Thursday, July 8, 2021

Escape Velocity (2012)

This poem is about my feelings of alienation on being a working class man living a middle class life. It is certainly not how I would approach the subject now but I think it has something original to say and says it well on its own terms. Let me know what you think!

Escape Velocity


Up and away, across concatenations of roof-tiles

and satellites, our flight from hopelessness


to exhaustion ends here in these migratory oases

of middle-class suburban botanicals, cookbook


horticulture, avocado and jojoba, all outside-in.

None here can speak of ambition without irony.


A nagging insistence wormholes our detachment:

some accents are harder than others to shake—


some cause my jaw to ache. Our old neighbourhood

reminds me not of itself, but of my primary school:


too small in every sense. It is how we must appear

to those already in orbit who blasted off from here.


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