50. I Dreamt All the Young Poets Wandering through the Building

for Emily Critchley

Hear through this place where the night falls bald

Upstairs we are all poets, young & ferocious, now

Rooty muumuus are our dress & we’re all very pissed

All, all again, mad, questing & dirty, sad

Voyage to where we are desired & forget the aches

Porridge plasters cover our mouths so we are silent too

Water’s memorable here because of what we do to it

Shaken, all again, repeatedly & vehemently into purple

Improved ways of manoeuvring ideology aren’t getting it

Whatever’s actual, that feels right, come on, oh

More hopeful decay to montage us off the shelf

It is just so noisy when that pattern cracks & breaks

I am hopeful despite this that what is strange will say

That we must never deny utterance to that hopeful “NO!”

But as we flurry through the corridors ignore each small fidget

Of dead white chalk, no more pleasure than cancer