Possession

Between 24 January and 23 March 2026, Trevor Joyce wrote one or more six-line stanzas every day and missed no day. Possession is the result: a documentary long poem in 149 stanzas, 894 lines, each stanza printed with the date it fell on.Almost none of the language is invented. It is found language, taken as it arrived and mostly within hours - wire reports and eyewitness testimony, official statements and the euphemisms that carry them, market commentary and analyst forecast, the scripts by which AI companions perform intimacy, the working vocabulary of machine safety, the therapeutic vernacular, the language of tissue and organ recovery, seventeenth-century English accounts of the Irish.These registers already reach us through the same lit rectangle, minutes apart, in a single scrolling column: the atrocity, the earnings, the affectionate script, the assurance that the facility is now in a safe state. Taken one at a time each is intelligible and even reasonable. Set in one syntax and made to share a stanza, they disclose a common grammar - a way of speaking about the living as material, as stock, as by-catch, as assets, as content. The poem adds nothing to condemn them. It refuses them only the separate rooms they are normally granted.Written forward, into the thing, from Cork, with no hindsight available and no opportunity to revise from a position of safety. It ends where it ends because on 23 March the writing was interrupted, and the interruption has been left to stand. An afterword sets out the method. 6