articles

Lunch Poems

By Howard Slater, 9 August 2007

An ordinary ordinance day.
A bureaucratic pounding.
Not a ritual, a procedure:
dirty pieces of silver paper.

***

The zags are cut lightly into card,
spires persist, 
husbands are solicitors,
torn letters are posted into sewer vents,
lift engineers order teas, 
leaves are vacuumed,
a filter despairs of its plastic sheath,
lunch ends it’s out to back.

***

In the square the jugglers
command the crowd.
A debt of sitting.
It’s not free: the order-word
of entertainment.

***

Spoke to suicide case’s father
(later re-let flat)

***

‘I feel I’d wake up if I didn’t have to go back to work’

***

Don’t expect them to think it’s not 
theirs, they’ve paid and now they 
won’t let you alone for more of your 
spares – surplus energies feed the line 
of lingo, musty stutters grapple
for excuses as to why it’s like it is, 
why it’s held in handbooks. 

***

Discretionary explanations. A kind of 
sovereignty is invested in every 
officer-employee, a final word written on 
a complaint form, the eviction of the 
already abandoned, the conviction that 
worse is to be rolled-out to the phone-dead, 
ring-eyed, dry-gobbed, clocked-in advocates 
of an administered social loan. Don’t leave 
now, worse faces you, stay, stay, stay awhile 
for the edict of the new contract is 
INCENTIVISATION, and Monday’s report 
of recommendation meets the sixty day later 
ratification of an opposedless motioneering 
for the sake of later expulsed sacking, lately 
unperturbed to get out of here into air, the 
debt of food, the idyllic retreat into some 
music from the beggar’s porch.

***

Gold is dead
Value is breath

***

A dark trip to the centre of nowhere;

the mill of work,
common collapse,
creditworthy traps. 

Service level disagreements.

Expectant vehemence triumphs over the phone.

***

‘I, Abdi Ali Noor declare hereby that I 
no longer live in this ghostly house.
I am now from the mental hospital. I
have returned back all your keys. I go
back to Belgium. Bye bye London.’

***

Cabbies look in longingly.
Sunglasses. Leaden boots.
Turbulence in the mock square’s corner.
Indifference is bliss.
Found people freed for an hour.

***

They’d taken me away.
But I went voluntarily.
You see, I needed food pills,
bio points and tobacco.

***

We accept euros for golfing trophies.
Narrow passage.
Emptied playground.
A tear on the brow of his cheekbone.

***

Impotent commands the worst,
usually instructed from above.
No real ground except the
communication of an order.
She is sacked in public. 
She protests, seeking a rationale
other than the empty words of
the managerial chain. The reply
to her despairing request is
‘stop arguing with me’ and this
too is met with the delighted 
sneers of her peers and colleagues.

****

Desperate right,
shot in the head 
in Somalia,
in the past,
in transit,
in hospital
in temporary,
chucked out,
now he’s here
at the front desk.

***

Grout case file three.
Typical foisting.
An hallucination of hearing.
Use anger directed towards
you as a shield when your words run out.
Nothing can be heard.
Audible tweets at 12pm.
I am non but eponymous.
Calls come (again).
The restricted zones of personality
disable speech, make recalcitrance.
Good morning, how may I help you?
Some gifts still to pay for.
Paladins as housing, as icing.
The language of deflection is realer,
really procedural.
Thump the table.
Pock-mocked lumpen-face eats apple.
Veer to veto (again).
Get once lost letter late.
Genocidal consumption.
Details plead to become facts.

***

‘It can’t go on’ she says. But what
‘can’t go on’ is not what she’s here to
talk about. The ‘can’t go on’ is beyond
my remit in this room. Does the ‘can’t
go on’ relate to her husband’s death,
the debts? Can this death-debt not go on?

***

‘line line line line manager’

***

three weeks later
the same track at mother’s junction
post box
pill box
snow dots of tarmac
awe of calm opinionlessness
free to be
appointed
a basket of obscure steadfastness

***

You fuckers! 
You stole our language, 
our scope to ad-lib, 
and now you’re coming 
for our inflection!’
***

We are underpaid and overexposed
to their sociopathic greed – we
feed them paper and now they scream
at us. They dearly want what their
forebears taught us was useless. 
They don’t have the means of their greed,
the desire to want difference to morph
want, and now they stamp our idiom to debt.

***

In the clearing smoke scours
the photographs, hiding the animal
labour which moves insects and their
information all over the face of the earth.
I arrive in kind by light rail 
transport rough and undependable, rocking
sideways with a peg of metal to make
it ring eratogenically like spraypaint in a cylinder.
And get my tag up on the boundary stone.

Apprentice to the art of uniforms.
Off the peg on the make, blush to be
at ease among gillyflowers where I toss
suffering to be carried back by animals,
the cabbage moth, the ordinary bee.

Chances start out anthological, and are re-
distributed by rationing, for loss looks better
and is altogether better an ethic.  I am who
ties together the navigation menu
all the compassed interests of Variety
all three corners of the fading earth.

Watch all day the screen in ratio, facing
its light and movement with more affect
and concentration than the branching
face of a lover, as these spaces slip into degrees.
Two move abreast the loan of specificity
keeping an eye on the melancholic
hourglass, poised beside the leftward arrow,
of the machine asking us to wait some more.

We share one hope, and it infuses even
the green-lipped mussel we eat sickly, the curl
of green-fringing kale.  It bolts up the sky
and our assertion that there will be a future
clearing the smoke swings from its rootless peg.
That the blood will root, and take turns
through all the living work done on the earth
to divide and return to us intact.  Ours is
the most abstract, and furthest from the truth.