Give me a noun
give me a verb
and I’m in motion
cos I’m on a mission
to deliver information
The opening of the second stanza of this poem joins with the opening lines of the other stanzas: “Give me a preposition” and “Give me a pronoun” for instance. This is poetry as manifesto. The speaker cannot be separated from the author; both view language as a tool, a weapon, a drug, a lover, a stage or anything that empowers one to connect with another in any kind of significant and useful way. The verse is a proclamation of power; the power to put words together to form phrases and sentences into ideas as an act of creation.
It's past midnight. I'll call a cab if you want me to.
But your eyes know how to fit
a condom like a second skin. Come on…
The closing lines of this poem are indicative of the poet’s canon thus far. She is a writer who excels in the dramatic monologue, not least because she is also a performance artist. The lines do not just sit idly on the page for the reader to interpret; Agbabi is notable for live performances in which poetry is transformed into soliloquy. Most of these poems are first-person accounts sometimes of a singular event in time, often of a narrow constricted time period. The closing lines of “Skins” is also indicative of the poet’s relentless resistance to closure and finality. The ambiguity and open-ended quality of these final lines echo throughout much of her work.
I work Stamford Hill mostly. My first time
was 96. We was really broke. Boy
from the local estate. Dealer. The girls
put me up to it. Once I got over the taste it was child’s
play.
Samantha is a dramatic monologue about a young woman who becomes pregnant. Not pregnant out of young love or coercion before she is ready; Samantha is a prostitute. In this excerpt, she recalls the circumstances which led to adopting this line of work. What is interesting is the manner in which the poet fuses peer pressure from outside the home with economic pressures located within the domesticity of home. Also of note is the casual, matter-of-fact quality with which she eases directly from the life of an inexperienced girl into the life of a prostitute.
He said, Open wide, poured olive oil down my throat.
Soon you’ll be forty… he whispered, and how
could I not roll over on top. I rolled and he drowned
in my flesh. I drowned his dying sentence out.
“Eat Me” is a disturbing poem on many levels which is, of course, the intent. It is a portrait of domestic abuse wrapped up in a seemingly less offensive brutality of a husband whose preference in females is definitely toward the pulchritudinous:
“big girls, soft girls, girls I can burrow inside
with multiple chins, masses of cellulite.”
Which is all nice and fine and would be not just acceptable but perhaps to some even admirable if only his “love” was not tinged with the sadistic impulsive of forcing his wife to eat, forcing her to become bigger and softer. The abuse is perhaps not as palpable as broken noses and black eyes, but it is fundamentally no different at all. And so this becomes an example of one of Agbabi’s dramatic monologues which leads to a moment of transformation, an epiphany, a change. And yet, it too concludes on a note of ambiguity lacking full closure and finality.
