12 December 2016 | Dominic Hale
White fire wail, a valid
truth, flash the
inward Tiber
smoking on & |||| BRITISH
VALUES VALUES; I Our
are ‘Jacob Rees-Mogg’ search cut
baking shreds, Best British
border RUDD stretched
on the dead (top rack
of BRIT skyscraper & to ‘flush
out’, beat shard, theythey, whip the Tory
youth, it’s beneficial, they work for
everyone: appropriate being THE fire
conferred BRIT fire / May
on the majority, bull’s
hide, hedge your money, SOFT, so
hugging an American Nazi(
citizen border stats THERE:
they burn the career, blue
sphere, the days of the
weak / right deal the right
deal debt struck BRIT the) right
concern legitimate fumes
norm clear fucking incentive
the block hate, right their monthly
cruel’s right DEAL legitimate
song they deal live|live
brightest Thames leading outwith
The British People; The British
People: PEOPLE THE, now whistle
(Donald Trump is a fucking fascist
Donald Trump is a fucking fascist
Idyllic cut of Nigel Farage,
Theresa, sing idyllic pigs—
a
We stand on the bank & we heave
their names into the blissful water, exit
ashes on the lashed tongue, red into
the violent water:
a
THERESA MAY. BORIS JOHNSON. AMBER RUDD. DAVID CAMERON. MICHAEL GOVE. GEORGE OSBORNE. LIAM FOX. DAVID DAVIS. IAIN DUNCAN-SMITH. DAMIAN GREEN. NIGEL FARAGE. ANDREA LEADSOM. PHILIP HAMMOND. JEREMY HUNT
and on and
on until the screen smokes and
shatters or the glossy window
breaks.
REFLECTIONS
This poem was written quickly in revulsion, incandescence, disbelief, and horror at present conditions, and the normalising march of recent events. Theresa May’s speech to her delegates on October 5th; Trump on the threshold; the whole unwitty circus. ‘Because in June people voted for change, and a change is going to come’; the ‘quiet revolution’ of a referendum campaign in which a young mother was murdered on a daylit street by a neo-Nazi. The will to change. In the early lines I flood Wordsworth’s ‘inward eye’ of the imagination with Powell’s bloody Tiber. The back gardens of England ossify and stew in their imperial cologne, capital heaving. It isn’t a nuanced thought, of course, but in the moment of writing I could only find possibility in outrage and lament.
About Dominic
Dominic Hale grew up in Blackpool and now lives in Edinburgh. He has just started a PhD at the University of Edinburgh on Wordsworth and a gaggle of late modernists.
Cool poem: more Charles Olson than Wordsworth!
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