Digital Poetics 2.3 kludge time: Fred Spoliar
The poem tries to look directly into the origins of public health in paternalism and policing, written around the Kenmure Street anti-raid action and in the stalling daily effort to hold time for grief and organising.
By the hands of the Queen’s men I lay down and
applied myself resolutely to work
Laid out as an annual
review of Time in the Street
Having been randomly selected to labour
Under zeugmatic monolith to Purity and Plague
Assigned to this machine under samesame
cut-off & crowning
the eleventh finger… now the twelfth...
Assigned at ergot-tipped despair
as hand-made // theory of phantom joint
between the doorstep and the park
stressed heterochronic dogging
delphic money in the street
Between the task of organising
the sunset and the value added Sunset
labour for a cities
we could live in
a laboratory for particular & peculiar forms
of reaction & happily
I was a molecule there
Assigned to healthful exercise
by a series of informed choices
I pushed all the buttons
feet on the tarmac
I felt myself
becoming one with the park becoming
one of the erogenous zones
of the state
of public knowledge
I was getting through this time
And if I see tonight
a state of complete mental physical & social wellbeing
coming over the hill -
the Year was healthy happy men
were not disposed nor was I one
in breathing with
the stalling community of the message of
the world // a function
of the double bind
between the regime and the romance
of wind-time
bin-brewed dandelion wine
of the leisure class
with its foundations and its content mills
Between the Visor and the Mask
I saw the origin of public health
coming over the common
Then Nothing,
Clouds
Then I knew
that healthy happy men were not
disposed to procreation & bouldering
orogenies of fear
between the go-kart and the paint-ball
the work was boring
holes in my panoramic head
began the day coming in to
bring ibuprofen, that was my first job
heart-first and bodied forth inchoate
at the peripheries, knees and towns ache
you in the collective head
I want to feel you
like a held van
we could live in the cities of -
they have this indirect action
we have this many hands
it congeals on monday
as a luxurious crust
a damaged building you could reconstruct only as
more new sadness
we have this being held back
a strike leisure held in the teeth
while climbing# little vom globule
held in the mouth while
climbing# serrated work-grin held
in the face and hardly working
in two thousand and look at the spring
the Rec full of wrecked asters and kids
playing football on the tennis
pitch the occluded surviving
Present yes I have hopes
a lightning held in the dark
a homemade wooden boat
the mountain heavy with people
the gift of antidote
in two thousand and booing the cops off
we could live in this collective noun
a comedy held in a breath
& the horizon blazed
over aldwych and clapham
I looked directly into
The Origins of Public Health
coming at you through the daffodils in the name of Plod
coming at you through the seven-day week
a kind of bitten nomos persisting
through the six-day week
all cotton industry child labour
mannerism
and the moral health of mechanicals
fixed on green circuitry
decelerating thru the 5-day week with terminal beating
rapt victoriana
piecework in the heart of citizens
with their private medical police
& the moral health of cyclists
to correlate with road speed
stuck on p.92 of the Grundrisse
against the moral force of trips over uppers
by the arms of the corporation
a proper family like I like
raids on delivery riders
& sushi at home
Between the French disease in italy
and the Italian pox in france
By the hands of Milligan and Dick
the foreigners’ disease like always
seized while walking
seized while out running
seized in their landlord’s
& the weather personally
crying hold me in economic
childhood mangles
a ghost worker in romantic time
with your plan
like an unfuckable orrery
clogged with temporary mercury
doing Thursday wrong
like the clouds do
a kind of special work
abstract from the POV of the real
abstraction //
this demeans
the daily struggle to produce
to recover thirteen senses
dragged thru oculi of firewalls
form a flash dew
perfume bomb a police
It was a bad time for
something links
between sport and bare life, just being
puzzled away in the vanishing
“silence” // it was a good time
to be exposed
to the liability of being touched
reduced to this
arrhythmia
to be in glasgow to be having dreams
We ate the queen and said tender
not a word but ways to fly opacity
a mute pre-pinkness bodied
by styles of arduous arrhythmic drumming
the sanity of violence “itself”
establishing a violent baroque
need for the useless
counterpart to the oubliette
everyone who goes down there
you holding up
a silent night bus for this
the light, s o m a n y m i l e s f r o m h o m e
faltered
and turning waved
veers into morning-
There are no trees in London.
A green belt wheels in the clouds.
The time for how strange is stolen
All shadow
All fall down.
*
fred spoliar is a poet and education worker living in London. Recent poems can be found in publications including algia, datableed, erotoplasty, PIGS, and tentacular.
*
This publication is in Copyright. Fred Spoliar, 2021.
The moral right of the author has been asserted. However, the Hythe is an open-access journal and we welcome the use of all materials on it for educational and creative workshop purposes.
