This piece stems from the Bush/Cheney days. I still like it. It’s fascinating watching British TV now, as the whole war is disentangled in an understated, completely devastating way. A monstrous saga, still not at an end, and powered by abstract conviction about the world and its desirable shape, its desirable resources. One is left wondering if it was really about the oil, and more about some sense of structural legacy, a fear, ultimately, of impotence.

From the Centre

Once your eyes have adjusted to the burning
scan through those racing battalions:
that mouth, idle elbows, and then tilt your head like this
to observe an arranging sea of grit. You can sense

the singing or crying, crying or singing,
where it is a high-throated sort of commotion
for the day. Anyway, no one wings it
in the compound. We’re poverty in motion.

How we ended up here is funny, like a shiny
belly or bare flank, or it could be that ash-
coloured, hose-damp concrete there.
Every child distorts the man, and man the cash.

Look at it raining down — sordid, localised love
beside electric couples filming, or are they fleeing,
the gift. It is an entirely live feed while we learn scripture
from wire. Someone says, ‘Nomads in waiting,’

as we become scintillating, free in the debris.
Don’t catch life out, then, and watch the traffic.
Now you know when the slap up meals fall out
of those sacks we’ll be taking home our pick

of your bomb-retiring heroes, day and night,
night and day, those clean-cut silent flags of ham-
burger heaven still warm under props. Later we’ll
be zooming or seething through that dream

up dislocated arterial routes, shaky gorgons
in the zone. Together again, we are a modern fog,
the idea of the better dead, immortalised grey
eyes above subtitled totally idealised dialogue.

No one adheres to the precise terms any more.
The streets shiver like widows this afternoon of very
large government, we’ll ape out the speeches
of the ape. Our country is his artery.