JOSEPH EASTELL is a poet from Keighley, West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in 3am Magazine; Streetcake; Ink Sweat & Tears; Morphrog; The Bohemyth; New Linear Perspectives; Poetry Pulpit & Bare Hands; Burning Eye’s Book Of Alternative Young Poets: Rhyming Thunder; Regardless of Authority; Fur Lined Ghettos. His collection Blossom Boy Beta Test received an Eric Gregory Award in 2018.

Fractal Misery

Days squirm through the periphery of body language
until your vision becomes as pointless
as algebra in a 10-rated gale.

Life is an illness, with birth
we are each given death sentences
that we pass on down narrow passages
of time until we are all forgotten eventually.

I watch street drinkers fumble teeth watching birds
in an oblivious arrow over a churchyard
washed and unwashed each year by dandelions

This glorious transmission of looping supernova
expanding Samsara’s seamless rebirth
until no one can tell from which original
or which mould, all these copies are made.