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Antonio Bellotti

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The Established Order Of Words And Things

Tomorrow is almost a year
since I’ve had the typewriter;
it was not easy to get hold of
because they know what it’s for.

It arrived in a brown cardboard box
battered by careless customs hands;
I paid for it with my savings
and lent it to a score of formidable friends.

We are a close-knit community
of syllables that hardly ever scan
or rhyme, or say nothing much
but that we long for music and the smell of bread.

Every four weeks I make good copies
and pass them round to be read
in basements, in closed bars, in smoke-filled flats
of couples with two children and no income,

with German books in stacks, a guitar, stools,
and the smell of nappies and gas.
We are insolvent, blue-jeaned, proud
the printers have no paper for us.

Tomorrow I must walk to the Station
to renew the twelve-month licence
on the typewriter. All I need with me
is a satisfactory character reference:

that I pay the rent and am actively seeking work,
that I do not hold strong views on party lines,
that I am not infectious or queer or green
and believe the State is always right.

I am worried about the action of the SHIFT KEY
for yesterday, when trying to remember the exact texture
of the sand between two loose cobbles, one slightly raised,
the other visibly sunken, I could not fail to notice

the sporadic infiltration of a number of lower cases.
More alarming was the seemingly absolute independence
of the MarGIN ReLEASe.


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