Another Beautiful Day Indoors

Cover Page Title Page Copyright Contents 1 Out on the Pleasure Pier Studying the Myth of the Flood Microplastics in Antarctica Satellite Insurance The Please Stop Killing Us and Destroying Everything That Sustains Us Society The Safety Coffin To a Couple Who Had Their Rings Brought to the Altar by Drone at Their Garden Wedding The Black Friday Elegy Another Beautiful Day Indoors The First Plant Grown on the Moon Open-Plan Office The Class Anxiety Country Song Picking up Pieces of Paper Other People Have Dropped Phosphate from Western Sahara Focus Group Survivor Van Advertising ‘Interior Plantscaping Services’ An Interesting Redundancy Package Lives of the Poets The Inertia Poem All Holidays Are Made-Up Holidays 2 [notes towards a definition of essential work] Four Life Forms Setting up the Debate Official Printer to the Government Agatha and Florian The Planned Obsolescence Rhapsody The Plot of the Nativity Play Early Evening at the Coal Plant Notes Towards a Definition of Essential Work The Night Before the Barn-Raising The Admin Job Psalm 3 The Foiled Axe Murder Poem Young Adult Success Stories There Is a Man Dancing on the Rudder of an Enormous Cargo Ship Local Politics The Vegan Poem, or It’s Not a Conversion Narrative Because I Was Already Converted Nineteenth-Century Rural Road-Builders The Autonomous Vehicle Research Centre Abandoned Duckling in the Car on the Way to the Animal Hospital The Dead Men of 2012 The Invention of the Shovel Activism Post-Pandemic Adaptation Anxiety and Executive Function Beginning of a Longish Holiday Grief Sonnet 1 of 235 Composite Sketch of My Enemy Cemetery-Going Beaches You Can Drown At Father’s Day We’re Nice to Each Other After the Trauma Shin-Deep in the Floodwaters, Already Afraid Notes and Acknowledgements Thanks 
 
 
 Te Herenga Waka University Press
 Victoria University of Wellington
 PO Box 600 Wellington
 teherengawakapress.co.nz
 Te Herenga Waka University Press
 was formerly Victoria University Press.
 Copyright © Erik Kennedy 2022
 First published 2022
 This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part may be reproduced by any process without the permission of the publishers.
 The moral rights of the author have been asserted.
 Copyright acknowledgements on page 93 are an extension of this imprint page.
 A catalogue record is available at the National Library of New Zealand.
 ISBN 9781776920075 (print)
 ISBN 9781776920860 (EPUB)
 ISBN 9781776920853 (Kindle)
 Ebook conversion 2022 by meBooks
 To George and Susan Kennedy
 . . . Vain things alone
 Have driven our perverse and aimless band.
 —Ernest Dowson, ‘A Last Word’
 It is utterly decadent, in a world gone out of joint, to behave as though everything were in perfect order.
 —Ernst Fischer, The Necessity of Art: A Marxist Approach
 A system based on perpetual growth cannot function without peripheries and externalities. There must always be an extraction zone—from which materials are taken without full payment—and a disposal zone, where costs are dumped in the form of waste and pollution. As the scale of economic activity increases until capitalism affects everything, from the atmosphere to the deep ocean floor, the entire planet becomes a sacrifice zone: we all inhabit the periphery of the profit-making machine.
 —George Monbiot, ‘Dare to Declare Capitalism Dead—Before It Takes Us All Down with It’
 Contents
 1
 Out on the Pleasure Pier
 Studying the Myth of the Flood
 Microplastics in Antarctica
 Satellite Insurance
 The Please Stop Killing Us and Destroying Everything That Sustains Us Society
 The Safety Coffin
 To a Couple Who Had Their Rings Brought to the Altar by Drone at Their Garden Wedding
 The Black Friday Elegy
 Another Beautiful Day Indoors
 The First Plant Grown on the Moon
 Open-Plan Office
 The Class Anxiety Country Song
 Picking up Pieces of Paper Other People Have Dropped
 Phosphate from Western Sahara
 Focus Group Survivor
 Van Advertising ‘Interior Plantscaping Services’
 An Interesting Redundancy Package
 Lives of the Poets
 The Inertia Poem
 All Holidays Are Made-Up Holidays
 2 [notes towards a definition of essential work]
 Four Life Forms
 Setting up the Debate
 Official Printer to the Government
 Agatha and Florian
 The Planned Obsolescence Rhapsody
 The Plot of the Nativity Play
 Early Evening at the Coal Plant
 Notes Towards a Definition of Essential Work
 The Night Before the Barn-Raising
 The Admin Job Psalm
 3
 The Foiled Axe Murder Poem
 Young 1
 Out on the Pleasure Pier
 Out on the pleasure pier on that benign afternoon,
 the air heavy with the blossom of vinegar and old tyres,
 you asked what was Studying the Myth of the Flood
 Did it happen all at once,
 the buildings filling up
 with seawater like rain gauges,
 litter and people floating
 into the mountain ranges