Digital Poetics 3.3: from ‘Failsun’ by Kyle Lovell

Source: Twitter @thaqafatalhind

And still. The brief sky shuddered in
candescent bushels. Sod and sodden.

//

I was naive as a hedgerow

I was a specific but delayed season
I think it was autumn

I was reading a friend’s poems to try on another I
washing through les corps de métier in yellow gloves

I was a monument to unnecessary engagements
a pair of tickets to the revivalist morality play
just for stalking horses and their handlers

I was watching a dismal giallo about the home counties
about the nitrous economy of pale canister shells
the roaring slivers of blue and cloudy knives

I was rattling a rusty sabre over John Barleycorn’s corpse
and praying that he would stay dead this time round

I was in agreement with the sinister old harlequin
tearing my poetry from the pity and its publishers
otherwise we would not be surviving this decade

I was trying to swallow this stupid fake island and forest
the whole of its dull black sun and howling centrality
its stagnant mourning ponds and neglected hegemony
so that the eggs might crack themselves in peace

I was feeling absolute and tracing a crisis of faith
as was the fashion of the time

I was a forsworn and sexual shame
all rumpled gait and stubbled jawline
a floral-maxi-dress-leather-jacket look
I think it was March

I was grey in grey and the middle was breaking into

//

No cops, no jails, and no linear fucking time
for them to clock our living hours.

//

If I say that everyone experienced
the same summer, would that trickle
down into a sense of community?
Are the verbs common enough?
Is the state ‘concerned or curious’
about our language games?
If I make it new, is that useful?
Am I being too harsh?
Am I not harsh enough?
Does this move anything at all?

//

“Darling, let’s not talk about geometry or the stars,
the four corners of our Barrett Home, its cracked french windows,
the ethics of strike action, half-finished triangles in the grout,
poppies, peonies, delphiniums, wisterias, hydrangeas et al.
God knows my heart isn’t really in it.”

Notes

See: Geoffrey Hill, ‘Mine angry and defrauded young’; Oxford Lecture (02/12/14)
Frances Kruk, Down you go, or, Négation de bruit
Gillian Rose, The Broken Middle: Out of Our Ancient Society; Mourning Becomes the Law
Douglas Oliver, Love in the Dark Valley

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Kyle Lovell is a poet & editor of Fathomsun Press. Their poems have appeared in such publications as LUDD GANG, Blackbox Manifold, & Pamenar Press. They are the author of Each Sharper Complication (legitimate snack, 2020), In the Debt of Love (And False Fire, 2021), & a collaborator on the seasonal pamphlet series, Sonnets for Hooch (Fathomsun / Mermaid Motel / Rat Press). They are based in the West Midlands.

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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.