Digital Poetics #18 Force of Nature: Amy De'Ath
It’s a good night to stay home & work a delivery tread
on the yeast farm, then pour oneself into a plaster-of-Paris
model of our own activities. It’s a fine night to entertain!
Neo-feudalism for indolent boomers. Birds in their little nest,
Hanging on the edge
Of earth as it is in heaven
But more than that, aside heaven and hell:
The quickness deepening a family of dead flies and a bee
Storm clouds lit up from the inside
Angel Hair anthology inscribed outwards to me
The two formalities walking out to dinner
Fluoride & Sestius, Discourse and Reason,
Samantha at the World’s Fair with her stupid husband.
Godly flourishing. God, I don’t care
I want
What you just had
You “army of People,” you logistical shadow. You want it
but you can’t need it, you love it but could never conceive it
to do your job, or to provide the material equipment
to cancel a city to bring you back to my feet, if life slips
easily then why
Are you so brittle? Lording it over me
like a natural dude science outdated, struck
for embezzlement, forgery, crooked stock jobbing, quick to
Go blue, I know of you
I look at this and just think
It’s not about NAFTA.
First there was piece work
then there was wage-labour
we should not allow this
then we should bury them.
At this point in the story
the inverted world itself—
And there was piece work again
imagination and virtuosity
liveness and death
a flashing ferris wheel catching
and throwing us off
once as predictive policing
second as unconscious bias training
Land in Saskatchewan, land in Delhi
As if the earth existed twice
a prism through the hook
Of a Lucretian swerve
a pretty planar fold of power
folded in upon itself and
everything else sublime
about you and that you want from women and gays
I don’t speak for women but I am compelled
to act as one and make a concept out of it.
I am both cottagecore and hope
you’re keeping safe. Resilience discourse
And electable bunny boiler, crimp-ed
Where the stars fell into themselves
A wildfire here
a cup of Stevia there,
A turgid cat in a car park I picked up by
Morrisons with a feeling of déjà vu for
Things and their
uses I may not divine
Social mobility to what?
A mysterious union
Comes catachrestically to me,
says what it is
and why I am, but I am no longer
what it was then and now:
I thought the job would be forever; my hang
glider to the soul
I look upon myself.
The bar slides down the screen.
You look over.
The first declension a downturned ladder to a depth
I don’t know any more, is it you
or me cooler now here
Than it is in there?
All wage-theft is theft, all proles
can be theivers so
We’re forms akin to ourselves
no longer recognizable
A nothingness to act on
as our activities act on us
Catching in antimony creased ideas beneath the skin –
a beautiful garden
the nineteen-sixties
a handsome river
the nineteen-seventies
a sweet dusky dune
the nineteen-eighties
a proper fleecing
the nineteen-nineties
city of atomic light
this casual gesture
hot body heat
these pleated hills
a fold of skin
quadrouple freedom
a deep green pool of sleep
behold me I’m you now
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This publication is in Copyright. Amy De'Ath, 2020.
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.
*
Amy De’Ath writes on contemporary poetry, gender and Marxism, and has published a number of chapbooks, including ON MY LOVE FOR gender abolition (Capricious) and Lower Parallel (Barque). She is Lecturer in Contemporary Literature, Culture and Theory at King’s College London.
