‘And that is the reason why a young buck with an intelligent looking calf's head before him, is somehow one of the saddest sights you can see. The head looks sort of reproachfully at him, with an "Et tu Brute!" expression.

	– Moby Dick (1851), Herman Melville

A person’s life was in her neck.

– Will there ever be another you (2025), Patricia Lockwood



The bistro menu directs its laminate winks,
each tendril of letter pressing me 

to translate. Tête de Veau, 
vingt-quatre euro:

Calf’s Head, 24 euro.

*

Welcome, love!
To purpose-built Paris, designed

with compliance in mind – look at it,
its broad streets prohibiting 

dissent, any consideration of such
off somewhere, spinning!

Before you arrived, I watched
the boys and girls turning starchy

in Montmartre, their tender gestures
disrupting the city’s momentum.

The basilica’s arms embraced
these ruderal lovers, hand in hand in hand

and plugging the gaps
in their own misunderstanding with wordless,

bobby nods. What wordless 
angels, such blissful 

little crocuses…

*

Love, young things everywhere 
are methodically being divested of their humanity.

Divested further, I mean, for such
is the desired effect of history. 

Agricultural immanitas, you know? 
Aristocratic immunitas, and so,

let’s consider, for a moment, 
the farmed object: the gestating cow. 

The harmed mother (lover!) 
that never requested its life. 

Love, I’m trying my best
to get at something, so listen:

all that distinguishes an act of wisdom
from an act of butchery, or stage magic,

is the timely interruption 
by a mother.

Further, all that distinguishes stage magic
from butchery 

is speciesism, you see?
Imagine the calf, placed squealing

in Goldin’s box, Solomon’s scimitar
making veal of it, its screaming mother

in the field, making a nightly meal
of her grief…

Do you see? The endless fractal misery
of our mammals!

Love, across Paris’ disc-shaped arondissements
the palisades embrace to form stockades around luxury,

but nearby (oh, so close by!),
the luxated patellas of social beings

are being boiled to beef stock!

Love, the rate at which only some of us
are permitted to flourish

can be understood in the language of cherry trees,
rooted and bound over underground powerlines.

Their blossoms are too early,
but also too beautiful, love.

It’s too delicate, too crinoline a sickness,
for conscientious diagnosis. 

*

And I still haven’t got to the thing of it yet,
to the thing, of the thing,

so I’ll press on, and pray 
for epiphany. 

You see, the thing in question 
is the calf’s neck, love. 

The neck of the calf whose head was listed
on the bistro menu.

This is the idea which consumes me, love:
what became of its neck? 
 
*

Before I begin, I love you.
Bear with me, please – 

follow me through
this new disease.

*

First: imagine the calf’s head.
Can you picture it? Jar of potential,

scrapped! Consciousness 
boiled to threads!

I couldn’t face it, at first, so instead I looked up,
at the ceiling’s urine yellow fresco,

ogled its daubed clouds 
and corniced limits.

When I returned my eyes to the table 
the calf’s head was still there, as it had been before,

but made anew, for now I could picture it,
couldn’t stop picturing it, in fact – 

the neck. The absent, invisible neck.
I saw it, lurking below the table’s surface,

like the speculated upon plot on which
an empire is built.

And so, the calf’s neck seemed a bit
like Versailles, love. If ‘Versailles’ is synecdoche 

for well-trimmed terrain, for tonsure
of shrub, for the secateurs and hoes,

used in the tableau’s arrangement,
but also, love, for the broken hands, forced to grip

the lengths of procedure,
for the snarled backs propping up the grand plantation.

Yes, I think the calf’s neck may have been like that, love – 
like metonymy. A language unit 

with a universe 
curled inside. 

Just look, love.
Just look at what a you can hold.

*

Do you remember the park in Norwood?
How the lake’s surface decapitated the swans,

and the stopped Ferris wheel was right twice a day? 
How the branches shielding from the impromptu spring

were replete with frothy blossoms?
In those first knotty weeks of love, somewhere 

between my thoughts, and the fleeing worms, 
was the seeing self.

I watched you put on red shirt, blue shirt,
yellow, only to shed them each night. 

We sought togetherness. 
We watched the pale light scry then limp

through gaps in the sky, gaps in the skylight,
gaps in the amniotic sacs of our solipsism,

gaps in the burlap sack of our personal 
accountability. 

I love you, love – but is it enough? 
Do I, enough? Oh, time. Go back

in your nut. Time, go sleep 
in your shell. Time, 

if you have any inclination,
take my old worm with.

*

But back to the matter at hand:
the calf’s head, resting on its plate.

As I gazed at it, I couldn’t help but think
of Petrarch. Of the name, ‘Petrarch’,

and how, if you score out the T and the R
and the R, what is left of the word is ‘peach’,

and so, I pictured that – a portrait of Petrarch,
as a peach.

And maybe the calf’s head was like that, love –
like a peach, placed in the porthole

where Petrarch’s face should go, in that portrait
where he’s wearing his 14th century Italian snood,

where the arc of bay leaves seasons his head.
Because the calf’s head had that too, love:

anarchic leafage!

In the portrait of Petrarch I’m thinking of,
it’s interesting to note that Petrarch has no neck,

he is just ovoid face in snood aperture, ripe
for peach placement. We assume the presence

of his neck though, love, for what thinker doesn’t,
at some point, have a neck?

I never saw the calf’s neck,
I merely sat with the assumption of it,

with the belief in some tenable link
between body and consciousness. 

And in fact, the calf’s neck was rather like my neck,
as I will never see my neck.

*

Do you remember the day you taught me
perdurantism, love? 

The tennis courts in Croydon, 
both of us brought to life afresh

each smelly instant, bored by the fruitless cache
of our past actions. 

Every day I ate a world’s worth 
of limescale, the milky parentheses 

of my choices’ sediment. 
I carried a thousand calcified minds 

to the court, kept one eye on them
as I thwipped the winnowing world around ball.

Each Saturday I’d greet our friends in the kitchen 
and watch as light hits the scrim – 


Love, if I ate me, I wouldn’t know it,
you know? The world can’t be mine 

and also the world. 

*

Perhaps the calf’s neck was like the golden schnapp
of the Latona fountain – nucleic,

from the bird’s eye view.
Like a sunlit, too-many-legged spider,

and so, I guess, not like a spider at all.
I placed the conch of my clasped hands

on the calf’s head, and for a moment 
the head and I collaborated:

we were one – a nodule of spider 
atop another spider,

a spider with an extra percentage of its torso
fused to its torso.

It was at this moment I saw the truth, love:
that the calf’s head was a body, a world,

a life.
And me? An unresected teratoma.

*

And maybe the calf’s neck
was like an ecclesiastical relic, love:

a foreskin, housed in a reliquary.
A sacred bit, an escutcheon on canonical masculinity,

the thing that swings between what men are,
and what they need to become,

if we are to fix things,
because this is the question, love, the truest crux

of thing: what gods have we conquered
that we may eat the head of a child, love?

What victory have we snatched
from the jaws of survival?

Frabjous day! What a triumph, what a coup!
The streets are wet, the blood runs blue!

And I digress. Because actually, now 
that I think about it – to know, truly,

what the calf’s neck was like, you need to imagine
the reliquary is sat on the back of a wagon 

of a travelling theatre troupe in 2014
(a time when relics, and travelling theatre troupes,

for that matter, were at the nadir 
of their popularity, but anyway).

And the reliquary is opaque, that’s the thing, love –
the legitimacy of its contents are mere rumour,

forever unproven! It’s Schrödinger’s dingdong,
it’s paradox of quantum superposition!

And that’s what the neck was like, love.
Not like hope, or ignorance, but like false ideology,

corroborated by an even falser apotrope!
It’s a coping mechanism, a fable responsible 

for our shared delusions, for what good 
is delicious, well-seasoned, 

long time reasoned-with flesh,
in a cooked world, eh?

And for that matter, when’s the last time you even saw
a theatre troupe, or a functional wagon,

or an interventionist art form, love?
Think of the lies we’ve told, to pretend art

is all it takes, to pretend the earth is ours, love.
Think of the sheer apocrypha, of those ideas,

for that is what the neck was like!

*

Anyway. Nothing makes more meat of me
than breakfast breasts, you know?

Your hand beneath my négligée 
as the morning finds us, 

our skin seeking some primitive 
we’ve romanticised…

It never lasts long though, does it love?
The newscast squeaks, your competitor gets in,

the stresses of impermanence caress 
these awful compost bags. 

I examine myself: chest like wagyu beef,
face like battery hen. I pull away, commence fretting.

Intent gets eaten by result.
Gets eaten like everything gets eaten. 

*

We contemplated the countryside, remember?
We fantasised decamping to bluebells, becoming 

extradited… 
It didn’t work.

The wheeze of aspirated vomit drowned out the breeze
aerating the mulch, the buzz of wired gulch,

dug for better connectivity. 

Love, the messes of new industry exert a grip
that conscience lacks, and oh, what a crutch!

I suppose our guilt stems from unconscious fetish,
our push for futurelessness. 

We write, yet life won’t live to read the words
I try to trap it in, so why do I bother?

This thing I’ve made 
will squall to nobody,

or nobody who cares, at least.
The project is a pile of shite,

but I suppose it’s easier than  

*

Imagine standing in the light,
on a path between two buildings. 

Of then being actual, actually being
on a path between two buildings.

Imagine your beloved’s face before you:
red, turning blue, then yellow.

Imagine the neck below their face, their chest
below their neck turning red, then blue,

then yellow. This is the light
of the new outside, love,

it’s a Léger painting, and if only I’d known
the calf’s neck was like that too. 

Like the halogen tube of infrastructure,
challenging and dying my long-chewed 

imaginations. But the neck was also
like how you adjust to that eeriness so soon,

like how you need to forget forgetting,
just to survive.

Sweet amnesia, I source you
from the paltriness of writ description.

*

And love, perhaps the calf’s neck 
was like the Mandelbrot set of my conceptions

of my personality – was like finding beneath
my surface-most patterns of behaviour

reiterative ‘me’s, reiterative patterns,
increasingly meagre but no less historical,

Love, lately I’ve needed to look closer each time,
just to retrieve any substance, any belief,

for it seems the bulb is no longer germinable,
there is just vapid, interminable me, trapped in the prison

of my neoliberalisms, if you know what I mean?
If anyone knows what I mean, surely it’s you!

Please, can you yoke me to meaning, love?
Can you save us from the full stop?

Love, I love you. I make you the keeper 
of my interred humanity, the inheritor

of my asbestos mittens.

*

Love, there are times I picture a piggy seraph,
holding us to account, granting us some new means

of love, some union of man-
made and mystic. 

I picture him guarding the last tree of the green earth, 
and to its fruits I say, oh! Figgy sheriff,

don’t plop to the earth just yet! Don’t give up
your oleaginous insides – 

offer us a future! 
Any will do!

Love, how awful to think of branches,
trained to mend engines.

How sad to think of blackberries,
gurning in the corporate diaphragm. 

Not for much longer, at least.

*

Oh calf. Oh baby. 
Pulchritudinous you. 

Calf, perhaps I thought we might make more
of each other. Make gloria mundi, maybe, 

some perfect abundance of subsumption!

Alas, sic transit. All passes at the hands
of my species’ parasitic inveigling. 

Tiny, blessèd cow, the things you could do,
blessé mooling, had you not been forced

to live. Had you not been brought low, unkissed,
never lowing to the metronome of a good or happy youth.

‘Try to love me,’ I hear you say,
but in a voice all too similar to my own.

‘Try to love me in a manner unrecognisable,
if possible. If not, I suppose your way will have to do.’

*

And perhaps the calf’s neck was raw flesh,
proffered under a Tuscan sun in Scunthorpe,

unfit to see the coming confrontation
(teeth, fingers, natural disasters). 

And so, the neck was like my keyboard keys,
sullied with alien filigree that leaves my flesh fingers,

that makes everything I touch distasteful. 
Every gesture I make is made of the alien,

that animal residue that alters what starts as thought
and becomes expression – what undergoes alchemy,

what becomes uncontrollable. 

The calf’s neck was what we can’t prove exists,
pre-extraction from blastocysts,

and so the neck was like Sycorax, or no, it was the gaps
between Sycorax and no, or no, it was the interstices

between my stanzas, my thoughts. 
Each gap is the neck, or the seconds that lapse

between the synapses that dictate movement. 
No biography without bacteria,

no romance without the future’s bacteria!
Love, imagine thinking we are any different

to all that is dying behind doors.
Imagine thinking we can own what we hold

in thought. We are so largely other,
and this is all getting beyond me.

*

And the calf’s neck was like
what the calf’s mother’s neck was like

at one stage, presumably. Intact and alive,
ready to graduate. Popcorn. Amaryllis. Metaphor.

*

Do you remember the soft bellies
of the allotments? Do you remember them swelling

with what was to come? The dunce hat buddleias,
full of Duns Scotus’ cone knowledge and above, oh!

The glass-bottomed blimps carried the clouds along!
Love, my memories of that time are unreliable – 

was the falafel tree in blossom too? – 

I suppose we’ll get to accrue little new knowledge now,

but at least I’ll know what comes after plosive.

Love, poetry is devouring itself, ouroboros-like.
That is its cultural value. 

Suppose the calf’s head could have done that too,
called moratorium on being, on there being

more of it. The corrosive in the oil drum, explosive
in the parliament – why didn’t we do it?

The problem was we weren’t thinking 
hard enough. Or the problem was thinking

as we thought thinking was.

*

And finally (at last you say!), love,
the calf’s neck was like the neck

of a lamp, one which offshoots at its tip
into floricanes, its buds curating the narrow light of intimacy 

in a Parisian bistro, where I sat, waiting for you
to join me – our first sojourn abroad together.

I sat, imagining our future, drinking wine.
I ordered the calf’s neck to reveal itself,

having ordered the head from a waiter,
having ordered, I thought, everything in my life.

Love, perhaps our feelings are the final piece
of scaffolding, the last intact fret 

of the falling cathedral.

O, the reality is this: the calf’s neck,
it turned out, was everything or nothing

like the calf’s head, which I ate in a Parisian bistro,
waiting for you to arrive in Paris.

I drank the evening out, anticipating 
your arrival with thirsty eyes. The calf had had 

its eyes removed, its scalp was prised open
like a reservoir. And though I never saw the neck, 

presumably it was also once like a reservoir: 
a miraculous panoply of life! 

But like I said, I never saw the neck.
I saw the calf’s head, which I ordered without thinking.

And when I saw the calf’s head on the plate,
on the detergent-softened tablecloth,

it was like a rococo pinecone on a plinth 
on moulding, it was like every adornment 

to our beautiful extinguishment.

And maybe the neck was like that, love:
like some baroque adornment of obsolescence,

the last bibelot gripped by the slaughtered aristocrat,
because what good could come from something

like this? What got bred out of us – ex animals – 
with this? The cow on my plate bled out, somewhere 

out of sight, and there was only the glass 
of Côtes du Rhône, the basket of bread brought out, 

and my new-found thought: of a neck. 

The neck, if there ever was a neck,

was gone. The calf was gone, and its neck 
was like my increasingly elaborate methods

of poetic misdirection, of absolution 
via convolution.

There may be no absolution now, love. 
No proteinaceous body, no code of warning.

Only a violence I didn’t know I’d had a hand in,
a violence I never had to witness. 

And I, love? I was like Saturn, 
holding Saturn.

I was like Saturn, holding Saturn.

Saturn, eating Saturn.