<< Issue 33
John Kinsella
After Coleen Fitzgibbon’s Late 1989 Film ‘Land of Nod’
and Being in My Days Past as an Addict
Homing in never honed
to step away a purchase
price a panhandle exchange
infinite step of tags
voicing surveillance static
out of phase; what value
a stash a code-of-conduct
stairway parody, prêt-à-porter
fix a vision away, to climb,
where I came from lost
for years, dead as a doornail
and brought back into the light —
so literal, surely you won’t
surely you can’t take that away;
how many hums of conversation
do you think are devoid of cliché
when you link life so differently?
Step out for the day, hanging
where what’s happening
public as photos as phases
passing the time parsing lines
of sax anonymity, mark to wile
away shadows and outlines
of exposure — you will, you
will be, stash and keep off
your person, to introduce later,
to let each particular take each
particular, bodily offload and uptake
leaf by leaf grain by grain
out of an old grammar,
step by step, familiar customer
by customer as nanoseconds graffiti
the responding conditions;
keep an eye casual as democracy
behind the scenes of secret
uptake patterns, nature writ
into street into nod-off of which
I searched and found friends
who were strangers looping
minutes and hours together
then gone as I was gone
because we lost similar places,
conversing under conditions,
transferring frames to different
neighbourhoods on different
continents — the learnt
and lost, the animation
of seasons of anger and loss
and frustration of where we
might go to find a way out,
through, relying on sources
of wastedness where politics
blame and confuse and have
moments of intense truth, too,
scaling and scratching a warmth
of annihilation in oratory
of purpose to keep going until
stairs come back down and doors
don’t need to open, to whistle
against ‘privilege’ of scored lights.
John Kinsella’s recent books of poetry include Insomnia (Picador, 2019/Norton, 2020), Brimstone: a book of villanelles (Arc, 2020) and Aftering Delmore Schwartz’s A Season in Hell [Rimbaud] Translation (Equipage, 2021). Recent critical titles include Beyond Ambiguity: tracing literary sites of activism (Manchester University Press, 2021) and Legibility: an anti-fascist poetics (Palgrave, 2022).