Working Material
You have become working material,
all of you who in former days
appeared as kin & enemies
or neutrally meaningless eating- & shitting-machines
You have become source-matter and template-matter
for modern fiction;
even for burlesque groan-literature
– so in some measure
your forgotten existences
have received a grain of meaning
Now you lie like pressed plants
in Carl von Linnaeus’s herbaria
in the pedantic entries of my diaries,
which grant even wholly insignificant fools their places,
even the palest citizen his deserved mockery,
as raw material for irredeemable type-designations
in the most poisonous contemporary literature of all
You are primal grotesques in tales
wherein your dreary characters are employed,
at will,
together with all my relatives’
and ex-relatives’ empty mugs
fit for nothing else
than to serve in artful word-heaps
and bracing bardic pieces
You have been forced into hard-fisted analyses,
just battered enough
not to serve for prosecution,
yet so thoroughly considered
that no one can be mistaken
You have become working material
in resounding contemporary horrors
& historical acts of humiliation;
petty devils draped in state imagery;
unique failures in shit-towns
& schoolings,
work crews & hospital wards
You are type-material
in the most venomous offshoots
of modern social depiction,
slaughtered like suckling pigs, paragraph by paragraph,
page after page, cover to cover;
at last properly handled
& brought into speech
May you recognize your alter egos – and swagger!
Poetry by Ingvar Loco Nordin
Written on 2026-02-09 at 19:55
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