Thomas Chandler
Haliburton Regards Liverpool, 1855
Mr.
John William Graham—
manager
of Tate & Lyle Sugar Company—
Oxford-schooled,
a classicist,
thrills
to see the humongous ships,
brimming
with snowy sweetness,
steam
to refining, distilling,
while
black soot clogs nostrils,
tangles
into hair,
causes
lungs to belch black phlegm….
Such
is the toil of Pleasure,
to
ratchet up profits
as
implacable as the Crucifixion:
The
steamer exhaust hurts lungs,
blackens
clothes, faces,
so
pallid children look suddenly,
“wonderfully”
(they imagine) vile
and
dirty, like heroic waifs,
or
cantankerously ugly
as
printers’ devils,
their
fingerprints bluntly black
(no
ornaments of other tints),
and
whose violently scrawny frames
will
likely crumble under bobby batons
in just
a decade
or
half decade—
in
this brickyard dump of Empire.
Anyway,
unfortunately too,
the
sugar mill specializes
in
multiplication of ogres—
spectacular
amputees—
stumping
for coins before churches,
weeping
baroquely,
but
only themselves to blame,
for
such bumbled job performance
as
to mishandle or tumble
into
fine-tooled, well-oiled machinery,
and
become fodder for the pen
of
Mr. Dickens, who takes blood for ink,
so
as to soil Capital reputations….
But
Mr. Graham wishes to be Sir Graham,
if
he achieves greater heights
of
sugar manufacture,
pouring
mountains into ships’ bellies,
thus
bloating the ledgers’ pounds,
even
as he distracts himself
from
the cries of self-mangled minions
via pursuing fanatically skeletal,
sugar-pale
tarts,
so
gleefully anemic—
subsisting
on whores’ wages
(absinthe
equals drink and opium meat).
However,
outlawing Negro Slavery
mandates
using nurseries,
Kindergartens, as labour
fulfilment
centres,
to
top quotas required
at
mills, factories, brothels,
disgusting,
but enriching;
thus,
the innocent dormitory
now
upstages stink,
and
model Youth—
pale
Adonis, fair Venus—
ebb
to melancholic, graceless Ruin.
These
beings mature, cancer-rife,
or
fall prey to geniuses of Vice—
passionate
as leeches—
who
love nothing less
than
to eviscerate every anus
with
a syphilitic organ.
Mr.
Graham thinks himself no bad boss,
to
excuse workers’ sickliness as “noble,”
or
to see juveniles broken
down
to oozing bones,
suing
Salvation in alcohol
or
starry-eyed Astrology,
their
inebriated jaws drooling on bottles,
or
urine-tasty male organs,
obstinately
pale,
like
sugar at sight, but sour in scent;
or
the kids get sold—
a
seven-year-old
to a
seventy-year-old,
whose
joy is to finger a virginity
until
she screeches, bleeding.
Such
is the sovereign Tyranny
of
factorists like Mr. Graham,
that
Vice is enabled
to
enact intolerable freaks
upon
urchins,
to
so injure “white niggers,”
their
young brains and fledgling genitals
turn
diseased and degenerate.
The
replacement of black slaves
by
white girls and boys
means
capitalists gorge now
on
unskilled muscle,
on
illiterate cradles,
and
once they’ve exacted all Wealth
and Productivity,
discard
these de facto Morlocks—
to
starve or steal,
be
harlots
or
hang by hangmen.
Thus,
Englishry turn Negrory,
insensate
souls,
no
better than rats,
who
must nurse on liquor
and
fatten on sugar.
This
antisocialism attitude
explains
Mr. Graham’s mimicry
of
swine—
his
round-gut, piggish aspect,
puffing
Greek and grunting Latin,
as
he manhandles a wench,
fucking
dirtily a thinness
fed
by clouds.
He
decants fishy smells,
executes
a fever of movement
in a
pretty rut,
soon
flooded with a sugary meringue.
[Liverpool
(England) 12 octobre mmxiv]
