Precarious

In the heat & the heavy I’m a pack horse work machine mixing metaphors & making ends meet/ing a tired reflection in shop windows walking fills the gaps driven and drained all love & anguish body holds the ‘casual cruelty’* longing for poems like lost lovers for magic that tricks & slips the daily grind/ing the inside out/side on the street moments that refuse centssense-making but listen there is no such thing as security only annual leave & sick days & super & savings & here where ‘large sections of the workforce live in fear’** [bull charging at them] I cannot get a bank loan but my white skin does me favours & I’m counting fortunes like running water & I’m made of water & water remembers violence.***



* Ruth Barcan, ‘Life Choices: Vocation in a Casualised Work World.’ Sydney Review of Books, 5 December, 2018.
** ‘Australia’s insecure work crisis: Fixing it for the future’ – report by Australian Unions, May 2018.
*** The words ‘water remembers violence’ were taken from a documentary titled The Secret of Water, directed by Jirka Rysavy and Saida Medvedeva and released in 2015. It was described in a New York Times review as a ‘cheesy documentary stuffed full of pseudoscience masquerading as profound truth’ (Ken Jaworowski). It appears there is no definitive scientific evidence in support of water memory to date (though thankfully none is required for poetic license and found phrase metaphor).