“Hope It’s Not Important” and other poems

Amy De’Ath

08.30.23

Hope It’s Not Important

 

Just go to sleep what is that sound?

The sound implodes more like

 

gunshot than firework more foot-

ball than soccer because words do cleave

 

the producer from the land

the lover from the rope the sweet sweet

 

duration of a head sliced clean off

pushing up daisies in this ex- and non-ex

 

council estate where half the flats are

sold off but all still have pre-paid

 

premium rate electricity and gas meters

still, the College TRAC team are never

 

going to receive this Time Allocation

Schedule from me, sing it with me

 

The squirrels play a hopeful game

Under new King Chuckie’s reign

 

They cannot organize their thoughts

but they can chase freely across trees

 

while we reconfigure here

under the repurposed archway of a

 

grain store where everything is still

so expensive, so dour, and so poor

 

made unspecific except for us, immobile

wondering what happens next

 

Just go to sleep what is that sound?

Experience or domination by things?

 

A new Public Order Bill says

you can protest but not disrupt.

 

The birds make their nest

In the disused water tower. They know

 

they too will be pushing up daisies

singing, that empire is falling

 

pushing for the most outrageous faggot’s

wisdom, vying for everything, rounding

 

up henchmen, burning down Elon

no elan, they’ll sing to that cell tower disguised as a tree

 

they’ll get the Time Allocation Schedule

from me with commission and return

 

my hours in full. I would like to sit in a

Trap beat half cow half fish, and

 

Feel whatever is impermissible or

flawless with my entire body as in

 

drop to the ground in a pile of sand

down the folds of an English vale or

 

find some other way to, like all us sweet

chicks, get repeated

                                               thus repeat on myself

 

spinning around the sun

re-joining the tenant union

 

For it all to un-happen then re-occur

To show these fuckwads that what they do

 

And that what they do

is do it,

                                  dare me,

 

or do one yourself

 

under this vintage Edison bulb and delayed

profitability crisis, passé now, is fine since

 

as Jack Lemmon observes in Glen Garry Glen Ross

there’s a non-disclosure agreement

 


 

Fidelity to a Foundation or Condition

 

It’s not so bad! But

                the prospect of winning

 

seems unlikely today

                sweet earth sinking unto me

 

to have freedom and then be tied

                to be loose and then stretch

 

to interject say hey that’s natural

                and for that to be a statement of fact only

 

from Lee Ann’s window a plane crosses a flag

                or is it a plain of yellow Kansas wheat

 

an unnatural scene, not Nebraska, South Dakota,

                somewhere west of the Mississippi River

 

a pail of light, North Dakota, Montana

                where wheat is also the primary crop

 

take my thigh in one hand and

                substitute it for the other

 

bright green fields reassuringly enclosed

                as in Constable’s Dedham Vale

 

how free my loved ones have made me

              en plein air      in Mattapoisett

 


 

Young Hearts Run Free

 

Is my trust misplaced

Is Violet dead?

Come to me, babe

on the inside of my hand—

 

Though the earth won’t

let you go, I heard

Someone was having a party

there in that Vulture article

 

but no one was celebrating how

they could’ve been happy. I could be?

If I could learn to avoid

the periphery of the rectangle

 

Of grease on a formica table

when deadpan Amelia Dimoldenberg

on Chicken Shop Date tells Aitch

he is nothing but a prawn

 

It’s proximity to prawn she wants

and realistically juicy this time, and

It’s true how white girls stay white

girls even when they try, and

 

it’s true I wrote a poem titled

Sonnet: Suck My Big Cock

then dedicated it to myself

Like a futures forecaster for Big Oil

 

Who’s that? Yes I am a big dick

Look, it’s my day of visibility and

it’s me who’s that slut talking shit

On the upright pussy canal

 

Unaffected and therefore unharmed

A wannabe Candi Staton, or

Kim Gordon working in a chicken factory

or one that sells oil filters for diesel

 

vehicles, it’s me who’s that Renault Clio

Toyota Toothbreaker

JCB Edgelord

Vehicular, transformed, systematic

 

a monstrous accomplice just-in-time yet

 

                unable to come at the same time as you

                                                but it’s ok, hm

                                It’s me who’s that so when I first fell in love

                                                                                                I felt invincible

                                                fully caring about them, doing things

                                I felt I could see myself

                I felt I could fill my self fully in my life

doing things like sleeping

 

When I first fell in love I felt invincible. I felt I could see myself

fully in my life, doing things and fully sleeping around them,

caring about them

Amy De’Ath is the author of Not A Force of Nature, forthcoming from Futurepoem in 2024, as well as ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition (Capricious, NY), and Lower Parallel (Barque Press, London). With Fred Wah, she is the editor of a poetics anthology, Toward. Some. Air. (Banff Centre Press). Her scholarly research is focused on contemporary poetry and Marxist-feminist studies of gender and sexuality, and she is finishing a book about feminized poetry and the critique of value. She is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture, and Theory at King’s College London.

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