Pouring One Out for the Petty-Bourgeoisie

Ed Luker

At the Ledbury, shards of a thousand years of compacted pressure, borne of fire,
Pierced through the taut surface of the camembert with revolutionary exactitude,
Lissitzky with the crystalline edge forced into a splintered baseball bat,
Pour one out for the petite-bourgeoisie, a nightcap to end all nights,
Small business döners cleave the meat from fresh importation of the Afghan poppy,
Every scratch card and coke can on the Kingsland Road realized in human traffick,
Some of my friends are forced to sell their bodies, I sold mine by choice, lay in bed
For two weeks, read Invocation by Jo Walton and
                                                                               watched Transformers: Dark of the Moon,
I hate Shia Laboeuf, every movement of his hideous face, I wish Eric
Cantona would drop kick it into oblivion and the fish chase the trawler,
Transmute into an army of bipeds, kill the crew, throw them overboard and
Commandeer the boat to Dalston – assassinate every bearded poet.
Pour one out for the petite-bourgeoisie, a nightcap to end all nights,
Scum is the by-product, it drips from the pavement into the gutter,
Amassing in the vomit of every ‘creative’, it bleeds through the drains,
Beneath the surface lies a secret history, the weeping sore of bitumen
With its teeth ripped out and red bull puss an oleaginous mist of Unique Selling Points,
Scum, as in, Looters ARE, as in, they scrape away and erase, they continuously deface
The surface, a truly Euclidean plane. Someone told me it is only realizable as an idea,
An idea hammered into the terraform. When I walk down Broadway Market, I think about fire, I
think about police, the nightstick, I think about how stupid fashion ninjas look, I think “Why the fuck
did I just spend £3 on a sausage roll, and, why does it come in a box?”
Pour one out for the petite-bourgeoisie, a nightcap to end all nights,
The fish arrive from Dalston, dragging the severed heads of poets by their beard hair,
Some smashed up grit and washing powder rubbed into the chin of the poet Iain Sinclair,
I stare into his beady eye, “Hack…Rose…Red…”, off with rose head,
Pour one out for the petite-bourgeoisie, a nightcap to end all nights,
It is placed into my hands, I hold onto his ears, the mouth still jerking with a waifish creak
The voice of Iain Sinclair speaks to me, he says “I am your father”, he says,
“so much talk | about the underground is silly. WHEN it would re- | quire a constant effort
to keep below the surface”, the lights go out, his eyes go out, two pearl earrings roll from
Under his tongue, I pick up the dead head of Iain Sinclair it is now robotic & cut from circuit
Boards of Rwandan coltan stitched into the collective memory of the AQA assessment team,
Dropkicking the android head of robot Iain Sinclair, I scream fuck the surface, fuck my AO2’s,
Fuck staying above ground, if I mean it – it’s only when I pay it,
                                                                                                        and the underground road
was real. In Paris, Beckett fled the Gestapo and Alfred Peron was truly captured,
The shopkeepers wanted the state of violence to secure their profits, they wanted scum
Swept away, to disappear, the state can make you disappear, one cannot refuse
In plain sight, so off I go to Ur-Bane Outfitters, to clothe my crushed soul in the darkness,
Pour one out for the petit bourgeois, a nightcap to end all nights,
I reach for my balaclava, Nathaniel Turner had visions of blood on the corn,
The first shall be last, I shall be somewhere, in a library, writing a poem,
The quaint ink of my quill caressing the parchment with a quickening fervour,
How is class constituted in the concrete lobster pot of post-industry, how does
Its conflict appear, who and how many will die, what songs will we sing to remember them, “after
staff chased off the looters, guests were given glasses of alcohol including, champagne and whisky to
calm their nerves.” Pour one out, pour one out.