Minus is about what gets taken away when human beings are treated as products instead of people. It looks at the language around enslavement and trade, and the way words can make terrible things sound neat, polite, and ordinary. The poem is about absence: the loss of name, family, wages, choice, and personhood. It is also about how language can help people avoid responsibility by making violence sound administrative rather than human.
I hope Minus makes you pause. I hope it encourages you to think again about the stories you inherit, the language you accept, and the histories that can sit quietly inside ordinary things. More than anything, I hope it leaves you feeling something real, not lectured, but moved; not shut out, but brought closer.
Minus
I’m learning the grammar of sweetness.
Take cane, take heat, take time.
Then take the person out of the person
until only product remains.
English has a talent for subtraction.
It invents clean words for dirty acts:
cargo, bonded, estate, loss
and the mouth says them without taste.
Not “trade” but taking;
Not “labour” but theft.
So I borrow a small hinge-word – without,
and let it do its work.
Without-name: the easiest kind of cruelty.
Without-wage: the oldest kind of lie.
Without-kin: the new shape of a human,
Fit to be priced, fit to be moved.
And notice the sentences:
It was recorded, it was shipped, it was done
As if the doing could happen
Without a doer.
No villain.
Just a clerk with a steady hand.
Just a captain with coin.
Just the tasting-room where everyone learns what not to ask.
So we practise refinement in bright rooms:
We praise vanilla, oak, spice
As if the tongue were innocent,
As if sweetness were free.
Rum is what was left
When absence was made profitable.
Hold the glass up.
See how it takes the light.
Now ask what else it took
And why your hand is steady.
I was born in West Cumbria, in Harrington, and I have lived there all my life, overlooking the sea. I grew up with the Irish Sea always there in the forefront, grey, restless, familiar. The sea air is part of my life. The salt air is home. Living here teaches you very quickly that landscape is not just scenery; it shapes how people think, endure, remember, and speak. You also learn that no matter what happens the tide will always come in and out every day, and there’s something poetic about that.
I was drawn to The Rum Story because it asks people to look again at something familiar. Rum can seem social, warm, ordinary, but behind it is a much darker history. I wanted to write a poem that did not let that history sit at a safe distance. I was interested in the gap between what is presented on the surface and what has been hidden, softened, or made to sound acceptable over time.
Poetry is a passion for me rather than a job. I write about history, place, memory, power, and the lives that are too often ignored or simplified. What matters to me most is that poetry should not feel closed-off or distant. I want people to enjoy it, but I also want them to feel seen and heard through it. The best poems, to me, are the ones that make people feel less alone while also making them think more deeply.
Sonny Smith, April 2026
