MAGNIFICAT

(NEW POEM)

carried into fantasy on the back of a living wage. regret is a gradient. glamour has a gradient. so, in large, dark glasses, the poet considers her position, sweats the conditional and additive logic of social ascension, goes arse-over-tit into the ragged hole that she herself has dug between considering and sweating. o god, not another surveilled pastoral.

how like a self the poem is. some poems entail praise the way a corpse entails an orchid – elegant.

for whom an idea is not a sustained meditation, but a moment of promise. a flag of fire is hoisting itself up yr ego. this is what it means to be a working-class intellectual.

sometimes it is very sad. here, where the rancour of capital blooms, we have learnt to be feasible and convenient, to eke out, to meekly economise. once, we organised and gloried against the optimised morning. but now we are polite. when the night has come, percolating casualty, we are not worried, we have signed the petition.

does the poet think she is better than this? no. she can find no relief, and she is not relief. one’s relationship to the academy has a formula like fate: drawn inevitably inward, and pushed – also inevitably – to the furthest edge. held. yes, held at bay.

handbook/ handout/ printout/ clipboard/ whiteboard/ white-out/ burnout/ walkout/ blackboard/ blackout/ back out/ comeback/ outcome/ come out/ come out/ come out/ come out/ come out/ come out/ come out >> incite sublime defiance << come out/ come out/ come out/ come out/ come out/ come out/ etc.

an example isn’t set, but tendered.

pain inside like an airbag bursting. dressed in the dark sash of epiphany, the poet, grinding the axe of endeavour, on the axis of endeavour. again. her glossary of perverse incentives, shored up against the present – that moment when – a recitation of symptoms becomes a list of demands.

can u hear it? the sinister whimpering of soft power. to live by persuasion and mistake, dressed in white cotton socks against the burden of agency. has an algebra of abandon, phonemes and boners. is amorous and damaged. they are turning the world inside-out one felicitous dick-pic at a time. they church-up their desire with plain and fancy mithering about ethics. they want to reinvent the abattoir, their butcher’s cacographic all the live long day.

spend yr revelations wisely. once, there was a language. once, there was a language other than money, its aggregate of mansions in the mouth. thought persists: an irritable trickle, like rain inside a sleeve. but language? thin streams of lineated bilge. this is not language. that beckons like a bony finger. that circles like a subtle vulture. that spreads its mucky thunder through the city, red and gold. this is money, meting out its miracle. money, flattering and satisfied. money, that belongs to the men, who ration both rhythm and water together. money, flooding the faces of poets – those waxy paranoiacs – money, its liverish idiom still. its belly full of dark peripherals.

give me a dog, couchant and in clover. give me an allegory of arrows. give me the corners of tall rooms, delicately tenanted. give me marsh-moult, malt and loam. give me salt on the tongue. not this, not these: stale excoriations. a conqueror’s song that dies on my lips. make of me a stubborn muscle meeting the earth. music, raked across the planted ground. breaking open, breaking apart. for i hold no dominion dear. nor the hard-edged discipline of victory. nor the bright enterprise of emptiness.

i am like you: a stained and fragile body flayed inside a wage. have seen my love, truncheoned all to rubble. caught, conniving curses at the edge of this island, will never be free. out of my spinning infancy awake into the sacraments of scarcity. scarcity ritual. scarcity theatre. the empty shelf eternal. the empty self incites, where once was language.

they took our language. whose only beads, the abacus. whose alphabet, the tally. whose only book, the ledger. they took over our language. left us with dirges, dodges, slatternly grift, gift of the gab. look at the tower: a concrete christ we consecrate disaster to.