Drew Milne
WELCOME TO THE BIOTARIAT
|
‘... “we” — all of life — are in the same desperate and drunken
boat — constrained there by a system of total and planetary accumulation that even the term “capitalism” perhaps cannot adequately capture anymore.’ Stephen Collis, ‘Notes Toward a Manifesto of the Biotariat’ |
come on in and take the weight off
the biota of your ready-made duals
here now home again with the biome
that first cut into the we grammar
the sum and sun of the broken dome
murderous placeholders in balloons
drifting into microbeads of autumn
now plastic of our passing fossils
each enclosure a step in the sinks
the gyres and for bronze read iron
for copper read coltan for peat so
coals then uranium songs for pluto
read nucleosynthesis into the pond
and into the teeth of the capitals
marked for extraction from commons
so private now here a star chamber
let lichen kind be a leading light
how as ever each oxygenation event
obliges us with this solar commune
filled with airs of snowball earth
tuned into asterisms of the hyphae
drifting eastwards over broken sky
diverted by the clasp of acid rain
into sustainable agendas come song
each weak competitor giving up the
ghosts of capital as radionuclides
braid Oklo uranium to Bikini Atoll
metabolic drift done to daily dead
grafts of the pacific trash vortex
in the red data collection folders
until cell around cell the extinct
rota throws some ledger of elegies
the advance of the fungi gives way
and offers twilights of the lichen
slow to indulge every vinyl cradle
ears for subtle eyes in dull lifts
its musical of irony dripping with
because but as friendly adjectives
seep into tropes or morbid figures
even harmonies in a house of cloud
radio falls or soredia as pioneers
by the minimalist pores letting go
every lit contest of the faculties
does the prefigured representation
yours ever among monumental warmth
all gone to seed in rotting litter
the refrain of how symbiosis rules
with mutuals and windfalls for two
the biota of your ready-made duals
here now home again with the biome
that first cut into the we grammar
the sum and sun of the broken dome
murderous placeholders in balloons
drifting into microbeads of autumn
now plastic of our passing fossils
each enclosure a step in the sinks
the gyres and for bronze read iron
for copper read coltan for peat so
coals then uranium songs for pluto
read nucleosynthesis into the pond
and into the teeth of the capitals
marked for extraction from commons
so private now here a star chamber
let lichen kind be a leading light
how as ever each oxygenation event
obliges us with this solar commune
filled with airs of snowball earth
tuned into asterisms of the hyphae
drifting eastwards over broken sky
diverted by the clasp of acid rain
into sustainable agendas come song
each weak competitor giving up the
ghosts of capital as radionuclides
braid Oklo uranium to Bikini Atoll
metabolic drift done to daily dead
grafts of the pacific trash vortex
in the red data collection folders
until cell around cell the extinct
rota throws some ledger of elegies
the advance of the fungi gives way
and offers twilights of the lichen
slow to indulge every vinyl cradle
ears for subtle eyes in dull lifts
its musical of irony dripping with
because but as friendly adjectives
seep into tropes or morbid figures
even harmonies in a house of cloud
radio falls or soredia as pioneers
by the minimalist pores letting go
every lit contest of the faculties
does the prefigured representation
yours ever among monumental warmth
all gone to seed in rotting litter
the refrain of how symbiosis rules
with mutuals and windfalls for two
NATURAL HISTORY ON FIRE
you heard it here last as neithers
doing what did for offices of note
wrecking balls in a field of socks
and singing tents to kitchen sacks
parcelled out to thanks in the sky
but what x marks worse for garbage
grills tending shoulder to markets
and rival strains for ash bouillon
all satanic landfill and electrics
as the corvids glean through dross
CARBONS IN THE SKY
pump out the wrong songs and as kind
as you meant it the climate changing
is not some mood or wallflower sulks
oh so macho and razzle dazzled among
interim larks hissing into the bored
riffs and ambition or twinset chimes
then never quite on side with liners
as repairs more icecube then iceberg
a conceptual brine come home so rapt
did you not find such lichen be gone
among sometimes dirts that speculate
how long flares are so there in dust
or tuning how concepts cannot labour
what the trace is such cutting crime
far out, far off, scarcely for stuff
its fix is not ours, even the shades
do flammable politics, market forces
shaped falsely in endless litigation
that is there still the hate grammar
what comes over but covers such lies
sewn to a blunt end of brutal truths
how the many things best left undone
turn babies with flies in their eyes
into skies for pesticides over genes
that human kinder left to build sips
to each distress of lovely noticings
given wild grammar and three monkeys
or snobbery material on a scar barge
giving as it happens industrial stew
and as noise going through the gears
WHO KNEW
about the arsenic dump under Giant Mine
up in Yellowknife among the territories
not SombaKay or just where the money is
in the diamond capital of North America
well who can even bring to mind 237,000
tons of anything in one place and toxic
inscribed on the departing gifts of men
who came and mined and left neat poison
trioxides leaking into Great Slave Lake
so it will come as no surprise that the
fridge leaks too and the crazy solution
is to freeze the ground in for eternity
permafrost is relaxing poolside and the
icing on the cake is that coolants cost
the earth now and forever into billions
the given name for which is remediation
poison sewn all along the caribou trail
and even if each last soil were removed
where would they bury belated apologies
to whatever living can survive the this
Copyright © Drew Milne 2018
Drew Milne’s collected poems, In Darkest Capital, were published by Carcanet, UK in 2017. This collection includes Blueprints & Ziggurats and Lichens for Marxists. He wrote Reactor Red Shoes (Veer 2013) with John Kinsella. His work has featured in several anthologies, including Conductors of Chaos, ed. Iain Sinclair (1996), Keith Tuma’s Anthology of Twentieth Century British and Irish Poetry (2001), and Vanishing Points: new modernist poems, edited by Rod Mengham and John Kinsella (2004). Recent poems have been published in PNReview, Poetry London, Angelaki, Zarf, Chicago Review, Lana Turner Journal, and Blackbox Manifold.