Jem Rolls

It's like the Lord of the Flies in there, and I'm hiding in the jungle from my own bleeding poem.

They sashay into the far reaches of hypertension like an existential French movie and come back to haunt you like the bastard sons of the Mongol bleeding hordes.

And it's like all the bits they will cut from the next Tarantino movie because they will be too violent.

Or you think you've got the balance just right, then the line tips up at the end and all the words fall off into the sea.

And what you wanted to write was a nice long hour piece about traffic jams.

In fact, this year.

But instead, one moment, it's the entire castle of the Wizard of Oz in the retreat from Moscow.

That's every retreat from Moscow there's ever been, simultaneously.

And the next moment, it's like a cartoon dictionary jumping in the paper shredder and firing out words like bullets.

yeah words could be mean they say nasty things they ruin the party you sling them out the door they come back in the window you shore up the leaks against them and the next thing you know they're on the inside the possibilities have started multiplying by the second and before you can say umberto bloody echo the place is bursting at every scene like the

suddenly get an overly high opinion of themselves and start proclaiming dissent from the latin or the greek and adding extra syllables just to be poncy luck stands up one day and says from now on you can call me serendipity or complicate gets for social realism says from now on it's tough now they come in one morning they find they come over all purist and earnest and bullying and hemingway and have slung out all the adjectives who pick at me all aggressive and malevolent

On the way in.

Or, except they then decide to all exercise their own free will and all vote Republican.

Except first they all want to use the bathroom, except a couple of them take me aside and start talking about William Carlos Williams and Lacan and Don Patterson and the current developments of modern poetry and why isn't their poem like this?

And the word coy.

The word coin starts flirting with me, just to get her own line.

Then, two weeks later, I come in after a lovely weekend in Reykjavik, where they've all had a vote, and they've decided to reject the tyranny of the author in favour of the great democracy of the reader, the audience, where they, the words, are the vanguards, the conduit of said great democracy.

And I find myself, me, me, standing there like a bitter toy going, if I'm out of a job, everybody's out of a job.

We demand capitalisation.

But the verbs, are the verbs happening?