We were at our best when we were unemployed. After our PhDs. Looking for work. Utterly desperate. Prospectless.
With all our education and all our despair. About this far from suicide. Wasn’t it the best?
It was the worst.
Which is why it was the best. We were beneath everything. Beneath ourselves. Beneath anything we could do. Beneath work. Beneath writing. Beneath any kind of self-preservation. Good for nothing.
We’d learnt everything and had forgotten it all. We’d studied, and we’d forgotten what we’d studied. We read philosophy for years, and now we’d forgotten what we’d read. Every page.
Street wanderers. Street drinkers, nearly. Drawn to the margins. To scraps of wasteland. To puddles in the mud. To fenced off land, undevelopable. Unproductive. We barely existed! And wasn’t that what saved us?
From what? For what?
Work in Progress 