After the Storm

With the completion of mindset
my life is in order, two weeks after
the day before. Anyone can aspire
to cultural intelligence, feast on
the corpse of public discourse but
I’ve got the music to go with it.

Despite feverish hype and speculation,
this is a really good idea. If you think
my mind is a mess, you should have
been here last week, my infrastructure
was ravaged by a maelstrom of doubt
presuming to speak, exploit the mood.

Ignorance is a virtue, reframes the day
through anti-intellectualism, patching
up egos enough to feather the storm,
checking all our shortcomings, guiding
the downtrodden flock to those books
which explain everything, or claim to.

Celebrity gurus are commonplace,
diagrams are available: voluminous
notebooks full of self-help jargon,
intellectualism, seriousness and
snobbishness that stymie ambition.
It is an extraordinary dumbing down.

I have emerged over and over again,
indebted to excruciating ideas about
earthquakes, wildfires, popular music
and other catastrophes, aftershocks
of disaster and spontaneous altruism,
as we create and co-create together.

Small moments cluster in many ways
but how to start deconstructing ideas
for a world that feels like art school?
How to make circumstances change
when disaster continually strikes?
Get a mundane job in Ipswich.

Rupert Loydell is the editor of Stride and a contributing editor to International Times. He has many books of poetry in print, including The Age of Destruction and Lies (Shearsman) and Damage Limitation (zimZalla). He also writes for academic journals and publishers and is an abstract artist.