Resistance

These poems are about resistance to intervention for whatever reason –other people’s preference, discomfort, submission, health, examination, not wanting to conform, wanting feelings rather than actions or habits of power.

Orifice One : tunnel not in use

(vagina not for use)

Boring through a tunnel
disenfranchised from her body
of the road system, with helmeted
torches and convenient workware,
they’d decided to dig the hole
in the sense that it was theirs.


It was their passage-way, to drive,
skid, rev, slosh, elbow, tear, bash,
and claim as their domain. Naturally,
this was of great resentment to her.


Approaching the entry point of open
and without her welcome, they
pulled the doors, and dry and
resistant, they squirted in gunk
to ease their tread, even though
strands of the walls and the careful
repair work had become too sensitive.
After they’d been in there, the feeling
of the atmosphere was one of open invasion,
discomfort, displacement and colonisation.


The fact was she’d decided to put up a sign
“tunnel out of use for heavy good vehicles”.
But with suitably designed operation-ware,
they then tackled the tunnel with fit for all
stream-lined devices, and a voyeuristic
young male work force - as
if that made it credible.


But unfortunately for them the tunnel
had its own mind and put its foot down, and
there was a new sign now, “ no vehicles at all
to pass now” . They were displeased, so what
made them carry on? Was it donning the uniforms?
Or the sheer control of the use of the tunnel
and to have their turn with their apparatus.


It gave them importance, despite the fears, that in the dark
the tunnel could give way, but not to them, if you see
what I mean, but that the complete road system would
collapse under their insistent pressure. It was
these mindless tactics which were under question
and needed to be overhauled.

The main problem was that there’d been no consultation
with the architect herself. This rendered the digging pointless,
because it was going nowhere, and there were no connections
to the mind and the soul of the city, and a journey such as the
kind they’d started, would be a ghost ride with
nothing particular going on, the users climbing out of their
tiny tin trucks looking big, numb, gormless and dumb.

Many people wish they’d just give up their obsession
and leave the tunnel alone. That’s of course what she wanted,
it was her tunnel, not theirs, and they had no right to be there.


Orifice 2: canal not in use

Rebuffed by their primary digging procedures,
the tunnel management then audaciously decreed
that a second tunnel was to be taken. This ran
parallel under the first. Already prepared for
the invasion, a ‘No Entry’ sign had been placed
at the entrance.

Orifice 2 group considered that this tunnel would
provide an alternative route for the sporadic
traffic influx, accommodating those attracted
to a divergent and scenic landscape. But this
road, like the first, neither reached the mind
nor the soul of the city; it was therefore pointless.

Orifice 2 knew that behind the very thin walls was
a mineral supply that could easily be contaminated:
specially protective garments had been issued.
With work going on, irrigation and ventilation
simultaneously ran through tunnel 2, now
moistened and inflamed, with a sore, more liquefied
sludge which passed along its discomfited walls.

The land herself, where the tunnels are located, as
previously noted, had strongly objected to the first
invasion scheme. Orifice 2 tunnel was considered
a further gross violation scheme to the land, which
after all was green belt, no build, considered to be
under a preservation order.


Orifice 2 knew that it had to tread carefully, but
was furtively smug about this further catchment
area – it being ‘underground’, transformational,
daring, appealing to the ‘in-the-know’ revellers,
groups who themselves knew about sub-branch
systems of tunnel work.

The land had to be careful how it objected, for fear
of alienating the reveller groups who, conversely
to her predicament, may have agreed to their land being
tunnelled, which was the main point of contention:
they had consented to excavation, this stretch of
land had not. It was her land, not theirs.