Management Song

hang pig’s skull over conned
          roads, polity of glass. what’s waste,
          what’s work, the treatment plant’s
          septage. I’m implicated in the tip, heap
          of dusked cities: landfill: screen bicker:
          snoozed lyric. my little viral song.

if I eat in coffee outlets. nervous ads,
          earth-sick, potential in burnt tenements; we
          working seethe eachself. safe planes
          browsing bluescreen. elect to blue-sky
          think: division
          fault, non-maskable
          interrupt. hoaxed
          speech, our.

I turn myself away far more, far much.
          unlike aisled skyscrapers, pavements
          cleaned with love: dream the death
          of credit, now the death of love.

Bovine Year

Wow era: numb
          from the supermarkets,
the shorelark’s work
          nothing. Flats
blank knuckled dunes
          we walk over.

Like battery hen, what’s
          use. Screen the conveyors
of private opinion. We
          eat real global;
I think enclosed, each trend
          of fumy,

calculable sea. Our
          sadness, globed. We
shuffle this unsociable
          coast. The year
is elderly, and I
          need you always.

Dominic Hale was born in Lancashire and lives in Edinburgh. Poems recently appeared in the Edinburgh Review.

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