Samuel Glover

The launch for that book wot I wrote is done, and you can buy one now. if you don't have a copy yet, follow my handy 7 step process to rectify your mistake:

1) consider the inadequate life choices which have resulted in my book's absence from your coffee table/bookshelf/spot-lit podium.

2) accept that a part of you was conscious of your wrongdoing, but know that the past is the past, and that everyone, even you, deserves a second chance. make some tea. hope is not yet dead.

3) go to https://www.speculativebooks.net/shop-1, where you'll find a selection of Well Good Books for you to choose from. peruse through these and buy a few of them, because, having completed stages 1) and 2), you are no longer the arsehole you once were.

4) allow your mouse to linger lustfully over the thumbnail of The Goodbye Raps, which is the one wot I wrote. I'm right behind you as you do this, and I'm so proud of you, like, mother-at-an-egg-and-spoon race proud. just don't turn around though, as I may startle you, and you're too close to lose resolve now.

5) pause for a moment to appreciate the excellent cover art by the talented Sean Mulvenna, who has a bunch of cool stuff at this other website, https://www.seanmulvenna.work. unless you're using a potato for a laptop, you could, I don't know, open it in another tab. just do it. don't be a dick.

6) buy the fucking book already.

7) do whatever boring shit you do when you're not reading my book, until my book arrives. and then read my book. and then tell other people about my book. tell your postman through the letter box, shout it out proudly, say, "no please I don't want to hurt you I just have a book recommendation to discuss please come back."

bird shit

it is the first day of it.
I have dressed in my suit.
I have taken my diploma to the yard and burnt it
stood watching it with my dog and my coffee.
I think aloud of the futility of a knowledge incommunicable.
the dog doesn’t say much.
it’s just his way.

bacon wrapped
sanitised by cellophane
a product, no longer a life,
but meat as means
ended for my ends.
no matter
my life is a walking through the halls of murder
with my eyes closed.
I eat as the dog salivates profusely and fights with himself -
sometime he would have just taken it from me
and that, as it’s said, would be that.

showering.
through the frosted glass of the window
displaying drunk blurs of reality
I see the curvaceous triangle of a butterfly in profile
bleached grey
black tinged, entirely static
resting on the glass.

education in the classics compels me to stir poetry
but I have a job and find myself instead

- in the company of men.
there is a fat alcoholic, perhaps queer,
a balding lech
a few others.
a women has the audacity to appear visible to one of our party.
“what of her, young blood?”
“she has a terrific pair,”
I say,
“of personalities”
at which they laugh
having established that I am hip
if dislocated.
“I would not inflict myself upon a spring barbour juliet,
you fiends,” I say, and smile knowingly.

for the first few days, I find it difficult to speak.
without a diploma I am something like a man undercover
who has been excommunicated from The Cause.
I possess no context.
I am now simply a man in a situation
like many men in situations
with the remnant of a memory
which implies a greater thing which must be fought for.
now there is simply drudge
things begin to muddy.

the language which I possess to articulate this position
belongs to a place which no longer exists
which I know for a fact is make believe.
it was a filter through which reality might appear beautiful and
child-like.
but now I am faced with what reality is
the truth of the world of men.
they spit and slap one another on the shoulder
use words like “faggot” and “cunt” non-ironically
and worse than all else
they are intrinsically decent
they are the fathers of sons and daughters
at first, I can’t understand this.

the men ask,
“how did you find yourself here, young blood?”
“where else is there to be, my brothers?” I reply.
after some specific time has passed
I am drinking in this little dive place
it’s sunk into the ground
there are these windows that start at gutter level
you can sit down in the gutter and look up at the fruits of
architecture
which lean over like bullies do in school doorways
this looking up is meant to enliven, so I’m told.
all it does is remind me I’m on the ground
I wonder what’s so good about being up there
and why they’d rather not come down.

I see a bus go past, and someone has scratched the word
“queer”
into the glass, with an arrow pointing to where the driver sits.
from the moment he sits down to his work, 
the whole world is calling him a queer.
I admire the ingenuity of the author, and file the technique for
later use.
I wonder if they listen to their dog
if they’ve ever fucked anything.
I wonder that it matters.
or if I only ask the question, because I can’t afford to think that it does.
us queers must stick together, after all.
there is a women with a barbour jacket at work 
who strikes me as compellingly familiar.
we shall see what we shall see.

my dog has screwed nothing but his bed
but
no one thinks any less of him for it.
man, however, is a social animal
he has grand aims
a dog’s aims, and a dog’s line, is less than a man’s
if a man neglects his business
he’s left in the mail room.
mine is a generation of panda-men
who would rather chew bamboo.
I respect my dog more than most men
he has more to tell me than most.
he cannot speak
these are not coincidences.

I was having a conversation with a young buck
back when
who claimed the doggerels ate the doggerels
because it was in their nature.
I refuted this,
I said if you find yourself a frog in a crock pot
you had best learn to like the heat.
it occurs to me now that it works both ways.
if you’d like to force your hand
and change your behaviours
you had best change your environment
an act once deemed impassive becomes an act
a most grave act
of free will.
I am watching the balding man pick his nose.
I am looking around to see what I can see.

I have this friend who comes round
I will say,
“what gives,” and vend him a beer and a beat
he’ll tell me how it is out there
in the world of the young and the vibrant.
I don’t much like the sound of it
I lay down in the grass of this summer garden and get lit
while the dog dances round me
as if I were a may pole
or a burning thing.
I read to him the verse of the devil incarnate
as he barks
without reason.
I persist in speaking, aloud.

later I’ll take a run and sweat out the fury and the madness.
I am the man.
even my dog knows this
and my dog knows squarely

fuck all.

diploma ashes fertilise my soil
but nothing grows in there but grass which must be cut.
work begetting work begetting
nothing.
they would tell me that I could exist without the world of things
that my voice and my life 
were merely actants in some self-sufficient teleplay
without a singular writer
that come what may there is no sin to lament
no virtue over which to weep with joy.
without good or evil,
what am I?

on my way back from the run,
I see the outside of the bathroom window
it turns out that the butterfly was just
bird shit.
I stare at the bird shit for a long time.
start to laugh and
gather some of the piss and the vinegar from off the killing floor.
I pluck my head from their guillotine.
this can all be fixed, I know it can.
I slam my picket fence
I slam the door of the vestibule.
the dog is frightened and his hackles up and his tail is wagging.
we are ready to work.

sir says

sir says I’m a credit to my generation
the way that I suspend my disbelief in the neoliberal nightmare
lucid dream my way through an artless
kiss ass degree
into a spinning chair
seasick and afraid
claw at my thinning hair
piss away all that I am
sir likes that last part in particular.


sir says greed is good
sir is less gordon gecko
more of a chameleon.
he has no colours of his own
they change when it’s convenient.
they neither broke nor made the mould for him
they didn’t need one.
he’s the puddle on the cutting floor
left over
when they finished with the propaganda reel
rewrote the century of the nazi
let the market decide
they said
we’re simply too depraved and weak
we people
to decide it for ourselves
they condemned us to repeat the twentieth on the history channel.
sir wants me to sell myself
sir wants me to make a job of lying
(that’s a career spent on your back).
sir wants me to fear for the security of my home
because if I fear that
I won’t precipitate a change.
that’s death row rental and fuck all council housing.

sir adores my pompadoured haircut
short back and sides
it reminds him of his vegan daughter.
he’d gladly introduce us because he knows I’d never pork her.
sir is relieved I’ve accepted metro-sexuality so manfully
that I spend my salary on hand lotion.
that I waste my anger on identity politics without one to politicise
(chase my stubby tail)
that I’ve adopted the inane vocubulary of a man child
spends half his time
tagging posts on hash with online phantoms
the other
looking out at life from the threshold of the front door as it walks by.

he needs someone upon this spinning chair
or he’d be spanked over his boss’s knee.
the dung must roll downhill
that’s why sir took away my union
because the shit stands still on a level playing field.

so sir gives me free coffee and
free dental and
a reacharound.
sir is nothing but the madam in a brothel
who’ll never meet the schmuck who owns the lease.
sir is a spayed kitten on a leash.
sir says
“I could appreciate why-”
bitch please
you could take the hat off.
or give rise to a twenty first century schizoid mammy’s boy
a jester for the courtly crimson king
who can point at truth and say
“isn’t that nice?”
smile wanly as the courtiers look away.

he wanders across the draw bridge while the purple piper sings

“your cold sweat greases the grinding wheel 
in the court of the crimson king.”

sir’s never heard of that one
sir listens to the charts.
perhaps someday sir will snort one of my lines off a coldplay CD
and through the thunder of his racing heart
catch a murmur in his conscience that compels him to quit talking shite.


clock in
sir says
I oblige.