Category: i] toblerone (a brexit poem)

a felled tree blocked our path—round we went in the mud

i seemed to have a big thing for m-dashes in the poem’s early days. this line is super literal. i was walking with a few friends on a trail near kelburn castle and came to a point blocked by great big tree. so we got our shoes all muddy and carried on our way. a fun day enjoyed by all. i went to john lewis to look at mattresses later that day, then watched sport on tv. one of the all time great days.

domsing bad, wee butt tender, hungrier than a mothered flincher

i think this was just a whatsapp message i sent and then thought ah well that’ll do for poetry today. and then at some point later i thought, ‘maybe i should change the incestuous swearword to something more (and less) family friendly.’ it probably isn’t going to be remembered as one of the all time best lines in the english language. i guess this is all a very elaborate way of telling the world that in early january of 2024, my butt hurt from deadlifts

hamstrung by the ancestors of landlords

i don’t know when i came up with this line but i knew it was an opening line and i had to just sit on it until i found a project for it. for centuries, the land has been owned by the descendants of cronies of corrupt kings who claimed the divine right to steal nature’s bounty.

the very first principle of liberty, per john locke, is that by mixing one’s labour with the land, one can take ownershup of it, as long as enough is left for others. this caveat was quickly forgotten by libertarians and aristocrats alike.

beneathe the distant barren peaks of a toblerone

i had decided i wanted to write an epic poem about brexit called toblerone after a shrinkflation measure increased the steepness and gaps of the chocolate troughs. i started writing the poem several times without success before it clicked in 2024 – brexit is a permanent process, the poem must also be a permanent process.

the traumatic trough entrenches resilience

the trough refers to both the increased gap between the peaks of the austerity toblerone, and to the inverse trough, that of the profit hungry pigs, feating on the chocolate shavings. from the many to the few, a tale as old as yawn is it that late already

a slight slide and crunch underfoot on icy steps

well it was january. i can’t recall the steps referred to, but i have always delighted in the crunch of virgin frost underfoot. it is january again now, and there is again ice underfoot, although it is the solid, rather than the crunchy sort. significantly more lethal.

the organism (the leviathan) slips into disequlibrium

my body like my polity. recalling thomas hobbes’s leviathan, a brutal philosophy of man in the state of nature, who by neccesity, in order to escape murderous anarchy, incorporates a vile king to rule over him. but people are perhaps fundamentally disagreeable. all tyrannies eventually end and it is the natures of states to be merely that: temporary states of being.

after 14 years of conservative incompetence, great britain, it seemed to me, was becoming ungovernable. likewise, my body, my monsterous corpus, was succombing to a shellfish related vomitting bug. sick with norovirus – i slipped into a debilitating disequilibrium.