'Open up...Make room for me...'

It's been an odd week, mainly spent in my new place of employment dealing with whiney, privileged arseholes who bitch about shocking stuff like having to do tests while in training and other such nonsense. There hasn't been any overt transphobia since I stomped all over one of the fuckers the other week, which is good, but damn, these people are hard work. In that spirit, allow me to point you in the direction of The Day The Immigrants Left, a fine piece of programming in which the BBC fulfilled its public service remit in stunning fashion by showing that, actually, the reason immigrants get jobs and 'indigenous' (dog-whistle racist code for 'white') Britons don't get them is because, frankly, most indigenous Brits are a bunch of goddam whiney bitches who need to be thrashed to within an inch of their lives with as many cluesticks as one can get one's hands on. I tells ya, if my employers had recruited me and a bunch of East European migrants for this job, we wouldn't still be in training: we'd be on the damn floor doing the damn job, instead of sitting around making feeble attempts at humour through the medium of fart noises. Or, in my case, being bored bloody rigid by people whose idea of humour extends no further than the fart noise. I hate whites.

One good thing about the job is that, due to my having to come up with work-arounds for the unreliability of buses during rush hour 'round these parts, I usually wind up arriving at work an hour earlier than I have to be there, during which time I've gotten into a ritual of grabbing an Americano from the canteen and sitting down to write. I produced a poem the other day which I feel is one of my best yet, particularly in terms of addressing my experience of adolescent anorexia and the underlying reasons for it. Said poem is called Criminally Fragile, and you can find it - and a bunch of other poems that have been posted on this blog at one time or another - at my Blankmedia profile. Do please have a look, and comment if you want to. Feedback helps.

And yes, the photos used as thumbnails for the poems are pictures I've taken. Some were shot near the area where I'm working at the minute, others elsewhere. I've became kind of addicted to taking quick, serendipitous shots of things since I got the Blackberry, and especially since I started doing those little poetry 'movies' for uploading here. I'm constantly looking now for little shots that could be well-used to accompany a particular line in a poem or the poem itself. At some point I suppose I should get around to uploading some of my shots to the Wikimedia Commons to pay back the number of times I've used their images to accompany my work. That'll be a nice weekend project sometime, I think. In the meantime, as a bonus for blog readers, here's one of the shots from where I am at the moment. I work on a business park and, what with us being in a recession and all, there are lots of empty units, which are fascinating in a JG Ballard/Iain Sinclair ruins-of-late-capitalism way. I got this shot taken from underneath a spiral staircase while creeping about by one of these vacant shells.