DATABLEED READS Andy Spragg’s ‘For some there are every, for some there are none’
‘Welcome aboard' says the title of the first poem in Andy Spragg's sequence, 'For some there are every / for some there are none'. It's hard to tell whether we are a new worker being welcomed into a corporate department, or whether the mythological Charon himself is greeting us as we board his ferry: something between a party-boat and a funeral barge carrying the dead across the Thames estuary for a chthonic team-building seminar. In either case, the poems deliver their dystopian memoranda in the casual tones of an employee onboarding training exercise. If Hades did corporate away days...
This is the bleak nightmare-scape of late capitalism, a bleary and ceaselessly disappointing commingling and unravelling of multiple fictions and simulacra. A world brightly illuminated by the artificial glare of merchandise and neon. Where time melts into a monotonous and unfamiliar circularity, while industry seeps into all spaces that might once have been private, including sleep. Reality is decaying and collapsing in on itself, blurring with fantasy tropes and monster-catching video games. Everything is transactional and all value is fiscal; everything that matters, or that is made of matter, has a price tag translating value in numerical terms. And everywhere are the traces of industrial pollution and climate breakdown: poisoned wells, oil spills, estuarine debris and glowing ruins.
As the title of the sequence implies, the poems emphasize social inequalities. We shift from the very low to the very high: from the ‘highest ranking member of the company’ to the ‘righteously poor’; from ploughed trenches to the rarefied air at the zenith of elevator shafts; from mudflats to interstellar cosmic dust. This is industry on a cosmic scale, beyond the bounds of Earth and into the galaxy beyond. And looming in the shadows are absent, dead and fascist gods, or rather, ideas of gods, while bodies break down into waste and gore and product or drift, haunted, on the edges of lunacy. Indeed, human figures in the poems – ‘I’, ‘we’, ‘he’, ‘they’ – have a haunted and haunting quality, as if we are all already dead.
The poems explore what it means to move and connect within this horrorscape: in liminal spaces like bridges and boats; via transferences and transmissions; with staples, glue and buttons holding bodies and minds together. But they also reflect the slipperiness of that movement and connection, and the hollowing out of language’s meaning within corporate spaces. Lines drift, dreamlike, refuse to settle, shift from one topic to another distractedly, and even in their simplest form – short, evenly-spaced lines – the poems are complex, knotty, twisting away from easy interpretations.
This sequence of poems captures with accuracy what it is like to live in the reality we inhabit in 2025; pinpointing the blend of daily horrors, griefs and shocks made banal through endless repetition, the dismal deadening of feelings that results from crisis fatigue and the endless repetition of work in bullshit jobs, alongside the darkly comic absurdity of events playing out on the global political stage. All aboard Spragg’s corporate Vengabus of nightmares; it will be like all of the worst office parties you’ve ever attended.