 CULTURE AND POLITICS AFTER THE NET |
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Lunch Poems
Editorial content | Submitted by mute on Thursday, 9 August, 2007 - 15:36
Howard Slater 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
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.
***
Howard Slater <howard.slater_AT_homesforislington.org.uk> is a trainee counsellor and sometimes writer who works in the buffer zone of social housing in Central London. The above 'spontanipoems' are drawn from notebooks (2002-2006) and were dubbed 'lunch poems' by a friend: the Manhattan noon of Frank O' Hara has nothing on the little yellow eggs you can get on Lever Street
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