On a day when it rains so hard you can't do anything (poem/mood piece in progress)

I want to hear the whining of rusty fans and the grinding of a ship's hull reverberating through the factory. That's my idea of a holiday.

I need a peeling dancehall in the cordoned-off season, seabirds nesting in the flying buttresses. The salt in the air preserves nothing. It's like Doom Jazz.

I want the sleet to slip into bed. I need the world to be the room my head is. I want the shattered attic to look out on an overgrown garden and a sodden cardboard stage.

I hold the broken cistern and nineties porn fading on the walls, I want mere corrugation. I need to be the quietest applause in the audience. The middle sister, the stillborn mouse, the pirouetting spider-husk. I could stop all this now with a coffee or snack but I won't. I'm not emptiest yet. I'm just dusk.

Poem: The Ages of Print

Tomorrow's chip wrapping is the first to go
yesterday's dead already coddle my roe.

Then there's the leaflets for food so fast
The green bin has gobbled them before they've hit the mat.

Porn, crumpled under holly – abandoned pups, dirty eggs laid dead of night,
cunts torn out, blacked out or worse, moustached and goggled. Scorched minge; glorious half-life.

Next, those that last through being overlooked.
Christian comic books. The Women's Library's unfiled tracts.

Annuals which hibernated teenage years to adulthood's irony.
Hardbacks cannot be chucked. Illustrated Treasure Islands

heft the same taboo as Reader's Digests, damming up the chazzers.
Signed Histories of the English Speaking Peoples, yellowing

duodecimally in fire-alarmed cellars. Ciphers as yet unconjectured.
Value these: Dead Sea Scroll, Euromillions winner, love letter.

Now, we place this poem. Bonfire, museum. I trust your soft clean hands.



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I wanted to write something about all this printed material we're surrounded by, how we sort it, and maybe what it feels about itself without knowing it. I'm quite happy to have written a poem that's not facetious. But genuinely, let me know what you think.