Outside of the office I’m a poet, I’d say. That crap done with for two days I can be a poet now I don’t write poems but I am a poet who else is a poet we’re all poets if we wannabe a poet just be a poet say we’re a poet like I’m a poet, a howling dub spool.

. . .

From the stuff industrial meat factories are made of, I went to work because I hated work, I despised the hassle of leaving the apartment 8am with the extra pain being 2^nd of Janus (just wanted bed) but like a grey sunken crud I stepped onto Quicker Street in a sort of frosty moisture that clenches your face, creeps down your neckline as I traipsed in sluggish thoughts of seeing nothing, scraps of pavement and inbound asphalt broken by a glance thru an iron spiked fence, a burned-out skyrocket, a clump of dogshit frozen blue. Memory is a spool. This memory spins as cars whizzed by and some articulated truck, the driver I imagined drunk, swerving off the autobahn, crushing us for dust. I halted into a shiver. Waiting to cross an oldish man stooped like he used a walking stick but there was no walking stick, only his left lapel bore a badge of the three-bladed radiation symbol. Breath piped from his mouth: kettle steam, I thought. But that’s him gone, over the wet road we trod and what I’m getting at is how: sod it: can’t-be-arsed. Heartbeats drummed deep in the coil of my head and warmth rose from each armpit when up the S-station’s gritted steps I half-jogged (thinking fall, crack, die) and right as I mounted the platform the clock from 08:10 changed to 08:11. Time passed kind of slow then below-zero and I rolled, made a quick cig but didn’t spark, a kid in a PSG cap sparked, blew smoke towards my feet when I circled the timetable cos the temperature bit my ears, nose, cheeks and I was hoping: avoid those two. Work-colleagues Dutch and Cilla, lived same floor same building as me. They’re okay. Commuting in the morning though, I wanted silence. That’s all. It was 08:18. Relieved to see in the mist an S-train racketing to a jarring squeal before it stopped, I walked to the far end and the doors bleeped, nobody got off as I boarded the front wagon (so if it crashes yeah) and parked on a corner seat opposite a blurred chap, I forget but every detail’s crucial. Every pause. So. I am I. And sat warming we stared numb at warehouses and a line of bare oaks, bare nettles and elms, another road surface and a PANASONIC billboard and this tenement made of shipping containers while in the far haze stood a white towerblock or blocks, I recall: all sunless. A drive-thru MCDONALD’S too had plenty of boring aesthetic space circling greyly before this mirrored hotel: to Neukölln it’s roughly fifteen mins. I disembarked. Naturally spooling. The zone produces some amazing skies cos that morning an epic cloud swelled with a sort of mushrooming sort of charcoaling effect and beyond the steel tracks the bushes swayed leafless so you get to see at least some bones I thought and the birds (what do starlings eat in winter? Junk-food: we eat a tonne of more in summer) as I followed people walking for the underground and everyone ignored the beggar knelt sockless-toeless with bruised mangled feet, I never looked long enough to check if they were bombed (by history) or cut off (by society) or deformed (by nature) but two days ago I’d dropped one euro into his styrofoam and strode by now without a nod cos of warm wind, a train’s coming belch to which I sped into a trot for gliding wagons rammed, everyone silent all a gloom as I shuffled on and found a humid pocket between (presumably) a woman’s elbow and some man’s shoulder near a door in which the glass reflected my face: the shadow of my philtrum I thought, off to work but always I’m a howling vast: north via G-street to collect my synth, it opened 9am the clinic but practice manager Sven lifted the metal shutters at quart-to. The guy’s a pranny. If he saw us loitering on the path beforehand he’d whine, he’d say you’re forbidden from waiting in the street and (another morning) I told him need to be at work before 10 and I glanced at the queue of pinned eyes as if to say unlike that bunch who’ll be congregating in the U after getting whatever medicine they’re here to: I mean, I’ve got a job: but he didn’t care Sven said, you shouldn’t stand outside before the door is open and the voice in my spine went fuck-off-you-cold-pedantic-arrggghhhh while his left hand (that wedding ring annoyed me) his hand became a big pair of plastic tweezers with which from a compartment in a wooden drawer he carried one-two oval white pills and dropped them into a white paper pouch and I blinked cos now the mechanical claw held a brass pestle and it thwacked the pouch cos Sven’s job was to crush the pills, following a policy to ensure I would not do a Jack Nicholson in One Flew Over when Nurse Ratched administers some tranquilliser that he hides sublingual and eventually spits in the little confused guy’s face is all I recall for tilting my head I sprinkled crumbs of synthesis neath my tongue. It was fuel. Cos then I rushed to lose myself to work and I hated work because I bolted from the clinic to G-street subway where I got a U7 to Hermannplatz and a detail of that station is the wall-tiling of dirty yellow teeth as I identify with the crust of tartar. I took one of the escalators for the U8 above. And this was daily: a train north took us below the canal to holy Kottbusser. And off I got. Fogged in the depths of my own embroidered reality I climbed to the U1, the Elevated, the metal beast (mythic to me) it snakes from over the unflowing Spree and is kind of the city’s backbone: the line passes a friend’s apartment and I always focussed on the window, picturing him in bed, a porcupine snoring in a straw nest. You see tenements then, a fifty foot angel mural before the canal crossing towards the Techno Museum, a perfect zigzag of iron bridges yet there’s never a shadow I thought and alighted at Mendelssohn. From the carriage I jogged down a staircase all pumped until a clock announced twenty-five minutes to go so no rush I said stopping to spark what I’d rolled on the ride. Nine clicks of the cig-lighter it took cos breeze kept dowsing the flame but I cupped a palm and shielded, the end burnt and I smoked unable to quit while heading for the benched grassy hump called No Man’s Land, it stretches the air and cloud in the north curdled enough to make me say wow and could’ve listed the variety of greys as I dawdled and calculated my total insignificance as a man and my total insignificance as a poet, reknit, fragmented, reknit: got no assets: just dourness, three eyes, a few clothes and books, I’m pure anon. Took a couple of deep almost throat-scraping drags, though. And the synth was working so felt good yet a bit dwarfed when my neck-bones popped and up I squinted at the sandy kind of quarter of a skyscraper, thirty floors of bullshit, offices, meat-pods, whatever, topped with an ooze-green cube on stilts, you can see from afar: tiny stilts: but now we or I, just me, I death-trod into its tall atrium of cables and polished chrome, lot of marble and reinforced glass, I worked on the seventh so got in a lift with two rigid oddbods. Men in waterproofs. I pressed button 7. One of them pressed 9. And I stared at the digital screen considering: my gut is fizzing is a tumble-dryer turning. I had one aim: because back in my gaff other peoples’ flecks of shit soiled the toilet etcetera, I did my daily-bowel-business here. At work. So when for floor seven the lift pinged and doors parted I galloped (almost) thru the annex heading to these clean zinc-veneered gents where in a cubicle I sat with a book and it was perfect cos others rarely used these loos, you could read and dump. Without worry. It was one of my favourite moments of each workday. Framed in glare I soaped, rinsed, I quick-dried my paws fore anyone entered cos I’d’ve hated them to smell my inner rot, despite shit being important to my theory. And down the glassed corridor I kind of loped lighter. Half a pound lighter is the average human stool as I’d glance into offices, side-eyeing hunched forms typing at keyboards and mildly remarkable I guess is one screened room housed a team of coders coding Cyberpunk 2077, their office adjoined our office which when I walked in Cilla was eating porridge and Dutch dunno: forget what he was doing like Ken as well but we’d say yo and ask how’s it goin with anyone else now wiped-out of mind so yeah: before 10am we’d congregate in the stairwell with all that grey sky, the rooftops, the canal and we’d light cigarettes and talk about what? Given the synth flowed with pinball-clarity into my backbone I’d wanna think about realism, the different genres of bogstandard lit realism like dirty realism and magic realism and hysteric and obscure micro-labels like Online Forums Realism, I’d read about on the online forums there’s Neckbeard Realism and Post-Soviet and the Ultra Ineffables and the ICELAND scene (named after a frozen food supermarket) making so many Realisms lest I created my own. No Maggot Lonely. I was in the process of inventing it, privately. It’s recording events of the least possible importance: a kind of dub in media res, I thought. Surrounded by work-colleagues I uncoiled from these ideas to ask what happened at the Christmas meal and Cilla said how on the train going to the Latvian restaurant these inspectors accosted Beesly our boss and I said yeah saw on WHATSAPP, him arguing the validity of his ticket with three BVG heavies triangulating it was in Gleisdreieck, the banister’s swirled wood I saw, lower platform and after Beesly we talked (or they did) about a creamy-berry gateaux, which was when I went back to thinking (realism-realism-realism) of the ancient art of synthesis till some of us but mainly Ken who’s Taiwanese and Dutch who dunno, three of us queued at the hot-drinks-machine: where I said little or nothing: just, resting each hand in each ass pocket of whatever jeans I wore that day I saw myself on the point of decline, long-lens, looking from the golden-winged Victory Column out the grey window to a tiled wall bearing in pink-green neon WE WORK that glowed sarcastically over my dogeared face as I put mug under nozzle and tapped Espresso. I howled. After a pause the coffee dripped. Once it dispensed I fucking tapped Espresso to re-percolate before the vital black liquid poured, frothing the surface in it was my black WE WORK mug and someone queuing kind of tutted, a message heard cos I was in synth-mode, I can pickup micro-bullshit and grabbed me coffee, stepped back and always, on each of the two-hundred-odd times I lingered in that canteen my eye panned ever-zooming over Tiergarten treetops for cloudcover and the golden Victoria shining, her Light boosted me before having to traipse to my desk and login, which I hated because I hated work and all that fuzzy-mindedness, mistyping email and password. I hated the rut. Hated saying hey to Beesly and his assistant Alex who’s all sinew, they’d swan-in together cos they shared an apartment and that crud morgen I said soz (not sorry) just soz to Bees for leaving the Christmas bash early and from his side-pod he sent me a flared nose and these eyeballs saying in a disappointed tone yeah and still with the eyeballs trying to suck out my eyeballs the unspoken message in my eyeballs said I am disengaged man, I don’t give a fuck and Cilla’s desk next to mine she said you was caked and I wondered if caked is a Norwich word for drunk (melancholically drunk) cos she’s from near Norwich and yeah: last shift before Xmas, the day of corporate meat-orgies everywhere I went to Potsdamer Mall during lunch-hour and H&M had black hoodies, a carousel full of them and printed white on each chest a band logo, such as the obligatory Ramones cos of bullshit merch culture I thought and turned the hanger seeing Queen, Queen, Queen, Blur-n-Oasis, Queen, Wu-Tang, Queen, Nirvana, The Cure, Slayer, Joy Division but only when I got to the Neubauten petroglyph, when I saw the human-stick-figure with a Cyclops-eyed head, I knew. This is Synth. With a big S. I didn’t bother with changing rooms. I stood in the gangway. Nearby a man in a Santa’s helper’s hat lurked. We the lonely penises: he started watching as I took off my overcoat and wriggled on a large hood that hung at the waist too low, too baggy off of the shoulder but why even record him? That man. Browsing female slippers, a white-fluffy pair in his hands, he gawped elsewhere when I tried on a medium that fitted pretty good so I purchased and put it on, my new Cyclops hoodie, nearish the counter, wore under my raincoat is how the spool span and. From a news kiosk I bought a six-bottle of BECKS. And sure, I tell myself. What then? Back in the office Cilla said: Ooh you been shopping! M-m I said and having eaten no grub I’d opened a beer. To describe the way I did this, the method used to undo the crown cap, it’s boring but life is boring and if maggot-brained realism is about life then with four blue fingers and a palm wrapped tight round the bottle’s slim glass neck I held in my other (right-handed) a cigarette-lighter and pressing the edge of the fire’s base against the cap’s crinkled rim, with pressure I prized it off simply, the top, chucked it in a waste-basket (ting!) and drank while telephoning, saying ba-ba-ba-ba-ba cos Beesly and Alex encouraged us in the afternoon to booze basically, to loosen our gobs they suggested and we’d visit the WE WORK bar (top-floor) cos there were self-serve beer pumps, what came out tasted tart but you could pull a pint into a plastic cup (all gratis) and carry it down to the office for a guzzle at your desk, yeah. I was a salesman. Therefore a cunt I felt. Sunken and self-aware. And I being I, phoned about twenty cold-as-fuck numbers not getting thru to anyone as I sank three warmish BECKS over a couple of hours and every half of those couple I’d nip for a cig in the stairwell with Patty who did HR, organised contracts and wages, from South Africa, we’d chat: she said you need strength during winter to endure the zone’s crushing greyness and I said yeah I’ve got that kind of strength and brain-sizzled by the dregs of the third beer, I pictured us coiling hams: so to speak. She said Neil Tennant on Sunday mornings cycles in Tour de France gear to Berghain, his bike has these time-trial handlebars, stuck out like reindeer horns she described and we were laughing just as my inner-eye flashed to her mouth sucking me off and a gulf inside began quaking with half-a-second of lust for her. Fried I thought but it’s norm. At my desk the oik side of my nature decided to say watch out Cilla, when drunk I am known to get a little bit rapey-rapey and she said yes I believe you and I went yeah-yeah and she said I’m telling the truth falsely, a classic predator technique as her eyes smiled browny-green and. She was cool: knew I wasn’t totally scum-baggy. And she was funny like once I showed her a rival poet’s selfie and wish I could describe her frown, Cilla’s: the way her nostrils twitched when she clocked this rival’s pout was great and not only a neighbour: she helped secure that room, my room: telling me it was empty. We even took an S-train for the viewing, which she gave along with the keys and the landlord’s telephone: zzzzzzzzzzzzzzz: shortly after the rapey comment Beesly said folks, everyone upstairs: the free bar where you could see over the zone on this clear day it was the icy side of aquamarine bled to whiteness and look: wow, the earth’s curvature I thought as Ken pulled a beer cos he asked if I wanted a beer and I said yeah feeling dodge but sure I’ll have half and he said half, half a beer and I said yes half please and waiting for it I watched thru the window and furthest I could see was the forest and the American spy satellite on the western contour. This is where a maggot philosophy is handy. My life is. Sat avid in that sparkling bar-room, everyone younger apart from a craggier man, a craggier woman, another way craggier man, another slightly craggier woman, now I’ve always got a miserable pall clouding my chops I thought and started to nauseate, so told myself ride-it-ride-it and supped the lager, hoping it’d pep but tasted kind of treacly, eggy. I should’ve eaten. Ken, Cilla, Patty, Dutch maybe but dunno, a few other faded-away colleagues sat nearby, drinking, speaking over two hundred voices while I unlistening checked people’s teeth, all of a white shine as Beesly and Alex played table-tennis: Edberg v Lendl I said and felt like a freak. Wanted bed. The more my stomach moaned it ached as my tongue tasted acidic and my eyesight, my balance, my speech, everything (you could say) got swirly: and what a bummer I thought when deciding: let’s jib: so told Cilla, told Ken: too rat-arsed man I’m out-of-here: then went home: back to the womb. Forget. It’s a bit boring but a U from Potsdamer took us south to Schöneberg where up on the S a ghost-wagon came and rolled my spine way east of the suburbs and between two seated passengers I almost huddled. Eyes closed, queasy-bellied. My left knee brushed someone’s leg and without opening my eyelids I flinched, readjusting how I sat. On my arse-bones. And accidentally I emitted a fart that just plopped out a silent-but-deathly crept afar as the vestibule permeating. Some guy sniffed loud to say: Not me. Then remember nothing. Just I’d brought that hoodie cos of wanting to look smart for the meal but my organs (kidneys, liver, brain) screwed-up kind of lightweight with the synth-pills and beer, I said: my life’s pretty miserable. Got to the apartment and slept on-n-off for twelve hours, listening to podcasts thru earphones, feeling glad my room lay in darkness cos when Cilla and Dutch returned they’d tromp into the courtyard and I kind of foreboded them merry, shouting my name, knocking my door, laughing and shit but nah: next saw them that morning: Janus 2019. Cilla to my left, Dutch dunno but our job was to bell subscribers of some Warren Buffett but not Warren Buffett just some Buffett-associated mailing list, people who’d given telephone numbers which bleeped in my ear as I howled and keyed. Cloudy innumerable times an artificial voice said sorry this line is out-of-service. In fact to any ringing-tone (because you rarely heard a ringing-tone) my brain sprang into focus (kind of) and if the line clicked, if a person said hello I’d shout (sometimes yo!) with my technique being to call the person’s name loud and questioningly so the tone maybe surprised or annoyed them and it was a cunty thing to do but I did this with my first sale it was to Bogdan who I must’ve rang twenty times before now (02/01) and I’d go Bogdaaaaaaaaan, extending the syllable like a football commentator bellowing a goalscorer and then I’d blather: how’s it flowing Bogster, how you doing, hope Samantha (a cat) is okay, tell her I said hello and purr just purr tell her from me, she’ll know what I mean, funny yeah and are yous up for investing today mate? Erm, he’d reply and I’d go: Might as well innit Bog we got some juicy TESLA forecasts and was gonna say trade in just another fifty initially so we can build that trust we’ve been talking about, you know, we can’t guarantee profit but I can guarantee my boss invested eight-hundred this morning and plus, you know Musk, he is a twat but he’s announcing these bionic arms and bionic legs which you fix on and can pick cars up easy, like those machines in Aliens: this is the fake jabbering Beesly and Alex encouraged us to spew and cos I’d necked sixteen milligram of synth and downed a few double-double espressos my voice (and my voice-voice) was bopping. Think that’s what Alex was talking about, my voice and my voice-voice. When he said I am like a hulking steamtrain how I’d arrive in the office 10am cold and groggy, really snail-minded but by midday I’d be firing full-on locomotive. Anyway it’s a numbers game they’d say so from a strategic point-of-view I recited the bullshit script freestyle in my brain and I dialled down the list of telephone numbers, burning the sample. If we didn’t connect at first I’d re-ring all the unobtainables, the dead hissings, all of the automated please-try-again-laters. The job financed my nightwork at least: my other synthesis, life-writing. And remember: Cilla to my west, a Ukrainian Marcia worked to my right. She one lunchtime in the glass stairwell saw me reading Apocolypse, asked what book and I held the spine horizontally as she quoted the title and Lawrence she’d heard of and said sounds interesting, can she borrow afterwards and I said sure but (unable to control the reluctant crumble in my throat) added how I take ages, a sloth still on the intro I said and regretted using sloth as we stubbed our cigs or no. I dropped mine. Then into a two-inch gap between the window and the concrete floor I kicked it. A butt tumbling down the storeys like a chasm, hopelessly I thought and still recollect daily the World Trade Center (1973 to 2001), the collapsing, the dustcloud, the debris. Marcia and I went back to the office and dunno: my life was buffering: as if I was losing zing with all this getting older shit because imagine: the zone’s job market was bad for poets like me so you end up in sales: a sunken cunt’s game trying to convince people to signup for the electronic trading portal META TRADER so we can guide in realtime on stock predictions and I never got the lingo. People asked: How you get this number? And we’d say you subbed for the Buffett newsletter. And how does your company make money, said one bloke and I had to ask Alex how we profited and all sinew Alex said it’s on margins and I said to the bloke margins, we make money on small margins of every snore and yet when this bloke went ah okay the hollowness in his voice suggested he was unsure what margins meant cos I was unsure, just talked semi-convincingly to anyone like him, anyone naive or bored or curious to wanna listen: and I grinded. I grinded the numbers on the spreadsheet because I'm a grinder because I worry, I worry about all the threats to me and my poetry and yeah. When I got to speak to a person I followed spontaneously the words my brain told me to say but (since we’d all started in November 2018) I’d only got that one Bogdan sale and Cilla only got one sale and Dutch only one and Ken I think got one while Kish this Israeli maybe had three and Marcia none: only I’d have preferred to be in my box-white room, alone, writing my labyrinth thesis: but it was the end of that first week of Janus when Beesly stood discussing with Alex about struggling to get leads cos the day before a few of us reps said we need leads, give us leads not all this spam: don’t worry Beesly said, next week we’ll have more-more-more he promised and every Friday the shift ended lunchtime: 1pm. Recalling now a constipated bloat in my gut or might’ve been my brain, I turned off the PC and sat low in the swivel chair as I rolled a little dooberry. Spent five crumbling weed, organising a roach and everyone bar Bees’d gone, just us in the ticking silence broken by him tapping the keyboard while his concerned face leaned into the screen’s light and I was fogged-out, put my tobacco and Apocalypse etcetera into (with its zippable pouches and sub-compartments) my rucksack, I don’t know or I do because in tired slowish-motion I grabbed my raincoat and put it on and buttoned one button maybe two maybe three maybe and when I said see-you-later Bees he mumbled yes in a quick dismissive tone, cold as the air on No Man’s Land I then walked by for Mendelssohn thinking fucker Beesly, what an ass-wipe, what an icy managerial bastard with those frog eyeballs with that nose (never mentioned his nose) he talks out of, dunno why he dislikes me but I’m pleased: done with that shit.

. . .

So it’s outside of work I’m a poet, I’d say. That crap over with for two days you can now be a poet even though I don’t write poems but I am a poet who else is a poet we’re all poets if we wannabe a poet just be a poet say we’re a poet I’m a poet: a howling dub spoolist.