feet up on the picture thinking homemaker

Reconstruction of Etemenanki ziggurat, Babylon.

[Image source: Wikipedia  . Created by Jona Lendering after Hansjörg Schmid.]

actually cramped in standardized          firm

quarters

draped asbestos ranked statuesque 

in situ 

its figurate living mind whose nature   feet

strolls

within the floor area the budget will 

afford 

pace Mayakovsky’s pacing breath         then

stretcher

atop a concrete slab laid upon 

minimalists 

whose song of the box or cupboard      slippery

draw 

drives a coach and fiat through the 

whole 

will to reside in architectonic                 tops

vocabularies 

no bulky buffet arrangement 

needed here

later deployed in low brow                     nature

configurations 

all hail Ikea and the stripped soul 

flooring 

the cause economy in light brown        makes

parquet 

strung out vacantly over gypsum 

lego sets 

till vermiculite sheathing holds             no

each whole 

of resin-bonded wood chips in 

rigid ranch 

the blue-collar coffee set dreaming      bounds

a buck 

this is plywood world on the verge 

of mdf 

a legacy of military design in every      etc.

trainer 

slash freedom’s no blank indeter-

minateness 

how goes it bonnie maid versatile         trenches

linoleum 

under which circumstances a dou-

ble want 

as a counter-poise to the absolute         puckered

standing 

partly too for something fixed and 

secure 

feet up on the picture thinking              lips

homemaker 

while glamour steals a march on 

the bath 

before sitting pretty up on execu-         in

tive foam 

every picture window brought to 

you by 

technology sanctified in modernist      furrows

points 

yonder the hum of happy wreck-

ing crews

and the inherent problems of an-         faces
gular form 

giving way to the revenue view or 

upkeep 

left to run from elegance to stark         come

brutalism 

hey you stop roaming in empty 

abstraction 

keep your eyes open for lay                  physic

Althusserians 

then there’s the horizontal cadence 

calling

I've been reading Drew Milne's Blueprints & Ziggurats, which is one of the two long sequences that were published for the first time in In Darkest Capital: The Collected Poems of Drew Milne (Carcanet, 2017).

The whole sequence, as you may have surmised, is preoccupied with architecture, design and construction. Perhaps we could be more specific and say it's about the human players; the architects, the bankers, the builders, the dwellers and everyone else who's impacted by what's built or (often) not built. 

Though (mindful of Althusser) I could be placing too much emphasis on individuals and not enough on social structures. But when I think of the robustly demotic vein in Milne's poetry, I feel I'm right. 

Near the start we have the spectacle of the superannuated Frank Lloyd Wright, when invited by the oil-rich King Faisal II to make proposals for developing a westernized Baghdad in the 1950s, suggesting a grandiose scheme for an opera house that would be topped off with sculptures of a heritage camel and Aladdin's lamp. (The scheme foundered when Faisal and his family were killed in the revolution of 1958.) It was a story that had lost none of its grotesque eloquence at the time Milne was writing the poem and Baghdad was being patrolled by US tanks.

My extract comes from a section titled "The bruise that Heidegger built". This may just possibly be in highly critical dialogue with Heidegger's paper "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951) [PDF], though I say this with an uneasy feeling of either being stupid or stating the obvious. 

But having gone this far I may as well venture another guess, that "hey you" refers to Althusser's concept of interpellation, i.e. how social structures persuade people to self-identify as subjects (which he illustrated by the way someone feels they have to turn round when a policeman calls "Hey, you there!").

Embrasures:

Embrasures at Keoti Fort, India.

[Image source: Wikipedia . Photograph by Timothy A. Gonsalves.]

            here an almshouse there 

            a palladian disability unit 

            baldachino for ciborium 

            and embrasures of within 

angular                                          lean to 

capital                                            roofing 

bloods                    care                  single 

capital                    shed                 roofing 

block                       tree                  screen 

capital                    folly                 framed 

cushion                                          rip offs 

capital                                            scallop 

             old style scandal mews 

             in debt to public private 

             injection traceries swag 

             now a pension torus in 

             wall to wall vernaculars

(from "Embrasures")

City of dogs:

Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacán. 

[Image source: Wikipedia  .]

The poem "City of dogs" is available online, here:

https://blackboxmanifold.sites.sheffield.ac.uk/issues/issues-1-10/issue-2/drew-milne

It's all about Teotihuacán, the ancient meso-American pyramids and temples near Mexico City.

In the post below 'Laura' visits the site, and talks about the "city of dogs" aspect:

https://funlifecrisis.com/visiting-teotihuacan-pyramids-in-mexico-city/

Skylon song:

The Skylon was a vertical cigar-shaped steel tensegrity structure that appeared to stand in mid-air, created for the Festival of Britain, 1951.

The Skylon illuminated at night.

[Image source: Wikipedia  . Photograph by Bernard William Lee, 1951.]

                   o  

                 sky 

                song 

              skylon

            half way 

           house and    

         paths lost but 

        summit meagre 

      brick charred ruin 

     burning burning so 

     still the none comes 

   and portals to watery 

   beds how sweet flows 

   concrete steel a thread 

   its once and future city 

  shows this slender cigar 

  steel that floats and flags 

 bonfire of the modernists 

 how each visible support 

  does a lash propaganda 

 sleek symmetry as cakes 

 for the millions who saw 

  who came who felt a sky 

  high into vertical breeze 

  to scrap of ashtrays and 

  satellite dishes air spear 

  here over the whimsy of 

  fabric and braced bulbs 

 their aluminium lattice of 

  something darkly atomic 

  who gave us the housing 

 scheme as advertisement 

 such as its fallen to furies

(Opening lines of "Skylon song")