Letter on Time and Work

So I guess by now you’ll have recovered from the voodoo routines at St Pauls. Guess its nice that we won’t have to pronounce the syllables Margaret Thatcher again. It all seems very distant now, like when you’ve been up for four nights, finally get some sleep, and then you’re sitting there drinking a cup of coffee trying to remember what the hell you’ve been up to. Do you remember that feeling? I still get it every now and again. Though obviously not very often these days. Anyway, the thing I remember most clearly is Glenda Jackson’s speech in parliament, yeh, when all the rest of them were wittering on about Thatcher and God and the entire fucking cosmos and there was Jackson laying out a few home truths. But really, it's a measure of the weirdness of those few days how fearless that speech seemed: and, obviously, a measure of the weirdness that it actually was some kind of act of bravery. Tho the best bit was when the anonymous Tory MP started wailing “I can’t stand it” in the middle of it. Like, no, motherfucker, we can’t stand it either. We haven’t been able to stand it for years. Anyway, after listening to Jackson’s speech on youtube a few times, I went and checked her voting record in parliament - bit of a letdown, yeh. Abstained on the workfare vote, yeh. So that’s her, she can fuck off. She made a much better speech back in 1966, I think it was, playing Charlotte Corday in the film of Peter Weiss’ “Marat-Sade” - I guess you remember it, yeh, she’s up at the top of a ladder, going off her head, and screaming something along the lines of “what is this city, what is this thing they’re dragging through the streets?”. Christ, if she’d done that in parliament, I might have rethought my relationship with electoral politics. Well, maybe not. But seriously, what was that thing they were dragging through the streets on April 17th, or whatever day it was. Through that silenced, terrified city. I thought of Thatcher as some kind of rancid projectile, and they were firing her back into time, and the reverberations from wherever it was she landed, probably some time in around 1946, were clearly a more-or-less successful attempt to erase everything that wasn’t in a dull, harmonic agreement with whatever it is those vampires in parliament are actually trying to do with us. Firing us into some kind of future constructed on absolute fear. Or that future is a victorious vacuum, a hellish rotating disc of gratuitous blades, and they are speaking to you, those blades, and what they are saying is this: “one day you will be unemployed, one day you will be homeless, one day you will become one of the invisible, and monsters will suck whatever flesh remains on your cancelled bones”. And the grotesque and craggy rhythms of those monsters are already in our throats, right now. In our throats, our mouths, the cracked centre of our language transformed into the fascist syllables that are ring-fenced right in the middle of electoral democracy. Sharp barking. A geometrical city of forced dogs, glycerin waves, gelignite. What a strange, negative expression of the scandalous joy we were all feeling, pissed out of our heads in Brixton, in Trafalgar Square, all of those site of ancient disturbances suddenly blasted wide apart, as if for even one minute we were actually alive. We were the defect in parliamentary law on those nights. That is, we were absolutely lawful. I walked home and I wanted to spray-paint “Never Work” on the wall of every Job Centre I passed, but already that foul, virtuous fear was sinking back into me, taking possession of my every step. I was thinking about Blanqui, right at the end of his life, sitting in his prison cell, knowing full well that what he was writing he was going to be writing for ever, that he would always be wearing the clothes he was wearing, that he would always be sitting there, that his circumstances would never, ever change. I was thinking about how the work-ethic these days is evoked obsessively, like in some kind of ritual, and how that work is absolutely fictional, an invisibility blocking every pavement I was walking down. I wanted to cry. In fact I think I did. Oh shit. Ancient disturbances. Ghost towns and marching bands. Invisible factories. Nostalgia crackling into pain and pure noise. No sleep. No dreams. An endless, undifferentiated regime of ersatz work. All of us boiled down into some stupid, Tory alarm clock. A ringing so loud we can no longer even hear it. Oh christ, I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear this shit, I know that things are getting bad for you as well. I kind of think you should ignore this letter. But please, I need you to reply. I need to know there is life out there.

after Rimbaud: A Foodstamp for the Palace

For sale. Everything the management dictated. Celestial dirt and the western scale.

The victory of the sailors at Kronstadt. The victory of the miners at Orgreave.

For sale. The odour of sanctity. Fictional factories. Special discounts on bossnappings, modern landlords  and the seekers of lice.

For sale. Top people of all descriptions. Chewing lice, sucking lice, bird-lice. The victory of the rioters at Poundland. Ed Miliband fucked by lice. Cameron as nightingale, wrapped in wire and torched.

For sale. The defect in the law and the dream deferred. All financial metaphors inverted. You will only starve when we tell you. An infrageography of microtomes and tactical spectrums.

For sale. The gospel of saving and abstinence. The victory of the Mau Mau at St James’ Palace.

Everything must go. The unspoken fantasies of electrical wire. 3000 subspecies of electrical lice. Sudden harmony and affliction. The corrosive victory of the unemployed. A car-bomb for the DWP. Exit wounds for specified customers only.

Letter on Employment or Not

I disappeared recently, don’t know what else I could have done. I know anxiety is the general condition, but that doesn’t mean it can’t open sinkholes in every aspect of your entire cellular system until, well, the simple velocity of starving to death becomes pretty much synonymous with the simplistic velocity of the society itself. Your social functions become that simplicity. To sit very still, to never leave the flat, to be surrounded by raging melt spectres. You probably think I’m exaggerating. So fuck you. OK, I’m sorry. I’ll try and explain what I mean: the latent content of that simple phrase, “fuck you”. The High Street. Walthamstow, or anywhere else. Everyone gazing at their reflections in all of the empty shop windows, weird technicians digging up the pavements. I think its great, I’m not kidding. Its as if the reflections we’re so hypnotised by are some kind of safety valve, as if the city is a spiralling Medusa and the only possible escape is, well, you know the story, and if you don’t, I’m not gonna tell it. I mean, its hardly an appropriate time for a revival of mythology etc, unless you understand that mythology to be the accumulated historical functions of glowing molecules and radio gas, an intracranial solid neoplasm that, if decoded, will at least give us some sense of the next stage we have to reach in what some people rather quaintly call “the struggle”. Yeh, I know, I’m one of those people. Anyway, those reflections we’re all gazing at are basically the visible points of an inverted world nailed onto this one, hacked onto it, setting up an insect system wherein each hour of socially necessary labour time becomes detached, and habitable, in the way an abandoned office space or a semi-derelict private home is habitable. Yeh? Meaning we are locked out. But actually, to be “locked out” can, in some sense, be read as an advantage. Misread, for sure, but maybe a productive misreading for all that. To get a sense of what the murderously rotational teeth of a key, for example, actually mean. To understand what eating actually is. To know what biting is, and consumption, and swallowing, and digestion. To understand the secret cellular fuck-toys of the entire social labyrinth as a simple sheet of buckling and jagged glass. And all of that is pretty much what I mean when I use the phrase “fuck you”. Anyway, like the ghost I’ve become, I’m now looking for a job. Actually, I was hoping you’d write me a reference, I could do with a laugh. You’ll do it, of course. I know it.

after Rimbaud: The Kidnap and Murder of David Cameron

I think it was probably some kind of terrible mistake. He’d howl all through the night, bloodshot and ridiculous: “I am not to blame. Prison, slavery, luxury. Crowbars and magistrates. Metaphors and factories”. I didn’t know what he expected from me: his thought-processes were mysterious, his logic slightly disturbing, all I could do was laugh in his face. Each morning I would clamber out the window, and wander through a landscape of geometrical music, a galaxy of vaguely corrosive stereotypes. State bureaucrats, military prisons. I had compressed all centuries, the better to see into his bones, the insipid cultural signals that had bound us together so strangely.

Sleep was no better. I’d turn out the light and his voice would be all that remained, rumbling like an imageless space, like surgery, an immense collection of shattered and pilfered hours. His idiotic dreams cut through me at impossible angles, finance and real estate shredded and negated. We had been walking together for centuries, sucking on stones, on cavern gas, on corked wine and planetary diagrams. I had meant it as a kindness: to tear out his heart, throw it to the dogs and to the homeless. The songs of heaven, the secrets of history, the kidnap and murder of David Cameron. Steal away.

after Rimbaud's Vagabonds

Letter on Work and Harmony

I’ve been getting up early every morning, opening the curtains and going back to bed. There have been rumours of anti-unemployed hit squads going around, and I don’t want some fucker with a payslip lobbing things through my window. Especially not when I’m asleep. Though I don’t expect to be able to fool them for long - my recent research involves an intense study of certain individual notes played on Cecil Taylor’s 1966 album Unit Structures, and so obviously, once I’ve managed to isolate them, I have to listen to these notes over and over again, at very high volume. Someone from the Jobcentre is bound to hear them eventually and then, even though I’m not claiming benefits, my number will, as they say, be up. Taylor seems to claim, in the poem printed on the back of the album, that each note contains within it the compressed data of specific historical trajectories, and that the combinations of notes form a kind of chain gang, a kind of musical analysis of bourgeois history as a network of cultural and economic unfreedom. Obviously, I've had to filter this idea through my own position: a stereotypical amalgam of unwork, sarcasm, hunger and a spiteful radius of pure fear. I guess that radius could be taken as the negation of each of Taylor’s notes, but I’m not sure: it is, at least, representative of each of the perfectly circular hours I am expected to be able to sell so as to carry on being able to live. Labour power, yeh. All of that disgusting 19th Century horseshit. The type of shit that Taylor appears to be contesting with each note that he plays. As if each note could, magnetically, pull everything that any specific hour absolutely is not right into the centre of that hour, producing a kind of negative half-life where the time-zones selected by the Jobcentre as representative of the entirety of human life are damaged irrevocably. That’s nothing to be celebrated, though. There’s no reason to think that each work-hour will not expand infinitely, or equally, that it might close down permanently, with us inside it, carrying out some interminable task. What that task is could be anything, it doesn’t matter, because the basic mechanism is always the same, and it involves injecting some kind of innovative emulsion into each of those hours transforming each one into a bright, exciting and endlessly identical disk of bituminous resin. Obviously, what is truly foul is what that resin actually contains, and what it consists of. Its complicated. The content of each hour is fixed, yeh, but at the same time absolutely evacuatated. Where does it go? Well, it materialises elsewhere, usually in the form of a set of right-wing gangsters who would try and sell those work-hours back to you in the form of, well, CDs, DVDs, food, etc. Everything, really, including the notes that Cecil Taylor plays. Locked up in cut-price CDs, or over-priced concert tickets for the Royal Festival Hall, each note he plays becomes a gated community which we are locked outside of, and the aforementioned right-wing gangsters - no matter that they are incapable of understanding Taylor’s music, and in any case are indifferent to it - are happily and obliviously locked inside. Eating all of the food on the planet, which, obviously enough includes you and me. That is, every day we are eaten, bones and all, only to be re-formed in our sleep, and the next day the same process happens all over again. Prometheus, yeh? Hang on a minute, there’s something happening on the street outside, I’m just gonna have to check what it is. One of those stupid parades that happens every six months or so, I imagine. One of those insipid celebrations of our absolute invisibility. Christ, I feel like I’m being crushed, like in one of those medieval woodcuts, or one of those fantastic B Movies they used to show on the TV late at night years ago. Parades. The undead. Chain gangs. BANG. “Britain keeps plunging back in time as yet another plank of the welfare state is removed” BANG our bosses emerge from future time zones and occupy our bodies which have in any case long been mummified into stock indices and spot values BANG rogue fucking planets BANG I take the fact that Iain Duncan-Smith continues to be alive as a personal insult, ok BANG every morning he is still alive BANG BANG BANG. I think I might be getting off the point. In any case, somewhere or other I read an interview with Cecil Taylor, and he said he didn’t play notes, he played alphabets. That changes things. Fuck workfare.

Cell 1 / Suite 3 / as in Crisis

 with his knees and his fists in bituminous black - Garcia Lorca

ok think this / or as in scabies, social ones
in any fiscal exit, in any skaldic bullet glass
is spinning: like the scorn of andromeda
would compress our picket cells, as infinite
scratch that /  with all your social nails, like
literally, inside our cutting waters, nails, like
inside our stuttered fall / & capital is mind
o frozen predicate: as in any social microbe
is mundane and berserk, as any slave ship, as
any social drunken boat, as in any scabrous
general strike, o scarab: would scratch this
numbered surface bone / like our finite scorn
of prison nails / this thing has fourteen lines
as in picket lines / like venus in a closing sky

October 2012: Blanqui is still in jail, and as the cosmological city plan becomes ever more compressed, each human body comes to resemble a conspiratorial cell. This is individualism: all of us fixed into a collective table of anti-matter that no-one believes in, despite how much its wild flashing may sometimes portend trouble. Official speech takes on the rhythms of chicken bones, glue and feathers cast across a receding social sphere, and the antiphonic interplay of megaphones disperses like the dust of imploding stars. Within this reactionary net, the poem is negation, which simply means that it is false. A hopeless omen that longs to rupture the tyrannical banality of the ‘true’.

HUNGER: A Sorrow Song

- sometimes I feel like -
- sleep now -
inside the mayor of London
- that thing -
yes / the trouble I’ve seen
his gasps of blazing snow
his misty mathematic glaze
- sleep now little hangman -
inside his word for coins
- yes / sometimes I feel like -
in each of his numbers a starling
in each of its beaks a startled knife
- sorry, we are that knife -
sleep well / we are cold and bleak

- sometimes I feel like -
a million shuttered doors
of meat and blazing stars
- it is 9.45 exactly -
- o golden city -
its livid sentence punctured
its corpuscles and laughter
- wait -
the city’s outer circuit
inside the mayor of London
- his automatic claws -
- his staggered scrape of convicts -
- stop now -
his million punctured doors

- yes / sometimes I feel like -
a bird within its shell
- stop now -
o desolate drinkers
metronomic and scared
inside his word for London
inside our disk of wages
- of dragonflies and moths -
- sometimes I feel like -
- stop -
- o graceful city -
- o graceful colour of ash -
a poisoned lark is shrieking
his golden voice is leaking

- sometimes I feel like -
- a rim of cutting wheels -
- inside the mayor of London -
his stocks and with his chains
his misty mathematic blaze
- steal away -
fuck it / the trouble I've seen
- sleep well -
o diplomats and bandits
- inside their mouth a printed rag -
- inside that rag a midnight hag -
- o public debt -
- sorry, we are not that debt -
- & music for our sorrow -

I haven’t slept since Thatcher
yes / have never been awakened
- stop it -
- sometimes I feel like -
- your silver and gold -
- stop -
we are your midnight lasers
your ritual and your razors
- stop -
- o spectral city boiling -
- its bitter coins are burning -
- sometimes I feel like -
- a motherless child -
- a long way from my home -