Manual for a Tender Demolition

Verse in the shape of a safety briefing.

Photo by Romain Virtuel on Unsplash

Soundcheck. Test the walls with your forehead. If they answer in Latin, counterfeit a better Latin. If they answer in silence, that is the correct key.

Bring only what sings when struck: rebar, rib, a prayermotor, two lengths of genderweld wire, one mouth primed for ignition.

The map is a bruise legible by touch. Concrete forgets; rust keeps minutes. Write your name in oxidised cursive. Watch doctrine lift from it in flakes.

We begin with the body: spine, scaffold; skin, tarpaulin; tongue, acetylene. Strike. Listen. Strike. Listen.

Do not chant; cough in tempo. Do not believe; balance. Artaud said the nerves are theatres: tear down the curtain, salvage the pulleys. We shall need them for the next invention.

Insert saint here [Our Lady of Bolt-Cutters]. Insert foreman here [the man with the gravel voice]. They say move, and even the dust complies. We decline with courtesy, in time.

Take the binary and score it for angle grinder: male/female becomes spark-rain, law/love becomes law-jaw, order/chaos becomes chord-ache. Hold the note between your teeth until it cuts true.

KLANG. knirsch. klong. (Repeat until the structure re-collects it is sand.)

Now the tender part: unbolt superstition from the rib. Set it down with care. Call it before. Step over.

Silence is a sledge you lift with the lungs. Use it between the beats. Sinner and citizen come off with the plaster. Let the dust rename you: worker in the dark.

There will be signage in the skull: DANGER / EXIT / THIS WAY UP. Ignore the arrows. Follow the drip. Water knows where everything returns.

Inventory of salvage: one myth with live wiring exposed, three good screws of mercy, a sack of slogans, damp, still flammable, the small hot engine of disobedience first heard in your mouth at thirteen.

If a choir arrives, give them metal. If a market arrives, sell it echoes. If a cop arrives, offer a flowerpot; ceramic bursts more softly than bone. If a god arrives, offer the floor plan. She will mistake it for a prayer.

Love will walk in wearing work boots. Let it. It is a lever; expect no bedside manner. Place it beneath the load-bearing lie. Lean together. Count to zero. Lift.

The building will object in father-tongues. Answer in mother-noise. Answer in neither. Answer in the third grammar. Answer with a hand on a hand on a hand on a switch you name now.

When the roof relearns the sky, when the floor remembers river, harvest the rebar for reeds. Make from it a mouth-organ, a ribophone. Play the ruin back into shape.

Final instruction: leave one wall standing, waist-high. Write there, in chalk and laughter: THIS WAS NEVER A TEMPLE. THIS WAS ALWAYS A BODY.

Listen. There, between the klong and the hush: we do not destroy; we rearrange. We are scaffold and sledge, bruise and breath. Strike. Listen.