat by a cane.
so I broke another precept, call me an opulent monk.
trust me, it’s a righter kind of livelihood to pickling drunk
wankers at a gala bar – thirty-foot-black-curtains draped
in a cushy cave at the NEC: champagne tray on my wrist,
bruised shoes that do not fit, nodding for hours to be tipped
a crumb of a minute’s wage. so he injects crack into his leg,
he’s given me the money, it’s chill. I lean up the wall
as he flips the bed and for just a second think he’ll kill me. 
he held his fist to my chin for so long it became a goatee. 
now who’s your daddy? I try to meditate on the bus ride home.

[💽 AUDIO COMING]

Shaun Hill performing poetry in low dramatic light, holding a microphone with a pink cable, one hand pressed to his chest. He wears a grey beanie, a plush wolf hoody falling off one shoulder, and a scarf. He's surrounded by richly patterned fabric hangings. His expression is intense and mid-speech, eyes looking slightly off-camera.

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, like a taproot decompacting the soil of the unspeakable.

Discussion about this post

Ready for more?