Cartoon vultures crowd rusting lampposts, shoulders hunched and talons tapping impatience. Back in the 80s – Thatcher, the Miners’ Strike, and that bloody awful gated reverb – the neighbourhood went to the dogs, but by the turn of the century – Millennium Bug, Dot-com Bubble, and the omnipresence of “reality” TV – the dogs had had enough of the whole shebang, and left it to graffitied characters from our shared cultural misremembering: mostly cats and ducks, but with quite the breadth of species, and enough humans to perpetuate the illusion of an Anthropocene narrative. Lawless doesn’t begin to cover it – bombs, blunderbusses, and grand pianos dropped on hapless passers-by – and what once was home to glowing children in nuclear families became a stop-frame pandemonium, with cell after cell an oubliette of thwarted ambition. But it’s all we can afford now, and the unspecified They send us back, with enamel paints, bent keys, and just enough tainted air – ammonia, particulate matter, and eye-watering body spray on packs of young lads – to maybe get us to the end of this poem. The vultures clear their throats to sing.
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Oz Hardwick
Picture Nick Victor
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