Two poems by Joshua Stanley
PRAYER
It is time for us now
to talk about my job
we have avoided this
topic for too long
and we must talk about it
I have chosen to be
a union organizer
and a poet not because
there is an easy life
but because it is a
speculative life a
life I know I can want
not a life it is
easy to want now
not a life that I
am rewarded by daily
but a life for a future completion
company balances with solitary
a life / I believe
in a bigger imagination
and it is on that that /
I want /
we must make it cohere
the possible imagination
of a different vision
nervousness happiness
to complete the words
pink cloud accession
human / we must /
for whom is this song
it is for me and for
no-one and for everyone
who is or for who / is yet / is yet to be
elaborated decadence
I will not miss the chance of
my life / to write my own
imagination
and to write the imagination
of a fading spirit of power
through work or for the
jobless we must talk
about it we must
make it cohere
the holy order to love
through skies strikes occasionally clear
eye sights that come and go.
WHAT OF COURSE
Ash willow
work language
sepias in its name
you find me
and do the songs
continue
do they
sing a song of
chancing air,
con sung off
course continue.
Bright now hear me
of sat and listened
write the names on board
flower backstop
a mother’s milk and blindness,
I ask the question why
continue to song flight,
does life absorb
through struggle,
contra backwards,
in what
does easiness imagine of course
rippling down the stream
May and a
pril
months of strife
the words continued
somewhere
emplacements plasticked
new arctic
under pressure
no flesh knows no one war land
oil to come in thine is the glory
tax decrease
or socialism set for rich.
Have I lost enough
to make sense
of becoming normal sing
passion curve
exit to tread
break down the granite
no human
next step of course
in singsong carry
through baby talk endured
others fluttered.
Ambition for
return
it masks the soul
to burn
what in our doors
we learn
our politics is what
to earn.
Ancient coin
we’re fucked by luck
says simply system city,
familial fate
body parts shared
in blood-weaved magic tree.
But when the coin
goes in and out
no longer one but three;
so hand in hand
the gift was tamed
bought by inheritance freely.
Why do I need this, the whole,
land flown joy source, I saw it on
the water and I saw it on the
cloud, I saw it come rising home gator
together, what at that leaf,
flickering heart of you flying over,
I saw it, empired video hand stretched
out, what saw 40% from
80% epic, fragrant time zone
language strange
thrall in another
state controlled
sojourn absence,
blood weather
up ahead.
Moon milk
comes to me
pure vision correct love want /
still music body rock hill tied up
as face looks
meander:
drink our fill.
It is the violence to come
that fizzes me,
epoch friend
which you
indeed
main see
dull roaring summer
beechams pill capsuled
nationalist odyssey
the long way round
or wrong
the parents having to be found
we press the button
ruin our day.
Nettle parch the blister
truth child desire too much
she knows how much I’ve missed the
stretch decade socialism lost
what do you want top pay
of switch, of what,
hid med cymbals for loud
coping with hand melt juice lab
the made up cure for cash.
Wherein, where end, of why
I saw nothing but the dyson
that nature abhorred, I saw
nothing but the vast landscape
of emptiness stretch out before
me, filling me with the void
and with the absorption of
others and with myself detached
from the planets and neutrinos
around me, filling me with
connection and with desire
and with emptiness, a void
I found in the song that
sang to me and pulled me
to the hill, I saw lips
struggling to sing and I saw
my own choking and the
bells and clicks and tunes and
drawn letters were connected
and the void and I woke up
and I imagined the future corridor
and I was filled with the void
of cupboards and possible voice
and filled with love not at my
expansion into the void, but that the
void contain things so different
from me that in fact I already
was and rhapsodically it shone of forever.
Sometimes songs return
sometimes fade apart
apocalypse
of course
twice bitter
blasted stem yellow
pedal stamen
homeward soon
behind milk
the danger is there
beaten out
went on your way
in happiness.
Void loiter
the sworn switch commitment
uncertain vaults
want
milk mild
to understand
milk mild
unimportant now
portalled for
sex dreams rapture
so hard to tell these days
milk mild.
Ecstatic fission step by step
disaster
understanding you does not matter
what matters is that
I find my own way
forward
and the same is
true of being
understood by you being
specific and singular
as group consensus
is my politics of
militant strategy centralism.
At the table
the void
reaches out to
the void
and with
out end
love love
Joshua Stanley did a PhD at Yale on British romantic poetry and now works as a union organizer for Unite Here. He is a poet and author of, among other pieces, Contranight Escha Black and Romantic Leninist Epic Fragments.
