Joy (1)

  Today I will speak with the bank and the person
who frightens, as it happens is closer, almost nothing
today but terror then hearing that 6000 workers at the bank
     will lose their jobs, what better day
to face down tube and confess the failures even just to ask
are you okay. To which the answer is a recorded ‘yes’, but first
 
   I will make some soup, archaic in a maddening agitation of stretches
called “God Soup” and think back to my dream where the bank
congratulated me on a sensible decision and I was there in the enormous
     branch of Homebase piling up wood to exchange for money
then going to buy Starr Hamilton’s collection, it was good in that dream.
They kept me asleep made me ready for the fear that bulged from the day;
   
      so first I will make this soup, second I will stand back up, third
hear some shithead MP who says that we should visit
the library. But mister, the library was closed.
     Even better! The next one is twenty five miles away, you could jog there,
and your mind, a full destroyer, devourer of ‘the arts’, in Strathclyde
they came at knife crime like an enormous boat turning

     in the harbour. Fuck it. Like a diagnosed hinge I go on in the corner
of your door. I am inside the through space like a vacated study
trembling against the walls, wondering, the code
     seeps from the wall still stuck until it’s worked out;
I have made the soup nostalgic and pathetic as it seems
I do believe in the remedy of a built up surface, a complexion

     don’t trust anyone who’d tell you to do this like that minister
same as saying love trumps hate or thoughts and prayers
never advise me, I ask of the bank as it changes giant hands,
     hands in the air over the visible cosmos hands change
and we remain like the teeth which hang in the gums
the sun is behind a cloud, the bank is its teeth. Beyond

     this corner of the sky, like a damaged cutlass the sinew
jerks to a halt at the end of the phone the person who is working
soon to make a call like this, identical but for knowledge. Hindsight
     as a populist myth like we are not required by God
neither they for us, utterly superfluous the dream slips
on better decisions, the kindness of unkind vectors, the reverie

     of everything in this world minus the popular tring
of jets, forced labour, eating the ground, rotting the limbs,
razoring the caravan, curbing opinion, never having known
     a non local sufferance, inlets of unmonitored finance,
a man called Fred Goodwin, a man called Warren Buffett,
a man called John Locke, a man called a man called a man across the sky

     for now not to recourse to their long names, the origins
of a picked battle gently not flowering, not mounting
the sex gland of a reassuring magic. I stir into this simulated oblivion
     the agonies of a kindness and the wrongs of its name.