A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends – Selected Poems by Martin Hayes (Broken Sleep Books, 2025), 359pp
By Alan Morrison
A Few More Sunrises Yet Before It Ends comprises selections from five of Martin Hayes’ previous poetry collections: When We Were Almost Like Men (2015), The Things Our Hands Once Stood For (2016), Roar! (2018), Ox (2021), Underneath (2021), and Machine Poems (2024). Most of those volumes are of considerable size in themselves so Hayes and Broken Sleep Books’ editor Aaron Kent have clearly done some extensive sifting of material to get this Selected down to the 359pp page mark.
For anyone familiar with the oeuvre of American blue-collar poet Fred Voss (1952-2025), his rangy-lined free verse depictions of manual factory work have served as something of a template for the unpunctuated expansions of Hayes’ poems, almost all of which are based around his place of work, a courier firm in London. But while Hayes might be seen as the UK’s answer to Voss (he too shares a tendency for long Whitmanesque poem titles), he has through the course of several volumes stamped his own signature on the underrepresented poetry of employment.
One key difference to Voss is that Hayes depicts his experiences in the courier industry where he works as a computer-clamped ‘controller’, more white-collar than blue-collar work, though arguably much more precarious. As Andy Croft notes in his Foreword, the corporate sweatshop of Phoenix Express is a computerised contemporary replacement for the exploitative painting-and-decorating firm Rushton & Co. in Tressell’s The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists (1914).
In Ox, the poem ‘Ox and the Great Big Identity Trick’ echoes the key Marxian concept of ‘The Great Money Trick’ as presented by the Tressell’s main protagonist, socialist sign writer Frank Owen, who fruitlessly tries to awaken a class consciousness among his complacent, tabloid-sated workmates. Thematically there are also echoes of Jack London’s semi-autobiographical blue-collar Bildunsgroman, Martin Eden (1909).
Croft touches on other similarly-placed poets in his Foreword: ‘In the first half of the twentieth-century a number of self-taught working-class poets emerged from the urban proletariat to write about their part in the productive labour-force – notably Joe Corrie (the Fife coalfield), Ethel Holdsworth (Lancashire cotton-mills), Julius Lipton (East-end sweatshops) and Fred Boden (the Derbyshire coalfield).’ But this proletarian tradition in literature stretches back to the 18th and 19th centuries much of which mushroomed from the Chartist movement.
Hayes’ job title of ‘controller’ is ironic given the poet’s sense of employee powerlessness, as he puts it in ‘In Between Controlling Jobs’:
in between controlling jobs
we sit dumb-open-mouthed
staring into the carpet
for hours
we look Hell in its eyes
trying to find a position for the uselessness we feel
that we have become
and then the moment we get employed again
we begin to feel our blood
Phoenix Express employees are the daily prey of their very controlling supervisors:
the telephonists come in with dead faces and tired eyes
saying yes to everything their supervisor says
just so they can get rid of her
and get back down to working out how much a month they can afford
to spend on Janey from accounts
Littlewoods catalogue.
‘Dead Faces and Tired Eyes’.
Exploitative and negligent, these supervisors only seem to supervise but do little else:
and no supervisor has ever thought
of actually replacing the faulty keypad
because that is not in the rationale
of the company
it is also no good for any of us controllers
to suggest it
because that would just be considered
make believe
and single you out
as a troublemaker
(‘How To Be Get Singled Out As A Troublemaker’)
Then there is the monitoring made by ‘programmers’, as detailed in ‘Trying To Paint The Sistine Chapel Over Again’: ‘all the while writing down notes in their little Moleskine books/ that will apparently help them/ hone their monster’. Further into this poem, Hayes launches into a lyrical tangent as to how the supervisors didn’t understand the complexity of ‘this controlling lark’ as if they had they wouldn’t have ‘signed off on a new automated allocating system/ that goes live next week…
which won’t be able to paint the Sistine Chapel over again
which won’t be able to leap like a Nureyev
which won’t be able to carve marble like a Rodin
and which won’t be able to see the unseen
or think the unthinkable
quite like us human controllers can
This is a powerful comment on human imagination and creativity which cannot be substituted by technology or AI. Yet in spite of their strictly monitored and controlled working environment, there’s a sense of overall aimlessness: ‘someone somewhere at Phoenix Express/ must know why and what they are doing/ even if we don’t’ (‘Futility’).
This constant surveillance in the workplace reminds me in some ways of the Public Control Department in Wilfred Greatorex’s dystopian drama series 1990 (1977-8), although that is ostensibly set in a near-future ‘socialist’ dystopia—Phoenix Express is the product of our hyper-capitalist society, where corporations do much of the monitoring, so more a Huxleyan than Orwellian dystopia.
There is a sense of class tension in many of the poems, particularly in the sardonically titled ‘The Importance of Law and Medicine’, which describes dilettante interns drawn from upper-middle-class backgrounds: ‘many of the sons of these great men/ leave by the end of their first week/ and go off to “do” India or “do” Thailand’. Episodes such as these bring to mind early twentieth century scenarios of stratified clerkdom as depicted in novels like J.B. Priestley’s Angel Pavement (1929) or sociological studies such as David Lockwood’s The Blackcoated Worker: A Study in Class Consciousness (1958). It’s as if the brief pool of social democracy and post war consensus between 1945 and 1979 never happened.
A particularly powerful poem is the short and despairing ‘Terror Street’:
…why must we sit in armchairs
sipping at dead wine in half-dead dark?
why must we walk through parks looking up at the sky
feeling nothing?
…why must we believe in protecting our jobs
when the sea
doesn’t believe in anything?
‘Last Rites’ depicts a 53 year old employee ‘laid off’ due to his age and possibly flagging performance, gifted a ‘collection’ in a ‘manila envelope’ along with ‘the hurt and utter uselessness/ they try to block out’. The Hemmingwayesque-titled ‘The Sun Didn’t Rise Today’ poignantly addresses a colleague’s suicide and closes another colleague’s apothegm on the subject:
Ronnie
commenting later that,
“some men
are just far more capable
of doing almost anything
than other men
I guess”
There is something of Hemmingway’s ‘iceberg’ sensibility to Hayes’s poetry: a sense of much more beneath the surface which isn’t actually said. This also fits with the masculine character of Hayes’ work, or at least, societal notions about masculinity as synonymous with emotional inhibition. Hayes’ verse is also very visceral, with anatomical images frequently featuring, particularly ‘blood’ and ‘teeth’. Hayes physicalises employment as something sinuously oppressive, full of muscle: ‘the the company that these hands work for/ try continually to devise ways to detach these hands from the rest of him’ (‘These Hands Have Made Sandcastles Too’).
‘We Help These Corporations Exist As Our 83-Year-Old Mothers Remain In Pain’, which could have been a song title by The Smiths, or The Housemartins for that matter, is similarly visceral in its anguish: ‘we help these corporations exist/ as we work through toothache/ work through hangovers/ pumping away at our keypads’.
These poems from Hayes’ second collection show a more figurative poetic sensibility coming into play which makes the polemics all the more effective:
they are under interrogation our fingertips
are on the run they are
scratching at the earth
trying to make the tunnel big enough
so that everything else behind them can follow
our fingertips are the pickaxes of their Gulags
their owners sit in rows
tapping away at their keypads
these owners who haven’t owned these fingertip
for years
for centuries
made to feel guilty that their fingertips are alive
made to feel ugly that their fingertips are unique
when they should all just be mucking in
part of their collective
with this company’s heart as their heart
with this company’s blood in their blood
our fingertips who have no other way to exist
other than this way of theirs
who never get to share in its profit
but who always seem to get to share
in its losses
(‘Our Fingertips’).
These moments of more figurative language give pausing points of lyrical grace amid the mundane and grittier detail—and they often come as crescendos at the close of poems: ‘filled with other men all seeking the same type of peace that eagles gliding/ through the immense sky feel’ (‘Peace’). In Roar!, there’s a poem titled ‘Lifting Off Like Eagles Into The Sky’ to describe the elation of Friday afternoons: ‘as Stevie sat back with a big Cheshire-cat grin on his face/ rubbing his hands together in anticipation so fast that smoke rose up from the palms of his hands’. It ends on a perennial epithet for employment: ‘some men/ will just never understand/ what a Friday afternoon means/ to other men’. In ‘That Uncontrollable Pit of Debt’ there is the line: ‘you can feel the anticipation/ in your guts/ the warmness kindling’.
Amidst the dehumanising environs of the courier trade Hayes never misses the moments of black humour:
the mechanics outdid even themselves
on their latest beano down to Southend
with Scott not even making it there
detained at Loughton services
for pissing in a rubber plant next to the Cashino one armed bandits
This poem, ‘Beano’, closes on the ironic trope: ‘nothing though/ that a day out at the seaside/ couldn’t put right’. ‘The Employed Poor’ makes its point in an almost concrete poetic descent on the page, rather like an iceberg (Hemmingway again) beneath the surface, or a crevasse:
one unplanned bill away from
tipping point one illness
away from seeing the
whole edifice of
their lives come
tumbling down
with no one
around to
help put
any of it
back
together
again
It’s something rather ironic but no doubt deliberate that, as with the verse of Fred Voss, Hayes’ often sparely written and unadorned poems have lyrical and declamatory Withmanesque titles. But there are often declamatory passages within the poems themselves, as in ‘Stitching This Universe Together’:
don’t we need these jobs
so that we can stand in front of mirrors
and look at ourselves
without feeling worthless
or disconnected
like a CEO must
like a President or a Prime Minister must
like the head of an HR department must
don’t we need these jobs
in the same way that Martin Luther King needed his dream
in the same way that Rosa Parks needed to stay on that bus
in the same way that the Wilding needed equality
‘The Men I Work With’ is an impassioned paean for Hayes’ fellow employees and the pastimes that keep them sane inbetween punishing shifts:
a man I work with
cries every time it gets too busy
throws his head back onto his fat neck
and stares up into the ceiling
all the while muttering under his breath
how thankful he is that he still has a job
and hasn’t been allowed to die yet
a man I work with
goes home every night to make Airfix models
only to hang them from his ceiling
or spread them out across his bedsit floor
reenacting the battle of Midway
or the siege of Leningrad
talking all day about historical wonders
what men and women have been capable of before
a man I work with
gets so drunk in the nights after his shifts have finished
that when he comes in for work the next morning
he looks as small as a little death rattle
rattling away at his keypad
with eyes that shine through his pain
and a smile on his face
that has no right to exist
the men I work with
haven’t written any great books
that everyone talks about
they haven’t painted any great pictures
or composed a symphony
that can bring a tear to the eye
but they have worked for years doing 11-hour shifts in a dead-end job
The ‘system doesn’t seem to want to help’ ‘The Telephonist Who Works More Than 36-Hours A Week’:
preferring instead
to let her tilt even more
until she finally takes on so much water
she will go under
and sink to the bottom of the harbour
along with the rest of the wrecks
There is always the health and sanity-checker of ‘Calling in Sick’:
nothing surprises me or shocks me anymore
apart from the truth
which I have found through my years of experience
to be absolutely fucking nowhere near
what comes out of a courier’s mouth
cynicism and disbelief were rife in a supervisor’s mind
at the best of times
but when it came to illnesses
and reasons for days off sick
that’s when they really could show
how much humanity
they had been able to lose.
Hayes admonishes one of the supervisors in ‘Supervisor Glynn’: ‘when you think about all of that flesh and blood/ and all of those smiles and souls/ he took apart over the years inside that control room/ just because he was allowed/ to feel that he could’. ‘The Blood and Smiles Yet To Be Delivered Into This World’ closes on a poignant meditation:
where we pick up bottles of wine after they have gone to bed
and sit at a window wondering about the industries of men
and the blood and smiles that are still yet to be delivered into this world
whether or not they will be the ones
to write that song or poem
that will change everything
Hayes often swipes at much of the middle-class complacency of the contemporary poetry scene, as in ‘Roar!’ where he notes while his supervisors are ‘screaming and shouting at us/ that we were ‘idiots’/ and ‘morons’/ poets are writing about the shadows tulips cast in distilling light’, or:
poets are writing about the smell of their dead father’s tweed jackets
and studying what type of poem they should write
if they want that editor
to put them in their magazine
…
poets are writing gutless poems
about irrelevant subjects
using fake words
…
the trouble is
it often doesn’t mean anything
because none of their lives
are ever falling apart
quite enough to make their poems
ROAR! ROAR! ROAR!
One wonders whether this Roar! is also an allusion to Shelley’s ‘Rise like lions after slumber/ In unvanquishable number’ from The Mask of Anarchy. There then follows another poem even more pointedly aimed at complacent contemporary poets, with its title taken from a line in the previous poem: ‘As The Poets Write About The Smell Of Their Dead Fathers’ Tweed Jackets’:
a crust of dry bread has become the dream of millions
running water and one bar of electric heat
amenities out of reach for a quarter of the globe
as CEOs stand in their kitchens
warming their feet on underground heated slate tiles while peeling an avocado
slate
ripped from the earth by people whose hands have to squeeze the last drop
of milk from a dead breast
wring a sleeping bag dry
so they can sleep at night without freezing their guts
people who have jobs but still have to queue in food banks just to feed their
families
as their Prime Ministers and Presidents talk about nuclear wars
destroy
…
just because their God lost an election
and had His fingertips replaced on the trigger of a gun
…
closed all of their factories
people who once worked in industries long ago shut by progress
who once used their hands to rivet together ships haul a piece of steel out of
a blast furnace replace
…
as the poets write about the smell of their dead fathers’ tweed jackets
are Forwarded £5,000 for a poem about the opening of a wardrobe
have enough time on their hands
to stand in front of mirrors
contemplating whether they exist or not
and books about wizards and bondage
sell millions
‘Fuck Off Darlings’ is a rebarbative twos-up to the poetry prize scene.
Roar! is chockfull with impassioned pleas: ‘This Job Has Us In Its Mouth and Is Shaking Us About In Its Teeth’:
on offer like a can of Coke
on offer like greasy chains
for us to slip our wrists into
…
the entire Universe up there
on our side
with the sea and the stars in our eyes
and that unbeatable laughter rising up out of our throats
to prove it
And a euphoric expression of escape at the end of ‘Friday Afternoons’:
that we can see for the first time
why the apple fell onto Newton’s lap
Mark Anthony’s face
while he was making love to Cleopatra
feel the fingers of Beethoven
moving over those keys
until it all comes so perfectly together
the moment we put our foot outside that door
and walk up that road
feeling like Beowulfs
out looking for our Grendells
In ‘How To Disappoint Almost Everybody’ Hayes evokes the crushing sense of occupational underachievement: ‘we didn’t need the supervisor’s disgust or hate to know that we weren’t making music/ we knew that sat in those big controllers’ chairs we were in the crosshairs of a sniper’. He next addresses the sense of a wife’s disappointment in him in ‘Some Nights We Get It With Both Barrels’ by imagining her thoughts: ‘‘Why did I have to get with a man/ who has no life-plan,/ who has no schemes/ or big ideas,/ who just works and works and works/ making money/ for other people?’’.
One poem says everything about employment by Phoenix Express in its Tressellian title alone: ‘In Between Stockholm Street and Syndrome Way’. In ‘The Ground in Dirt’ Hayes empathises with the daily chores of the office’s cleaners:
the cleaner pulls out polystyrene cups, discarded sweets, used tissues,
crumpled up crisp packets, pen lids, Gunster sausage roll wrappers
and bits of cucumber and tomato that have fallen
from the sandwiches the controllers eat
and then foot-soled into the carpet.
In ‘Getting Buzzed By the CEO’ we’re almost in the territory of Reginald Perrin being summoned in to his overbearing boss C.J.’s office:
and then I suddenly realised
that this office
with all its leather
and mahogany
and chrome
and cool air
was actually
a gigantic trap
In the wonderfully titled ‘Like A Sniper Wrapped Up In Wine’ Hayes conveys:
you have to sit here patiently some nights
and not worry about Donald Trump
the troubles in Syria
or the colour of a poppy
…
you have to stay patient
like a tiger in a forest
moving a leaf aside with its nose
like a spider
shooting silk out of its arse
like a bluntnose shark
who feeds on a decaying sperm whale
then won’t eat again for another year
…
you have to sit here patiently some nights
like a sniper wrapped up in wine
levelling your crosshairs at something
sometimes the words and meanings come into sight
sometimes
they don’t
Ox could be described as a kind of composite working-class reimagining of Ted Hughes’ Crow merged with George Orwell’s Animal Farm. Here Hayes has chosen to theme an entire collection within one metonymic framework, and it’s particularly effective for his purposes. The eponymous Ox is a personified synecdoche presumably deriving from the idiom ‘strong as an ox’ which alludes to the strength of the employed animal for pulling ploughs. Hence the Ox is the exploited worker, the put-upon employee. The opening poem ‘Ox’s Descent’ sets the tone: ‘when Ox got strapped into his first plough/ it was like a revelation/ only with mud and hunger and fear’. In ‘Ox and The Bottom Line Is All That Counts Method’ we get a consummate metaphor for employment:
so he begins working out how many days off each ox has
due to coughing
or lungworm
or cryptosporidium
cross-referencing the results
against which oxen eat more hay
or which oxen demand more of his attention
to look after
trying to separate one ox from another ox
to see if he can justify
its slaughter
‘Ox and the Struggle Against the Single File Entry Method’ demonstrates the punitive nature of employment, especially the type which circumnavigates basic rights to sick pay:
there is nothing wrong with you
you are faking it
you are full of shit
and you will not eat tonight
then he twisted a black mark into Ox’s forehead
with his thumb
and Farmer stayed true to his word
withholding Ox’s food
so that Ox remained hungry
letting out moos
deep and low
and this goes on
not only for oxen
but for nurses and fireman and fruit pickers
‘Ox and the Great Big Identity Trick’ echoes both Tressellian and Orwellian satires in its comment on de-unionised labour and thwarted collectivism:
every animal on the farm
wants what they want
as Farmer sits in the safety of his farmhouse
laughing away at his luck
as not only does God obviously love him
but it seems that all the animals
have fallen for The Great Big Identity Trick
become so wrapped up in themselves
that they’ll never get together now
to burn his farmhouse down
‘Ox and Those Voices’ is a psychological play on repressed anti-capitalist sentiment and resentment:
so for the rest of his existence
Ox ate his food
and pulled his plough around
to a looped soundtrack screaming out inside his head…
KILL THE FARMER!
KILL THE FARMER!
‘Ox Begins To Give Up’ appears to depict working-class complacency in terms of the perception that things can’t be changed:
wedged up against a bale of hay
smoking a cheap cigar
laughing
no one can threaten me anymore
I am slave of oxen
I am prisoner of the field
I am victim of all I survey
The cigar being a perennial motif for capitalists (so much so that cigar-smoking Labour prime minister Harold Wilson smoked a pipe in public), it seems Ox is falling into the trap of starting to think he has some kind of control over his circumstances. But no so, as the rest of the poem reveals:
Ox took a deep drag on his cigar
puffed a cloud of smoke into the air
and said
listen mate, we are oxen
always have always will be
oxen make things happen
for Farmer only
so there’s no need to worry
no need to get anxious
you just gotta give in
we work and eat when we’re allowed
and then we don’t
so relax brother
put your dreams away
and make the most of it
there’s nothin’ you can do about nothin’
‘Ox Confronting Technology’ reflects the constant threat of further mechanisation and redundancy: ‘when the tractors were unveiled/ the oxen knew that their time was up’…
no one knows these fields like we do
we have trodden and heaved your ploughs
over every square-inch of these field
for years
we are the best and most equipped
for the job
Farmer had to agree
they had indeed trodden and heaved his ploughs
over every square-inch of his field
and no one knew them like they did
all that was left to do
was to see if they could drive the tractors
obviously this didn’t go so well
even though they knew which way to steer them
they had trouble getting themselves up on the seats
and their hooves couldn’t grip the steering wheels
and when the tractor’s engines roared into life
they thought the end of the world was coming
…
needless to say
they didn’t get the job
and now they lay in their leaky barns
nursing headaches
ashamed
and redundant
For me, one of the most effective figurative poems is ‘Ox In Hunger Wonders About His Colleague Mole’:
the starter
a torn-out tongue
tender with years of grubby language
softening up its muscle
next
the Earth’s platter
spread with the scorched heads of its occupants, mouths agape
stuck in charred-black laughter
from the high temperatures of a sudden cooking
loosened teeth
to be sucked clean of their leftover gum-flesh
hanging on to their upturned roots
as an ache inherits the mouth of all those that are left
the wine
blood upon blood
deep as the dark of Moles’ eyes
after culling
then later
dessert
the cream of the white fat opened at Orgreave, beautifully rendered
beaten soft and silky to drip
like victory down their iron throats
‘Ox In Forced Retirement’ again tackles work as a punishing affliction: ‘Farmer is an evil monster/ who hides behind his/ thwacking stick’.
Inescapably the exploited employee ends up propping up their psyche through addictions, whether over the counter sedative medications or drink, as in ‘OX ON ALCOHOL’:
we don’t need that bloody Farmer
to feed us
keep this leaky barn over our heads
who does he think he is
putting these paltry amounts of food
in front of us?
are we supposed to be thankful
for his meagre wage packets!?
he’s the one who should be thankful!
…
and because this seemed
like the greatest idea ever at the time
it wasn’t long before all the oxen
were gathered at Farmer’s door
under a moon that illuminated the whole courtyard
bone white
Afterwards comes ‘Ox With A Hangover After the Crime’ with a chilling repercussion: ‘take that/ you ungrateful ox/ it’s the abattoir for you boy!’ Another of the most effective figurative poems is ‘Ox at the Gates of Heaven’ because of its focus on imagery:
and then there was the single file entry method
funnelling the herd in
to reduce the levels of stress
the white rubber wellington boots
flecked with blood
protecting the feet of a Vasily Blokhin
the silver hooks of a Torquemada
to upturn the world on its head
the white ceramic guttering of a Pol Pot’s throat
accelerating the rivers of blood
into the stomach of the Earth
the burnt out Fiat smoking in the abandoned skull
of a Mussolini
the black bud of poison squeezed from the festering anus
of a Thatcher
…
the empty testes
of a Trump
the lullabies
of a Marine Le Pen
then God’s final judgment
a bolt through the head for all
and a barcode slapped on your flan
to get you out of the gates of this Hell
In ‘Ox and Cow Under Moonlight’ Hayes employs a dialogic form. ‘A Night in the Leaky Barn’ includes the wistful trope: ‘until morning/ when the strapping into their ploughs/ diverted their hunger away/ from each other’. ‘Ox Witnesses Yet Another Birthing’ is one of the shortest poems in Ox, but packs in much profundity in its lyrical scoop:
hot blood has already knitted the words of its poem
warming up not only its mother but other planets also
there is a depth to this deeper than known soil
it sits somewhere in darkness wearing darkness
we are resigned unknowing how it all works
no blueprints survive
we must go blind into its waters every time
As does ‘Ox Gets a Visit from Social Services’ in its closing two lines: ‘they were prisoners of their own song/ Hunger it was called’. There’s a wistful aphorism in ‘Little Ox’: ‘I used to believe in something/ once’. ‘Ox Tries to Sleep’ deals with the despairing employee’s suicidal ideation and has echoes of a similar episode for Tressell’s Frank Owen in The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists:
and this sensation
that there was a cliff-edge near by
that would solve all of his problems
…
there was no choice though
Ox had to face the black
if he was going to sleep
so Ox took in a deep breath
and closed his eyes again
the black descended almost immediately
the fear and panic rose
but he held on grinding his teeth
until he found that cliff-edge –
or it found him?
it’s hard to say exactly how it happens –
and fell off its edge
and as Ox was falling
he suddenly realised that this blackness
the fears inside him
that was him
that was what
he was made of
The equally despairing ‘Ox Dealing with The Light’ ends on a sublime note:
which all helps go to prove
when you see an ox
momentarily pause in a field
swishing his head from side to side
like in a great struggle to set something free
there’s no need to worry
about the revolution starting anytime soon
because all it is
is Ox pretending again
that he’s got something going on up there
when really there is only blackness and fog
and the pain from all of this light
‘Ox and the Song of the Strong’ closes this powerful collection on an almost defiant note:
he knew he had strength though
that he could pull all of the stars back into place
push all of the oak trees back into the sky
lift all of the oxen up off their knees
he knew
that his blood was thick with stamina
that it was made up of all the blood that had ever been before
and would ever come again
and this is what enabled Ox to sing
because after everything had been and gone
it was only blood and strength
and the songs
that would remain of him
Moving into Underneath, ‘Why Not a Job’ is a dialectical materialist plea but which oddly—perhaps ironically?—suggests that our gods should be our jobs:
why not a job
to dedicate your life to
why does it always have to be
a man who died on a cross
or who sat under a fig tree
or who was the last messenger
to bring the words of an invisible and unreachable God to us
rather than these Gods
they keep rattling their cages for
why can’t these jobs be our Gods
our way of earning a living
the religion
we would die for
rather than the colours on a flag
That last line has particular poignancy at this disturbing time of Far Right ‘flag graffiti’. ‘5 Am Early-Shift Tube Ride In’ is another impassioned plea on behalf of fellow exploited workers:
who are these men
speechless now as worms
bright as flamingo
emptied out into luminous orange suits
SKANSKA – KIER GROUP – GALLIFORD –
BALFOUR BEATTY – MACE –
marked plumage of high-vis vests
marching out onto the salt-flat
‘The Night Worker’ is a visceral piece which skirts the subject of self-harm:
slowly the ghosts rise out of his mind dripping wet with mischief
crawling down the inside of his back
duelling in amongst the turrets of his vertebrae
swinging on the nerve-ends of his sciatica
playing out their deep and lonely dramas
that he has become the battlefield and protagonist of
tick tock
slowly the clock goes
carving each second of his shift into his own forearm
until the first cutting-torch-flame of the sun cuts a crack in the black
‘Kneeling’, as its pithy title suggests, is about the supplication of the exploited employee. ‘Lucky Charms’ is a touching poem that provides an office survey of the various mini-mascots collected around each employee’s computer space, the kind of shrine-like superstitious self-comforting that one sometimes sees in taxis with crosses, crucifixes or rosaries dangling from the rear view mirror. There’s one particular poignant detail Hayes notes of one of his colleague’s: ‘and Lucas/ hangs a picture of a man starving in a potato field on his headphones’ hook/ as his’—this could possibly be a reproduction of one of van Gogh’s earlier pictures from his ‘peasant characters’ period.
In ‘All of This Blood Going On and On’ we find Hayes in more figurative mode and with an unexpected swerve towards a spiritual faith:
I used to think that God doesn’t exist
that it was a thing made of stone
set in old mouths
that grew in graveyards
over plumb trees
and dreams
I used to think that all of the people who believed in it
were ignorant
gargoyles
who wanted to fill their hearts
with even more dust
because they were too frightened
by what running blood does
To Hayes, God exists in small acts of creativity: ‘in Chantelle’s hands who makes origami dragons and cats in between/ the calls she takes’. But God also exists in those who rely on chemical means for their small euphoria :
in Marcus the van controller
who comes in every day pumped up like a gladiator on coke
ready to make everything happen
with the magic of his tongue the agility of his mind
and the speed of his fingertips it lives
even in Merve
sat hungover in his chair
(Note the very effective g-alliteration in that passage: ‘gladiator’, ‘magic’, ‘tongue’, agility’ ‘fingertips’, ‘hungover’). ‘Foxconn Suicide Watch’ depicts a fellow worker who is so overworked that she is covertly monitored by the poet and colleagues for her own safety:
as Judith crosses her legs
and holds on to her wees
not wanting to get a black mark
pressed into her forehead
…
not wanting
to not be able to put a bowl of pasta in front of her child’s mouth
or be able to buy a plant
that she can water and watch grow up into the sky
as the system blocks out the sun
drains her blood away
from the heart she’s learnt
has to be made to stay awake has to sometimes
be made to keep
on beating
even when all the rest of her is so tired
so fed up
that all it wants to do is stand up on a roof
and fall
face first
into eternal sleep
In ‘Feeling Like A Man Again’ one of Hayes’ colleagues is sacked for hitting supervisor ‘Glyn’ over the head with his computer keyboard: ‘as Maurice sat there for a moment letting it all sink in/ knowing that he’d finally felt that great big bird arrive…
squawking up into the sky
so that it came out of Maurice with him picking up that keyboard
and smashing it over supervisor Glyn’s head
slowly getting up afterwards
picking up his glasses case vape and asthma pump
before silently walking out of that control room
Although he has now lost his job, the experience feels perversely emancipating for ‘Maurice’ who finally escapes Phoenix Express ‘unemployed/ out into the sun’. In ‘Singing Like An Angel Again’ Hayes depicts another more contented colleague:
as Magic Mike disappeared back into the workshop
with his fingers and his heart
to sit on his dirty old chair
listening to rap on his headphones
not knowing or having a clue
about half as much
as he was keeping this world together
The ironically titled ‘The Souls Of Men’ shows how masochistic the capitalist work ethic is on the part of employees some of whom seem to lap up their exploitation:
it’s amazing the amount of men who keep coming
through the doors of this control room
wanting to drive these vans of ours
it is like there must be some kind of cauldron somewhere
where the souls of these men
are gently stirred until they are formed enough
to grab onto the tails of smoke rising up into the air
…
it’s how they hang on
to that feeling
that they mean something
that despite everything
they are at least going to try to find a way
that enables them to walk through the fire
with their heads up
before their souls finally give up trying
and head back to that reservoir
In ‘We Need Payslips’, the simple pieces of paper transubstantiate into other pieces of paper with which workers can pay bills and rent to keep themselves surviving whilst they have to rely on credit to actually be able to afford much of the product they contribute to producing—a perpetual cycle of exchanging token for token, symbol for symbol, in the ritualistic mock-mystical travesty that is capitalism:
we work to make it turn into food
to make it turn into heat and electricity that keeps our families warm and
happy we work
for the council tax the rent the laughter and song
we work like Standing Bear worked we all work
for the hill in the mists at the back of our minds that we were brought up on
the land where we once ran free
The juxtaposition of exploited workers with the oppression of the Native American Indians is an interesting one. The title poem of Underneath draws its despairing conclusions: ‘God will not save us we are from Underneath/ His hands have been turned to shape a different valley/ silicon greenbacks and the wise selling us short before dumping us’. And this is a perennial state: ‘Underneath it has always been the same’.
The wonderfully titled ‘Cloud Workers’ focuses on the distinctly non-ergonomic aspects to utilitarian technology in terms of living spaces: ‘they have put two black boxes on the wall next to the intercom door of our flat’. Hayes drily comments: ‘the difference between death or a continuation of the pain/ Hansel and Gretel wouldn’t have needed all of those white pebbles/ if they’d had Google Maps’.
‘Brighton’ is a nostalgic poem in which Hayes takes a day trip to Brighton—the common respite destination of sea air taken by many a Londoner—where he reminisces on formative visits with his mother when he was child:
I remember my mum used to take me to sit on
near the old burnt down pier
when everything was younger
and pubs used to shut in the afternoon
…
the huts that used to house gypsies with boney hands
that used to spread out over crystal balls
telling you your future
But strangely the poet prefers the rusty decay of the almost vanished West Pier of the present, perhaps because in its neglect it is somehow more real:
but I like it better now
this charcoal black tongue sticking out into the sea
the twisted metals of the dance hall frame
pieces of iron fractured like an old woman’s teeth
the legs still sturdy
charred roots pinching their toes into the seabed
just about managing
to always keep it propped up
memories live under the sea she said
they twist and turn
stretching themselves out around our submerged architectures
like nightie-wearing ghosts
and sometimes the tide breaks them free
so that they rise for attention
The poem closes with a haunting image of the ‘ghosts of the girls and boys’ of more prosperous Brighton times still ‘out there/ at the end of our burnt down piers’, but this is positive in the sense that it places emphasis on the infinite revitalisations of memory and imagination. ‘Nothing Left To Dream About Anymore’ depicts the parlous prospects of the younger generations of today saddled with enormous university debts and then often offered either poorly paid employment or exploitative unpaid internships:
Edward made the decision
to give up his pursuit of a job in economics
that he’d spent 3-years getting a degree for
to come and work in our control room
as a right-hand man
because he couldn’t afford
to work for another 6-months with no pay
just to get a stamp and a tick on his CV
But Hayes notes that bosses’ prospects are entirely different:
but there is one man
in this building
who has realised his dream
who has a Bentley parked in the yard outside
to prove it
who sits in the boardroom upstairs
‘Where Are The Working Class Now’ seems to be an impassioned plea emphasizing how capitalism divides and rules and ultimately promotes racism and fascism by making white British workers resent cheap foreign workers (particularly those of colour) with the myth of them “coming here and taking our jobs”; it then imagines if all British workers were white rather than a multi-ethnic mix, which is where it seems to get a little muddled in message:
imagine if all of the workers in this city were white
imagine that
imagine
the Uber driving Somalian cabbie
white
the Filipino nanny
white
the Colombian cleaner
white
the Brazilian courier
white
imagine
that
imagine
the Nigerian traffic warden
white
the Afghan phone repair stall owner
white
the Indian corner shop owner
white
I am assuming the essential message here is how a collective working-class consciousness is forever muddied and forestalled by superficial dividing lines, mostly visible ones, cynically extrapolated for repressive and divisive purposes by right-wing newspapers and mainstream politicians, in short, the props of the exploitative capitalist class. The more effective and important part of this poem’s message however comes at its close:
imagine
if the colour of our blood
and the stench of our sweat
was more important
than the colour of our skin
who would
then
be able to split us
apart
see?
why
they did that?
Underneath ends on possibly its’ single most effective poem, ‘Friday Nights at the Typer’, again, because of its use of more figurative language to get its message across:
and inside
the rising and sinking of lungs
the stomach
a sea of beer and rose wine
the half-eaten corpse of an idea
bobbing about in the tide of a gin-coloured moon
a jubilation to a god
whose name now cannot be remembered
who stands back from the edge of the lips
under the dark sanctity of a tongue
bloated by the job
the mind
a lunatic thing
tiring of the ongoing experiments
made up now of the skin-cells of a clown
scooped from under the fingernails of its laughter
jokes
the camouflage of a shoulder-blade
continually wedged up against the sun
and over here
sat in the ear
the removed mouth of a mouse
squeaking away about the scarcity of cheese
the threat of the trap
the map in the claws of a fat cat
until finally
sleep suddenly comes
like the clunk of an irreparable fault in an engine
like the dark centre of a panther
This poem is a triumph of imagery and alliterative effect.
Finally, Hayes’ most recent collection, and the last ever to be published by Smokestack Books, Machine Poems. The short poem ‘The Worker Writer’ serves very much as an epithet for the poet:
what does he know
apart from the shrill bell of his alarm clock and the tube map
that gets him in to do their dirty work
there are no fields for him to saunter
or drag his limbs through their poetic mud
or regurgitate with crafted pen or plough
heaven’s true story
his is more a theft from the earth than a sharing –
when you’ve been used for so long
it’s not such a leap to become a user –
and no joy does he get from it either
other than paying the rent and showing
everyone
what he and his ilk are capable of
‘The Sophie Principle’ is a poignant depiction of an overworked colleague during the Covid pandemic:
Sophie knew what was what
she worked on our Track & Trace desk
monitoring the Major client’s jobs
letting them know when something was delayed
or was about to go seriously wrong
but whenever it got too busy
without anyone noticing her looking around for some help or support
her anxiety would kick in
and she had two big bottomless eyes
like something deep that knew the sea
and you could sense that she was softer than an octopus
only twice as wise
that she’d learned to grow three hearts
one for working one for living and one for her anxiety
while the others in there were shark-cold with their metals and steel
while she was all warm and flesh and caring
with the children still to come
It closes on the beautifully lyrical aphorism: ‘how much more beautiful and rich we are than the stars’. ‘Deshane Jackson’ is a similar poem-portrait which uses petrol as a metaphor for the fuel that powers exploited employees: ‘a bit of unleaded/ pumped into the insides of the machine/ can sometimes lessen the effects of rust/ felt in the throat and stomach of a veteran’.
Machine Poems is another titular synecdoche, the ‘Machine’ meaning the worker or employee, and here is a definite intermingling of the legacy of Fred Voss’s machine-operating factory poetry, particularly his collection Robots Have No Bones (Culture Matters, 2019). ‘The Unsaid’ produces the apothegm ‘10 words in 11 years/ which was more than enough/ for both of us to know/ almost everything’, which very much sums up how 90% of true human communication happens outside the limited parameters of speech. ‘The Flaw’ is nicely figurative:
you found the way in between the beauty of acorn to oak
…
but for the instinct I planted in your gene
that you cut free
dashed into the boiling sea
and replaced with your machines’ language
The wonderfully titled ‘Widening The Divide’ trips into a familiar Hayesian allegory:
the Inventor asked
who is it you worship?
the creatures replied
love money and rage
…
the Inventor knew then
that he hadn’t quite cracked it
that something else was needed
to help widen that divide
While ‘Watch Me Destroy All of That’ is a short monologue by this ‘Inventor’, who may be the God of Work, the Molloch of capitalism: ‘let them suffer/ let them come to me/ with their rent problems and their electricity bills and their damp/ on the bedroom walls of their children’. ‘The Inventor Creates A Device’ first seemed to me a kind of dialectical materialist take on the exploitative and repressive aspects of organised religion in capitalist societies; however, Hayes has since elucidated that the poem is about the invention of the internet and ubiquitous mobile phone as portals to a (to paraphrase him) ‘mind-colonising’ plethora of social media apps (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter etc.) and 24/7 news and associated ‘doomscrolling’, all of which Hayes figuratively characterises as a kind of new religion:
the Inventor thought
this is coming along nicely
they are putting bears in cages
writing songs about suicide
they have become ugly and ripe
all they need is a little bit more help
and I will be ‘this close’
to colonising them all
…
because even though it wasn’t real
like the old church
they came to his new church online
donating more money per month than they’d ever done
and their children suddenly fell quiet
turned in on themselves
peering into their filthy nests
rather than out
Again, this poem is more effective for its use of figurative language, its emphases on imagery: ‘like when Joan of Arc got burnt/ truth and lies became almost indistinguishable/ both a spear laced with venom thrown into a billion hearts at once’. ‘Isolation’ includes the aphorism ‘all pushing the same precarious anxiousness of existence’. ‘The Screams of the Supervisors’ is imaginative in its attempts to evoke the sounds of explosive supervisors with those of the animal kingdom:
then other times they are like the beatings of a silverback’s chest
…
sometimes they are like the bite of a hyena into the back of your neck
other times they are like the annoying whimpering of a chained-up dog
…
but mostly
they are like the coughing-up bark from some hideous animal
afflicted by a great disease
coming from somewhere far of
in the dense electronic wood
The ironically titled ‘Learning’ depicts the exhausted worker waking up for another day at the treadmill, described like an electrically prodded cow, or, indeed, ox: ‘feeling like a carcass electrocuted alive by the alarm clock’. But this titular ‘learning’ refers in part to a shadow-knowledge at how to get back at the capitalist system, and how to mentally escape from it:
to learn
to learn how to steal from those who need to be stolen from
Tesco’s Sainsbury’s TfL
Waitrose John Lewis British Gas
and for when it gets too unbearable
to learn how to sit in the dark drinking dark
Hayes makes a more than apposite juxtaposition:
where all of the supervisors think they are in charge of Rome
who will inspect your performance stats
like they used to inspect the teeth of slaves on a platform in the Campo de’ Fiori
to see if they were healthy enough to keep.
It comes full circle back to the livestock metaphor: ‘to learn how to use yourself/ you are a piece of meat/ you are a cow a sheep a bull a hooved thing’. The David Mercer-esque titled ‘What Resistance Remains’ is another aphorismic piece with pools of industrial lyricism: ‘you will sleep under the iron moon’. ‘Hope’ is an impassioned paean:
it wasn’t how much they were being underrepresented
…
it wasn’t the happiness of fools
it wasn’t the romanticism of poets
it wasn’t even the knowledge
that they were made up of blood and bone
…
no one could work out exactly what it was
but while it lasted
the machines could war over their elections and territories
as much as they wanted
The curse of employment in capitalist society is a Sisyphan one:
because all the creatures needed
was a little bit more of it
in a song in a poem in a kiss
and that would be enough
to keep them going until the next month
Machine Poems ends on ‘The Definition of What’s Not A Machine’, which answers its title in an apothegmic final three lines: ‘when there is an urge an urgency/ in the things that you do/ because you know that one day you will die’. Amid the casual language there are increasingly more figurative seams apparent as we travel forwards chronologically through Hayes’ collections: ‘his fingers began to dance over his keypad like dragonflies’ (‘More Magical and Beautiful Than Any Machine’); ‘spinning around while dragging deep down on their cigarettes/ before throwing back their heads/ and laughing that smoke out of their mouths’ (‘Our Serengetis’).
There are the more typically gritty observations: ‘spinning around while dragging deep down on their cigarettes/ before throwing back their heads/ and laughing that smoke out of their mouths’. And in ‘Work’ comes a crowning epitaph: ‘there is no respite from it// it is the only thing that pays the rent/ the food the electricity the toothpaste/ the plasters Bonjela codeine and wine’—opiums of employment. In these aphorismic flourishes there’s something of late Hackney Writers’ Workshop poets David Kessel (1947-2022) and Howard Mingham (1952-1984).
Hayes’ poetry fits the proletarian tradition in that it is almost entirely shaped by and concerned with the poet’s paid occupation; and, paradoxically, it is this despised daytime occupation that provides succour for his more authentic spare time occupation as poet, since it gives him his subject. In that sense Hayes is the direct baton-receiver of the recently departed Fred Voss, not only in methodology but also style: the often unpunctuated, rangy lines (and titles, try ‘riding home from work with the precariat on a packed Bakerloo line again’), and the use of ‘machine’ as both a leitmotif and a metonym for worker/employee.
There are some other contemporary poets who write about employment, one being Paul Tanner (Poems for Shop Workers, The Penniless Press), but they are exceptions. The candid content of Hayes’ work, particularly in Roar!, prompted his employer to threaten him with the sack, which is largely why Hayes began to use more symbolic imagery from the metonymic Ox onwards. Who says capitalism can’t sometimes feel threatened by poetry?
The poetry of Martin Hayes is more than the sum of its parts; it is one long, circuitous but ever-moving verse-testament to the defiance of the human spirit and imagination in the face of the remorseless exploitation of employment under capitalism. That so much impassioned and effusive self-expression can pour out from the pen of an underpaid and overworked employee for an exploitative private company resoundingly demonstrates how capitalism ultimately fails in its attempts to turn us into worker-consumers incapable of spontaneous creativity in what spare time we are permitted.
Some parts of this review were incorporated in an edited version/sampler published in the Morning Star on 9 September 2025 under the title ‘Poetry of work’
