{"id":2629,"date":"2026-09-13T20:15:27","date_gmt":"2026-09-13T20:15:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/?p=2629"},"modified":"2026-09-13T20:15:52","modified_gmt":"2026-09-13T20:15:52","slug":"bad-code","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/2026\/09\/13\/bad-code\/","title":{"rendered":"Bad Code"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I have just published a poetry zine called Bad Code. You can print it yourself at home. Or just read the poems below :)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/a><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
1. London

Crying lesbian pornography tears
Into my bowl of mortgaged cereal
Dreaming of terrible angels
As I creep around my corporation

Prolonged grief disorder
Is how they describe it
With two bottles of Bordeaux 
Cocaine is what they don\u2019t prescribe it

Up and down the City Road
In and out the Eagle
That\u2019s the way the money goes
With child maintenance payments


2. The Wonderful Wall (a cover)

There is a wonderful wall
Deep in some Mancunian wood
That is said to draw middle aged men
From across the island

They bend down and kiss it
In rows like that lewd way to 
anonymous fellatio
But what glory is here?

But the glorious sweetness of death
For the other side is not men
But skeletons who bed too
to meet with chattering teeth those

Aged adolescent lips
That cross the wall
Between the two worlds
As if sex offered some respite from the cold morbidity of life


3. Paris

They named you after a beautiful boy
Which is romantic
To the point of sentimentality
Wherever you are
I'm not allowed

Except to pay by the minute
For a green door
I can't see behind
Food that doesn't exist
But is somehow authentic

The first leaf of autumn
Is a betrayal of summer
As alien in a city of men
As a steam train at Calvary
As far fetched


4. Berlin

At a banal orgy
Genital genital contact
Is purely material 
With all metaphysics absent
In a corporate 
Do

On the Karl-Marx-Allee
The word is made flesh
In the shadow of history
A mere party or meeting?
One cannot tell

Lanyards
Names
Confusions

When everything is permitted
There is no

Word


5. Eschatalogical gates

What is most terrifying about the end times
Is that they never come
Just a dream
That dies with us

What I most miss about youth 
Is the delusion about 
What was 
To come

So cling to some apocalypse
If you must be afraid of your laptop
So death
Seems late


6. bad code

poem me a poem poem
word me a word
the disenchantment of the word
is not complete

hate me some hate
or love love itself
but text above all

intertextual textuality next to something logocentric
whats missing?

In the end was the word, and the word was word, and the word is word.<\/pre>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I have just published a poetry zine called Bad Code. You can print it yourself at home. Or just read the poems below :) 1. LondonCrying lesbian pornography tearsInto my bowl of mortgaged cerealDreaming of terrible angelsAs I creep around … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2629","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-other-stuffs-sic"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2629"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2629\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2629"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2629"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.raphshirley.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2629"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}