Embedded Files
Clay and Sigils
for my father
Initials wet, the maternal cast, his stake in a periphery
cleaved to climb along a reel, to motor and changeover
screen to screen on an island route, a cylindrical
seal set time to rout ways broken by mess via what
strays weigh up: an uncle trained, so you got the cue
to go to Camden for ice cream and settle fine
after in military employ; you broke down midsky, alive
deferred and changed, the seal unset preserved and the
cylinders still on soft material traced, just one line
slipped on ranging clays so trading names to wish.
The owl may be a mere symbol of antiquity; modernity some certain
spidery appendages appearing later from a fount of type
drawing swamp birds from the map he outlined in my sketch book
with an improvising chiropodist’s eye. But in tread with druids, Streatham
overwhelmed his Birmingham temple with a growing need
for worldly paths. The subtitle of his diary from then on could well
have been How To Become Certain In Diamond Deals. This hope gave him
the opportunity of grappling with the problems of life, bread’s diary
carving one back to mud, to matter, to mask, to utter High Wycombe.
He had to face up to the problem of life etching
with a needle on a piece of glass coated with titles: Vish,
Vishnu, Stephan, Steve. To relive one of his most cherished dreams
he saw bluebells with her on a Saturday and drove them
back for Monday assembly. It may seem surprising
that a person of his sensitivity could so easily dissociate
himself from the anguish of fracture and concentrate on his work
under desert mountains on a calendar in an office in Oxford Street.
So came his song to the moon: a cosmic community occupied his mind,
late at night, all kinds of different lines on the cold television’s glow.
Stepmotherhood, the marriage question, nieces’ shirts, even,
traced a kind of jealousy in revolting detail. His body
no longer belonged to his mother, every feature
he owed to her had gone. A snake might shed
old age with sloughed off-skin; a father might sweep
majesty, weight, and awesome authority home
to the glittering stars. But aphasic fame dispersed his
component atoms into air, not wanting to eat or drink,
or rattle more loved ones around in constellations that cleaved
to more containment, his self no longer sealed, but calm inside a room.
I got into a slightly unnerving habit of excluding pretty much everyone I spent my life with from the poems. Sure, their words were there. And so were various fragments of time spent with them. But who would know that? I set about course correcting, but that got even weirder. Like I was making them textual artefacts. I didn’t encounter this phenomenon in any of the various texts I consulted. When other people did it, it just sounded like a sincere expression of loving affection, or something like that. Maybe sometimes a bit exclusionary. But mostly, for them, I didn’t think it came off too bad. Despite having some sense of the limitations of my own attempts, I kept working away at it— losing quite a few loved ones in the process.
The Inns of Court
With his surface established, he seemed able to access
a more secure and wandering inner life.
As far as appearances led me to assume, he had
a clear set of interests.
I let him talk to me about etymology, how trade let
new coinages trot over the mint fields
he set out on, returning to the classroom
holding a volume of the OED— one way
to take our questions seriously,
and for those more intent on explicable things
to abandon their capacity to question forever.
In his role at the relevant state apparatus, he harboured
projects savoured by despairing later generations.
In an effort to pass an unacknowledged legislator,
we went to the Seven Stars
and slipped away from the law towards the blind spots
of the courts. He’d established encounters
beyond familiarity, slipped into the day’s costume
beside a church. When I read it, like any
other book, it seemed something
separate to the options available in life
before a conversation carried the medium into flesh.
As former subjects of reception, we too had strained
to fit our letters into the space of a finger
established next to each other in a rigid
line. As I saw him,
another one of the suit wearing population
capable of entering the booths
around the inns, I scurried after him,
brandishing Bleak House one other Sunday,
his text on my back, acknowledged
in order to be fulsomely encountered in the details
his language, city, and lost friends extend.
We had a solution. We’d swear off their notes. We’d insist knowledge was our form. More than value, it was a principled and unavailable conviction that basically pretended our chance. Me, with your imagination, left speaking to reduce having, well, to be. You, with my imagination, left being to reduce, well, having to speak.
Lack’s Dock
The mention of writing in nursery fills you
without writing as the Effra outlet
by MI6 wished we could willingly construct memory,
that the route to the American embassy
was no palimpsest
A day can acquire as a subject,
a structure mostly omitting increasingly significant durations
to become a conceptual model for crowd control
setting caltrops in language, passages of funereal language
working time to enter the eventual book and clock in—
So already the pieces lack secure possibilities,
and I put them in place, although I suggest affirmation, repetition, use
of simple message and images: I am important
and I am secure
alongside the neglect of a long book
Though with time I do promote sustained sacrifices
to embanking now, as an oblique drawing
of a larger storm relief channel
no time would restore, no
amount of focus on the coloured block Millbank Tower paints on the Thames
To time the crowds at one moment to establish
the protests’ numbers human, to discuss it
on the Albert Embankment, the protest done,
not divine, quite, as kind of sickeningly negligent,
albeit done from nausea, as in Sartre, settled seeing the eddies
Able by I, it, the, them, and those,
to draw it as it was ten years ago,
before the was, the I, the it, the the, the as, the so, some esparto grass,
the I, and the I, then the it, then the it, and the the went alone
ahead by barge building to slip more participles on a lost track of the event.
Of course I looked back from time to time. I noticed there were some recurrent characters:
1. A young aspirant with affections, imaginations, and haters in their head;
2. A newspaperman: they want their word to come first, to embolden peaceful
youth, and to compensate for the failure of some colony in the present;
3. A figure who desperately needs to be reached, before they do something
stupid;
4. Someone with a lost voice; they’ve given up guards, privacy, and sentinels, to
range around instead with imaginary friends.
I started to set them up in an array of scenes, generated by generative AI. I asked them to write speeches based on scenarios I took from opening my abridged copy of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at random and typing out the first sentence I saw. If that sentence wasn’t a scenario, I edited it until it became one.
Joseph Persad is a school teacher living and working in London. Beginner’s Mind was published by Distance No Object in 2024. The War of Leeroy Jenkins’ Ear is forthcoming from Broken Sleep Books. The poems above come from a longer text with beloved prosimetric models, currently called Constellation.
Copyright © 2025 by Joseph Persad, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author.
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