A typographic rukus interrupts
their dense arrangement of wires;
language for its own sake was
alone on top of a cold building.
Steel performs a shedding of skin
in reverse. The snake creeps back
inside. In truth, the whole metropolis
is bleeding from the guts and gums.
To order space when we cannot even
tell the time – to me, that seems absurd.
University of Life, mate. (Up a garret
down a side road with no heating.)
Some scrag in a poncho screaming
How’s your father? to a rookery of
knaves who’ve missed the deadline,
press execute and drop. The signal
to advance arrives, but through a process
of erasure, ritualised in stocks, fails to
register; they slump. Soon it will be 2010.
Incendiary devices are improvised
from the rotting shells of dead poets.
Tom Chivers 