Modern

A numbered catalogue of seven places, each worse than the last, tracing modernity as a series of environments defined by noise, drift, cold, strangeness, stench, death, and the company of the forever wounded.

A numbered tour of seven 'places' that reads like a catalogue of dying rooms: noise at the first, drifting people at the second, the third 'a very sorry stone cold,' the fourth where 'everybody dressed fine' until it 'got strange-as if the wind was in curtains,' the fifth so foul 'that bodies came when they were gone,' and the sixth 'where life stopped.' The biblical count of seven sets up the speaker's own fate at the last station, where he 'got unlucky in the seventh place for moments' and 'lounged around / with the forever wounded that never let it die.' The poem's titular 'Modern' is this procession itself - sensation, fashion, and decay arranged like exhibits, with survival reduced to keeping company with those who refuse to let the wound close.