Poetry by Paul Tanner

             ​Daniel Lobo CC



material dispossessions 

you should put me in one of your poems, he said and he downed the rest of his ASDA’s 
own blackcurrant juice mixed with some foreign rum, threw the plastic tumbler against 
the wall – I think he was hoping it would smash – and said I’m mad, me! then climbed 
out the window, leapt down onto the street – it was a short drop – and went into the road,
stripping and dancing and making whooping sounds … I thought it all rather tedious myself,
he was just another young’un who’d read On The Road and was on a bit of a Moriarty kick, 
but since he wants to be immortalised in literature well here you are mate, I’m getting it all
down: you’re in the street, dancing and stripping, but you’re down to your boxers now, and
there’s children in these flats and if you take them off, I’ll fucking have you, I don’t care if it
makes me a square, let me be immortalised as that. 
no one will probably read this anyway. I’m not going to, and I wrote the fucking thing. 
starved for content, it does accurately reflect our lives though. I hate this meta shit. 
life is meta enough. and I hate that last line – “life is meta enough”? fuck me, what
​throwaway post pop culture faux philosophy. or whatever. it’s all so ironic. 
you want ironic? get this:
he did pull down his boxers … but the kids just laughed.
maybe they’re packing bigger, even the girls. 
sorry mate, but you wanted to be in a poem, and here it is:
you’re hereby immortalised forever
as the Kerouac fan whose dick was smaller than a kid’s clit. 
and he reads this, his eyes glaring at me over the piece of paper. 
he’s not called Cody but alas – these are the visions we have to work with.  





​neutered by the green

so I went and stood on the jobcentre steps
trying to get my breath back … 

I looked up 
for a god to spit at 
but all I saw was the jobcentre sign. 
and for the first time,
I realised it was green.
you know what they say about green, don’t you?
that it’s calming.
someone will have earned thousands to come up with that.
I pictured some outsourced marketing exec   
that the government paid your taxes to, telling them
‘hey, you know guys, green is a calming colour. 
give your logo a green background 
and it’ll stop the scroungers kicking off on you.
you can deny them financial help 
and they’ll still thank you for your time.
they’ll waltz out of the jobcentre 
with a big grin on their stupid pleb faces,
neutered by the green. 
anyway
that’ll be fifty large ones, please.’
that’s how I imagined it went down, 
when I was looking up, 
there, 
on the jobcentre steps 
trying to get my breath back …

then the security guard was behind me 
saying ‘oi! come back here!’
so I had to scarper. ​
​

​

Tanner has been earning minimum wage, and writing about it, for too long. He was shortlisted for the Erbacce 2020 Poetry Prize. Recent collections include “Shop Talk” (Penniless Press, 2019), “No Refunds” (Alien Buddha Press, 2020) and “Working Class Zero” (Dreich Publications, 2021).

---