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 5^th; 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.