People Build Houses…
people build houses
that are too big
to live in
people build houses
for the dead and for immortality
people hoard money
people rob people
they put money in safe places
that the living can’t access
they hoard the money
to do great deeds
to devote to ideals
and to deal out death
people kill people
in the name of dead people
in the name of immortality
in the name of fictions
people kill the person within
people build big houses
people build big myths
people build big people
but those
who were dead
are dead all the same
An Elderly Man and Woman
an elderly man and woman
eating strawberries on the bus
faces fathomless and solemn
hand to mouth they raise
big juicy berries
the sky is clear the sun is bright
it’s Saturday morning
it’s springtime
but we’re in post-Stalinist trauma
Notes on this poem
When I first read fs’s 2004 (2004), the nuanced fluidity of poems that roam through a stark urban landscape reminded me of the monochrome scenes of Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker (some of which was filmed in Tallinn) and George Orwell’s 1984 (the epigraph to the collection is an extract from that novel). The poems work like tracking shots of dormitory suburbs, city wasteland, grey buildings and nondescript corridors, punctuated by close-ups of city-dwellers through the windows of their homes, in buses and cars, in the street. The titles of collections of the last 10 years – Naked and Alive (2008), 100% fs (2012), Untattooed Person (2018) – focus on the individual laid bare, a body and a person in the flow of existence.
fs’s poems are deeply personal and marked by self-irony, revealing the environments that he moves in and what is in his line of vision and on his mind – with an absence of metaphor and illusion. They speak of birth and death in the same breath, and of life as that ‘cycle of excreta’ in between. They evoke the anonymity, the aloneness of the human condition: ‘we are born in hospitals’ and ‘when a human being dies | doors bang | cars move | … | a cat washes its face | people rush past | a computer hums next-door | it changes nothing’.
fs is a straight talker whose language is pared down, unpunctuated and unadorned; yet these are not raw slices of life but choice cuts carefully trimmed.