"Sierra"

Jack and Sarah exist in the front room of a middle class house. In the centre of the room stands a Ford Sierra, purring unremarkably. It cannot be said to complain.

Sarah: Millions of people in this world get by without complaining, or at least without endlessly playing out their complaining: without trying to make this complaining into avant garde theatre.

& you feel cheated?

Jack: I do feel fucking cheated

Sarah: & you sit there with all this "our social problems are political problems"

Jack: smaller versions of

Brecht's method you know, it's a mistake to see these things as somehow optional. Drama merely recapitulates existing social drama, itself simply expressing these political problems.

Sarah: All our drama sublates does it? Why don't you put that on your fucking C.V.?

Jack: I don't know if I've got the vocation for missionary work among them. I have this aversion you know. Especially the whole thing links back. You have to justify it from your former employer. These Himalayan Nuns, you know, didn't have to justify their thing out of local sources.

Sarah: These adolescence!

Jack: Society does not recapitulate the logic of the school.

Sarah: Schoolmasters against school! I'll write that one down. Society does not what?

Sarah walks round distractedly and finally settles in the front seat of the Sierra. The electric windows are raised almost noiselessly.

When I arrived I read them, just for fun, one of the poems I wrote during the strike:

"It started as a metaphor/
but now persists/
as system staged to conjure/
its original referent/
She's swirling a red flag."