Luke Samuel Yates

infestation

It would be nice to have company,
we agreed, but our best bet
for getting any at the moment
might be an infestation.

I wanted voles,
or some of those small dogs
that are given to jumping up really high.
Sarah wanted a single polar bear.

Lauren, the neighbour, who had lived in Australia
mentioned that you can quite easily
get a serious racoon problem
in the outback.

We didn’t mind the idea of the serious
racoon problem,
the racoons in the kitchen
stealing wooden spoons

the racoons in the wardrobe
trying on dungarees.
It was always hard, Sarah said, to take
anything about Australia seriously.

The worst kind
of infestation,
we all agreed,
would be other people.

A self-help entrepreneur
from Reading
who reads The Economist
on the toilet.

A solicitor emptying
the washing machine
and singing Joni Mitchell
while you are eating breakfast.

Luke Samuel Yates has published three pamphlets, was a Poetry Society Foyle Young Poet on four occasions, and was selected for the Aldeburgh Eight. His first collection, Dynamo, won the 2022 Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Prize. A lecturer in Sociology, he teaches and researches political movements, technology, and consumption practices. His website is lukesamuelyates.wordpress.com. 

Luke wrote the following about ‘Infestation’:

The tension in the poem, and the joke, is about wanting company and difference but also choice and control, a variety of wildness or otherness that one can choose, own, civilise, subordinate and perhaps trim into a desirable shape such as a domesticated animal – but which remains different and other regardless. Apparently ‘infestation’ comes from middle English for ‘torment or harass’, and the Latin ‘infestus’ which means hostile, which itself comes from ‘belonging to an enemy’ or simply ‘stranger’. Yet the real threat to conviviality and self, the worst kind of infestation, might be the overwhelming presence of that which is too familiar.