Boxes arrive in the first line of Benno Emilia Sameyn's «Curse of the Colourless Star», and by the end the reader is unsure whether anyone has escaped them. A faceless "They" "want to put Them All in carton boxes, / West and East, no In Between". The phrasing is as tidy as the thing it criticises: two options, with the middle deleted. The boxes then harden from cardboard into "Concrete Rectangular Cuboids". "Cuboids" is a clinical, geometry-lesson word, and it drains any warmth from the idea of a place to live.
The next two stanzas turn the boxed-up people into a procession. They "waddle in lines of Black White Suits", and the verb is well chosen. Waddling is faintly comic, and paired with the black-and-white clothing it turns office workers into penguins. They march "only on Cue when The Lights Flick Green", so the only colour in the poem belongs to the traffic signal, not to the people. Even their free time is regimented, since they are "Distracted by The Stars on The Binary Squares". That could mean star ratings, celebrity or app icons on a screen. The poem never says, and the vagueness helps. "Binary" echoes the either/or logic of "West and East", and "Always searching, No-one talking" gives a crowd in constant motion and total silence.
The most obvious feature on the page is the capitalisation. Not just nouns but "The", "This" and "Them All" get capitals, so every phrase looks like a brand name or a label. The effect is also rhythmic. Each capital slows the reading and gives the line a stressed, stamping beat, which suits the marching. There is no rhyme and no regular metre, and the stanzas are uneven (three lines, then two, two, one, one, two, two). A poem about neat packaging refuses to be neatly packaged. Yet the speaker's own lines use the same capitals, as if even the resistance cannot quite leave the system's habits behind.
The turn comes in stanza four, where "I" appears for the first time. "With vigour I write This Poem" announces the poem's own making, and "With determination" repeats the structure two stanzas later. These are the poem's only deliberate, energetic actions, and they stand against the marchers' obedience. The sound changes too. After "No-one talking", "Pencil Screeching against The White" is the first noise in the poem. "The White" is the blank page, but it also recalls the white of the uniforms, so the pencil scratches against blankness and conformity at once.
What follows is the poem's most interesting moment. The speaker will "launch The Pin into The Wall", and "launch" makes a tiny pin sound like a missile. But the sentence ends "Trapping The Paper forever against The Bricks". "Trapping", "forever" and "Bricks" take the triumph back. The poem is now fixed to a wall, much like the people in their cuboids, or like a specimen pinned for display. The poem leaves open whether the speaker has escaped the box or merely built another wall.
The closing couplet gathers the poem's themes. "A Wrench Against The Machine" sounds like the familiar phrase "rage against the machine", with a tool swapped in for the emotion. A wrench is also what one throws into gears, a small object meant to cause a large jam. Then the title returns: "The Curse of The Colourless Star". Judging by the imagery, the star may be the speaker, or the poem itself. It shines individually, unlike the crowd chasing "Stars" on screens, but it is colourless, still made of the black-and-white world it opposes. The curse could be that isolation, or the knowledge that defiance made from pencil, pin and paper may change very little.
That honesty is what makes the poem worth reading. Plenty of poems shout at conformity. This one gives a sharp, memorable picture of it (penguins in suits, silent screen-gazers, boxes inside boxes) and then admits that its own protest is small and perhaps self-trapping. It ends on a question rather than a victory.