TIGER BLOWJOB

I debated a while whether to call this poem 

Language or The English Language or English 

or The Entrepreneur or Current Pedagogic Methodology or School

or even English School but it wasn’t a school

in spite of its departmental stamps and certificates 

and its 1200 registered clients, each handing over 

thousands and thousands in fees.

It was just a second floor office

in Tiger Central above a tanning lounge

and next door to a corporate paint-balling agent’s

and it was far from the only operation

that instead of selling lessons was, with greater acumen, 

selling attendance.  90 ticks. 90 teacher’s ticks were needed

at the end of every 6 month period

for the GNIB (Garda National Immigration Bureau)

to examine and then, finding all else satisfactory,

consent to renew those special ex-EU work-and-study 

visas which gave contingent sanction to a quota 

of mainly young and transient cheap-labour emigrants 

to work in the western world as long as they attended

those expensive English Lessons for a mandatory five

days a week leaving little choice to each but make

the tills continually click for the bosses of

convenience stores while handing up

the bulk of their wages to the Language Schools,

and the remainder to their landlords

(I heard of teenage Chinese sleeping nine to a room)

so that they couldn’t make any decent money for themselves

or to remit before working a sixty-hour week

which doesn’t leave much concentration

left for learning lists of past participles

or filling in blanks in the future conditional.

It wasn’t long before many students discovered, 

like many since and before them, that you can learn 

more English in even or especially the shittiest job 

just because you have to learn it

to get by than you ever could in a school or university

and you’ll earn more money too and send bigger bundles 

home and it wasn’t long either before some of the bosses

in the Language Schools came to realise that not-teaching

could be just as lucrative as teaching, could be

a million wad just dangling there in front of you

and all you had to do was make a grab

and so my mate, who worked for this Quality Assured

Guaranteed Irish Departmentally Certified school

one summer as its Academic Manager, whenever

a young woman from Recife or Nanjing or Mauritius

would turn up cent-less in a sob because the boyfriend

had pissed or mah-jonged the earnings or she had been 

needle-mugged or she had wired it to buy back

her little sister from the mob or it was crocodile 

or whatever and she couldn’t or wouldn’t pay 

for the attendance ticks but had come to beseech him 

like Magdalene anyway, well my mate would, decently, 

let her away with it, providing absolutely every tick she needed

for the small consideration of a blowjob.

I debated for a while what I should call this poem

and I considered Visadick and LinguaCock and CocKtionary 

and The man whose lad had visas in it

and The man who came language and even Liquidity

but none of the above had the bite

the clamp the rip the chomp the chew the suck

the roaring thirst the burning goo for blood

and piss

and spunk

and words

I think this story wanted.