Ed Luker’s new collection Other Life (Broken Sleep Press, December 2020) gathers poems written over the past five years. True to the European tradition of lyric poetry, but not too true, he sings the passions and ironies of our social pleasures in the present day: sirens ringing through yoga studios in gentrifying cities, a clichéd, still joyful relation to the moon, and the work of hope after recent and future political defeats.
–Editors

***

What does it mean to feel like you had your moment,
that time is something that has been stolen away from you,
that in the aftermath of that theft | a moment | your life is now
no more than the expenditure of compressed air leaking out
the backdoor, out a hole bored through the permafrost
stuffed down to the bottom of the planetary movements
of the universal dirge of the tepidly incinerating binbag?
Not that the moment was just yours but that its possibility
had been snatched away from you as the lid of the horizon
slammed shut on your fingers strapped to the underside of
the chassis of failure, irreverent chariot, because you then
were not you, not in the way that you feel yourself to be now,
how long can we mourn, endlessly diving into the river,
fitful, broken and tired | exhausted, empty and spent,
and that is what movement meant, to have been thrown, wrenched,
taken up: to have had every sense that possibility itself
had come truly alive with the future’s promise of its own end,
the cessation of the pressure of the measure of days,
a ring of batons, a chorus of orders, a phalanx of shields,
digital clocks falling out the sky, every second suspended
in the instant of its trembling, a giant hourglass spinning
round as the riotous dissolution of time as it is felt when it
breaks you, fireworks racing down the throats of policemen,
paint flying across the windows of every store on Oxford Street,
marching past the Ritz, hungering to eat their opulence,
marbles under the feet of their horses, hideous horses,
past all the monuments to vain glory (masking death and sugar),
as truncheons cracked skulls, as sticks flew, as it all burst out,
that you found yourself hurtling towards a sky on fire,
with the joy diffuse in communion, as a condition of trust,
blessed to be taken apart, tender and ready with your comrades,
movement itself a taking of parts. And what has been stolen,
sequestered into the cells of the regular clipping of the imagination?
Now all feels withheld like a swollen door ajar in a damp flat,
where nothing lights the spirit because the isolated cold
fills our every breath with its rot. All this stale air,
all this time compressed in our shoulders. And, friends,
it is rotten, to have had history pull you up and spit you
out again, for a few good moments, for nothing more
than debt and waged servitude, all the hours stolen for gas bills,
their world not built for you, its monstrous incursions
of spectacular boredom, the sheer misery of getting by,
the mob’s grief with a pang, and now without a mob.
And the pangs ring harder as our bones chill, waiting,
we drink til dawn and hope to find something in it,
this city is full of wolves where nothing is plenty for them to eat,
they pull apart the sinews of matter, on which we expend
ourselves paid down in rent and double rent. It is
the exhaustion, a cloth pressed firmly round the escape pipe,
troubled air smothering and poisonous, nausea & inertia,
as smoke fills your tear ducts and the tongue dusts,
two twins holding each of your hands and nailing you
to the floor. And what way to get out when the escape is full
of rats and the hatches are being smoked out
with putrescent black smoke, all the exits bolted shut.
I’ll be honest I want to shake you out of this,
I have wanted to for quite some time, it’s been too long,
I want to pull you out of this wretched hole, I can’t grasp
how you're so gripped by this, it’s been far too long.
And I speak through the imperfect medium of you,
for your moment, because they are my moments, too,
all of the moments stretched and then compressed,
into the edge of the present and held against our throats.
And I never really understood why people would want
to set all of the institutions on fire, apart from prisons,
but now I’m not so sure, burn it all perhaps.
I didn’t want to set the academy on fire, I wanted
to take it apart very slowly, brick by brick,
with all my friends talking and smiling as we lay waste –
book by book – to the academy,
mapping out the stars of the negative,
such that our moment would not be explosion
but the turning inside out of the present,
pulled through the restitution of everything
pressed up against itself, implosive sparking,
like unwelding the seams of the world’s currency,
such that the stars all shimmer, red and tremblant,

and the world’s two faces collapse,
the sky tinged pink,
with the promise of possibility.
But now the tigers of wrath
lie sedate in their cages,
and the whispers of fire,
burnt out, we're dormant,
with you I want to imagine
a place where this
is not enough.