Chamberlain Square, B3
a greyed shell
and the music is regretting, mostly
It's kept time.
shivering in bad nakedness
the wet facade
little ghost boys and girls
all fingering the rotting pages
roses discarded
dead petal signals
lettered leaves
What is all this writing?
places where hands
were moving
once they were
like non-work
dying brightness
The worms
hunker down
in the stacks;
they're the colour of numbers.
a schedule eating in
a catalogue of nearly happening
of going and of going
and of gone
The title refers to the current Central Library structure in Birmingham.
ReplyDeleteAt this very moment, vast amounts of book stock is being discarded. The greater quantity is simply thrown away, some goes on to booksellers (if the return is worth it).
They are making a new world.
http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/20070
DeleteWe are making a new world indeed. Perhaps even bleaker than that pictured by the visionary Nash.
ReplyDeleteNothing made or touched by the human hand. A heartless, soul-less, joyless, charmless, utterly feeling-evacuated world that can be negotiated better by software than by living beings.
The digits a poor imitation of worms.
Soon enough the memory of what came before ("little ghost boys and girls") can be extirpated as well, relegated to the bin of inconvenient dreams.
The thought of a world in which there is room only for that which is manageable is frightening. I still hold hope that "what came before" is resistant to their blithe hygienics.
ReplyDeleteWe'll have to haunt the scene of that administered peace and rattle those dirty chains for as long as we can, TC.
Unmanageability, in a curious and surely unpromising way, does after a time become almost "a way of life".
ReplyDeleteAnd talking of things to be romantically and probably also unrealistically nostalgic about (though it's a mere quarter-century ago), you've now had me dreaming all week of wandering through the impossible library.
An epistemic fugue; that's what a library is there for. I'd forgotten that scene.
ReplyDelete