The Commons set 3 // 34 - 35

according to dubious tradition
of weirds & scroungers -
“woe! my face in the -
my feet burning from me”.
This, I dunno, kind of happened
&, predictably, edited
here / inside world history
noises / brain snap.
Anyway, this has been a story
they say they were singing
but how we know that
“the doors & windows -
“burning & secure -
“enter the language & -


no meanings swarm / into
complicity etc: so, when
the weary smoke began to
rise / likewise the boiling -
heat, of course / has been
& of exile / totality is -
no meanings swarm / &
“who here can speak
the language of the dead”
emerges from music &
professionals / princesses etc
- fumes, narrative -
“golden bands / your necks etc
inc. ‘below the world’. lenin.

The Commons set 3 // 31 - 33

anyway, eclipse, as I was -
although we live in the city
- so -
they wouldn’t arrest us, their
astrology / starkly inside us.
It was a contented era, a
justification. They could not
arrest / their threads & names.
anyway, I owe this reference to
- certain international events -
- certain conformities -
it was 1974 / a ballad recalls /
“the life which once I had
by law is now controlled”


yeh, it was a contested area
- moderation, NGOs etc -
Listen, rather than suck
& with a turquoise chain
- like -
what is public knowledge is
WHACKED. Degree zero
- we were citizens of -
listen / a supreme vodka /
- merely the value that -
- sirens, as in commerce -
- & we encircled -
As law is anything or nothing,
is bended by / & like a twig


like a twig, the official position
& indigenisation / or what,
within US imperialism, gets
- as in, absolute antagonist -
or / the absence of the dead
- as in, an irradiant -
my true love, as I was saying
- we were buying weapons -
- as in, living standards -
- down to the drugstore -
or, because we don’t exist
- down by possessions, & -
- down by the gun / saying
like I was, my true love -

(after Rimbaud)

september 2003. we were wondering why the poets were silent
we: children’s books, whisky, record shops
bombed orchards, paracetomol, refugees, circuit boards
the sun, god of fire
there we have a series of verbs. they pass to & fro as if no-one had seen them.
they go in and out of random houses. signal towers. border towns.
the course of study is that simple
the legality & opacity of poets
the noises scratched into them. real constellations: beggars, economy, detonation
december 2009. a review of the year
a hell for the hands, for the hair, for the mouth, for the law. an entire symphony
360 degrees. supernatural sobriety of discontinued nouns
the reservoir at dawn
direction multiplied by velocity. glimpses of improbable harmony

The Commons set 3 // 29 - 30

objects / tobacco & brandy
or something truly ridiculous
class struggle / in poetry also
- yawn -
its contagion is spread
via rhymsters, their embers
their swarms of bone
not zombies, sirens
criss-cross a fraudulent
a map of, of what -
got an art council grant
will burn their houses down
- yawn -
everyone’s been buried alive


objects / of the future
who we’re speaking to
- or there is no future -
- so, like, tough shit -
but still your shadows
still they block us
are still eating us
even inside the poem
its rowdy echoes
we are drowned inside
sirens, as I was saying
or, of course, the law
our ruins our octaves
you speaking in them

The Commons set 3 // 27 - 28

meanwhile, we were documentaries
a code made of letters, like
unaroused by official culture.
For some reason, it was 1649,
we were trapped inside it, clutching
our most reasonable point of view.
I can’t say more / vast territories
of our singing selves, decommissioned.
Maybe it was 2003, or something,
I don’t remember, my favourite laws
were just a system of false brains
I recognise that / splintered & oblique
social utterance flaming malevolence
magnetic, would soon go dancing etc


our minds are clean & pleasant
the sphere of employment
- blank -
listen, we are your friends
gliding like magazines / we
inside each nations serenity
sitting near you on the bus
totally harmless characters
strange and flattering numbers
seriously, trickling inside
what we once were / we
esoteric in panic
swifter than birds
in our social role, objects -

(after Rimbaud)

complaint registered March 18th 1871
what I liked were crumbled octaves, fruit markets
xenography, petticoats, reservoirs
where mathematical fluid and relics of social movements might
no verb: complaint registered Nov 1989
we are still in Cimmeria
the point is a total reworking of all definitions
that means history, senses, cellular matter
here primarily for networking, interested in traditional values
abandoned pubs, tonal constellations, humanitarian intervention
where known scholars and professionals might
kept alive by musical systems
ancient wavelengths, electric liquids
dense silence in city parks

The Commons set 3 // 25 - 26

hello / we are your life
- stop -
now it is March 18
& we are a syllable
like a non-frequency
our twists & circles
ie the gypsy davy
- stop -
- 71 comments -
- we are your octave -
- not zombies, sirens -
- ie obsolete music -
- 1871, march -
- choke -


so, I’ve been in the penn
with the rough & rowdy
echoes, letters & notes
- musical ones -
“10, 000 were drowned
that never were born”
ie register that
via export of capital
understood as the dead
encircle us, in a sense
was a mole in the ground
no, sorry, I mean a census
I mean the police computer
as centre of gravity / irradiated

The Commons set 3 // 20 - 24

extract the city, extract virtually
blank songs etc, you know what
into ghosts / as a swarm of mouths
wow & / we were redistributed
of golden, springing speech / bells
& rags / inside this arc of fist
we alphabetic insomniac, in as
how old are you, my scratching
splinter, as in a spore heaven
who here can speak / and in what
flickers of ancient power, reference
you are crows, days / ok, have city
or live in it like was eating us
we bottomless trivials / as


BANG / & our musical duty
like right inside it / its flutter
as in zone-traps, full pyro
as in ex-landscape, is thighs
as decibel in slow retreat
RIGHT our cells & sections
in no underwear / biting &
when I was a country girl
a system town, as blow flatter
(o shit) (like sorry about
& are you / my adjustment
the aged parent, so softly
our non-existent whimpers
eclipse / movement / blast


& the cuckoo, as in
our ring of stilettos
its place / in the song
by now / pure cosmosis
nouns / rearranged
at the border / thin
diagrams / spinning
metal / I’ve played
cards / in england
I’ve played / I’ll
bet you ten dollars
here, in 1917, its
chordal flex, its
thin metal spheres


& the crossroads, yeh
in any case, what we
nah, just kidding, yeh
were never obliged, in
the enemy language, not
not what / daren’t say, as
blocked season, or else
the quartier of perdition
or then there’s, clean
& simple numbers, yeh
gardens / is what / or else
or necessary to lie
our slick & delicate sphere
we middle-class / leaking


or so, that we pulled up
our petticoats / entirely
zombie, & so revolving
drunkeness etc / my gold
my winding sheet / give it
but then again / as bruising
& the border is / where what
we three pretty maids / are
where dreamt a dream / &
troubled in my head / as in
my cosmetic knot, my stranger
I used to whip him with a
where we were the description
my petticoat / but not now, so

The Commons set 3 // 18 - 19

my absence now / I am speaking
as a drugstore here, a constellation,
an irradiation / as in vocal granules
inside the arc of time, becomes
a silent circle / contracted out
the work of destruction, what
constellation, what - weird, these
strange and bitter consummations
have burst into fragments. Sorry
I meant to say centuries, anyway
now that each word is reduced
obviously to money, ie invisibility
inside my stilettos / I meant to say
interchangeable / a din of galaxies



anyway / I just ate the passer-by
via 2 or 3 executive crossroads
known as burning talk / concealed
in the claims made by finks
their preposterous symmetry
strange, flattering numbers / but
- cough -
but as I was out walking, through
our musical positions, we were
sweethearts & membranes
we were sorry and tasteless
we were trickling curfews, but
here, safe inside our offices
we are eating / yes / & feeding

(after Rimbaud)

I can’t tell if its Regent St or Jupiter.
Blue ink from the Sahara.
Apartment blocks infested with cages.
Spiders screaming like birds.
Ancient houses, abandoned passions.
Kiosks for all the dull young men.
Shadows & Juliets, a thousand devils.
Smashed windows, broken stars, silent gardens.
Ridiculous songs from the past.
A fraudulent, symmetrical harmony.
Ruined boulevards: no commerce, no drama or comedy.
A fractured collection of infinite scenes.
A few people I used to know.
I stare at them blankly.

Brussels 1872 / London 2009

(after Rimbaud)

The wide avenues of Baghdad.
An attic room, sealed from the outside.
A pronoun cluster, incinerated by dogs.
A bitter sky, on a sober landscape.
Regrets are stupid, and exile is a matter of degree.
A matter of harmony, or hierarchy, like everything else, and as arbitrary.
Like a flight of scarlet pigeons, or a few wild nights where your thick skull stopped you from getting, you know, really out there.
A graceless trepanation in the soft earth, the collapse and realization of all literatures.
But what is the accumulation of all human knowledge compared to our corporate stupors.
In a volcanic landscape we were fed to mercenaries.
In a house in the country we heard the tricks of digestion.
In an alley in Paris we learned all of human history.
Constantly speaking of our mythical entry to the world’s cities, on a diet of medieval bread, we became businessmen, conductors, the entire universe.
But thats only true from the perspective of one or two outdated formulae.
In terms of a different set of harmonics this could be anywhere, Haymarket or Kabul.
And we could be pigs.
But I’m not going to let any of that stop me from enjoying my retirement.
It ends in petrol, rags and ice.

London 1873 / 2009

The Commons set 3 // 16 - 17

in this recent knot of days
the vile prickle of pills
is entirely political / these
grimy days, yeh, their static
preposterous symmetry / so
the side effects are, well
like this: its 11. 58, precisely
an entire molecular assembly
a ring of executive flats
a cheap solar monopoly. But,
I dunno, from another angle,
here on public transport
skirting the planets rim
pretty drunks are crackling


as I was out walking
the stiff prickling days
their numerical fallacy
gaunt fascist symmetry
ok. fuck that. lets see
we were in the anxious
centre of us, it was like
plastic fire, fuck your cars
& the moon, strangely
as I was out walking
it was like five layers
a small town, a feather
bed / filled with weapons
o hell / my burning thighs

The Commons set 3 // 14 - 15

but ghosts are necessary
a chart of / a collective
inarticulate harmony
i.e. minor surface noise
item: a basement strata
its bibliographic shell
I mean, its celestial arc
has got us surrounded.
Anyway, here in 1917
we’re having a right laugh
no point in waking you
love’s solar boat is slashed
is trickling down our thighs
the chatter of the past


meaning, the surface sector
or London, just sitting there
we’re not criminals, no
but the dead are, inaudible
these songs of burning circles
& then we saw medicines
trickling down our world
its membranes & posterity
weird, this springing speech
was blood in another circuit
not ours tho, so whatever
crackling in our tombs
we are warm & empirical
when we’re frightened, we

The Commons set 3 // 12 - 13

here in Poundstretcher / we are
- blank -
we are building nebulae, falling
like, I dunno, wages / but anyway-
“how old are you, my
sweet critique of poetry
burning, prize-winning factory.
True, we were entire galaxies
but now its 11.58 in London
its AM & PM, both. No point
in waking your oblivious storms
I mean in Poundstretcher
ten thousand were drowned
on discount / cosy & warm


but here / in the solar eclipse
we are kicking off, big style
- wet heat, petrol noise -
TONE SUPERSTORE (bliss)
“& we saw no sun nor moon
we heard some screech
the sea” / meanwhile
we were listening to some
records: “the demonic tones
these songs blank, unimagined
o our delicate spheres” /
o delicate crash, hyena splat
Stop talking about the fucking dead
Burn the EDL / slash boiling lead

The Commons set 3 // 10 - 11

here / in the centre
of the squealing world
original and peculiar
a small town, far from
here / this scratching rack
non-dogmatic / a guide
to action: “last night
I lay sleeping / all by
myself, was a thin leather
den of countless bandits
for theatrical exhibition
here in the centre
of the squealing town
medieval / a gated world


for scratching executives
use fuses / inside their office
membranes, posterity, a den
of countless galaxies, a net
of iconic repulsions. Nah,
the denials are in the post,
we guess we think we’re sorry,
here in the drugstore, filled
with mercury, made from
glass & plastic. Their era
is not ours / our dialectical
tilt circuit / our ferule / our
- BANG -
can come over / or rather

The Commons set 3 // 8 - 9

so we were buying weapons
ok / lets start that again -
on public transport, it happened
we were sitting opposite
bullets / chemistry / glass
we were separated. inside
what we once were. & they
were sitting opposite, empirical
& scared. they were scared
of us / our charts & remorse
no-one knows / we were buying
inside their office, the dead
they were scared of us, of
our seven metals / & radar shrike


but as I was out walking
with the strange & bitter men
we were / say it / we were
anxious radar dogs / we were
oblivious swarms, canceled
solvents, polite ones / we were
a confused mass of centuries
seven burning circles / were
electrons / proverbs / molecules
from hand to crackling hand
a fraudulent cosmology
a hole in the ground
I wish london would
like, crack its face / o cuckoo

(after Rimbaud)

So you check into a one-night hotel, not a particularly comfortable one. The noise is ridiculous. There’s a gang of drowned gamblers in the basement, a pack of juvenile hunters upstairs. Everything is held together by weird threads of music, so much that you feel you’re in some kind of evil documentary.
They give you a bed by the window. Or is it by the door. You can’t quite tell, but anyway, its in the pauper’s ward, and nothing there is clean. Its all so predictable. They have deserts and bombed cities, and they’re proud of them. They try to keep quiet about the ancient revolts simmering on the stairway.
At night you think about oceans and bullets, chemistry, glass.
And the evenings are great, you chat with the tourists, and everyone loves the strange physical groans we can hear in the kitchen. It brings us all together, makes us feel cosy and posh.
You imagine the earth’s lesser strata are on fire. You enjoy the exterminations, the tethered diagnoses, the faint remorse. You know that all planetary orbits have been canceled. You’re expecting a delivery of Bibles and Milk.
All of the hotel guests are satisfied: we sit here with our serious faces, our pineapple booze. We’re not exactly expecting to become legendary.

London 1873 / 2009

(after Rimbaud)

I’m a temporary resident, worried but outwardly calm, of a thoroughly modern city. Each house is a plan of the entire circuit with its animated shop-signs, raw water, & other monuments to superstition, ethics & language. Impossible to describe this gray sky, or the millions of people wrapped up together, wandering around inside & outside of each other. Their lives could be short or long, no-one knows. We could add them up, divide, multiply, make all kinds of statistical fictions, no-one would know the difference.
But anyway, who would bother. The depth of the city. The place & the formula. Idealism. A row of boarded up shops. Monotones & crowds. Systems of education. Funnels of carbon. All rolling past the windows, official glass domes, above & below the pavements.
I suppose there must be laws here, but its all so hypnotic I can’t imagine what crime might be. I’m not complaining. Like everyone else I’m sealed in. Whatever secrets I’ve got are entirely shared. An unsatisfactory death. A pretty little crime, murmuring at the far end of the street.

London 1873 / 2009

The Commons set 3 // 6 - 7

but in the claims made by music
posterity is leaking, strangely
tucked in minor constellations
strangely radiant executives
flatterers / amnesiacs / nouns
polite ones, yeh, rushing ideas
in a tame feather bed. but no,
we weren’t talking to you
say ‘iradium’, say ‘1917’
say ‘the books of the future
cracking the brain of the past’
no, don’t say that, its stupid
those people on the moon,
we left em there, plainly singing


anyway, here in the multiplex
in our plastercasts / in in
in our membranes, like, inside
the police computer, that thing
ok / inside our medicines
trickling down our thighs
our crossroads our whistling
inside like cracks / dogs / brains
“last night in a warm feather bed
thats right, the cold cold ground
is eating us / we, cancelled criminals
so warm inside the police etc
fucking set fire to cars etc
little birds, nothing / I mean

The Commons set 3 // 4 - 5

meanwhile, there are voices
glazed ones, rectangular ones
are trickling down our thighs
into swarms of cancelled centuries
anxious ones / FUSES
each one lives a double life
paupers, vagabonds, criminals
FUSES / FUSES / FUSES
Yeh, well, not to worry
they have no legs to walk on
they have no mouth to speak with
its 11.58 in London
contact us immediately
payments will probably be delayed


or, from another angle
thought this was paradise
bone of my speechless bone
or rather, london pavements
clasped & wrapped, contained
your era, my stiletos / or
revolving spheres, whatever
its 11.58, whatever that means
tame jackals, springing fools
from a different perspective
we are your dead coins
your glazed leather beds
“how old are you, my -”
noises / noises / noises

The Commons set 3 // 1 - 3

I wish London would
like, you know,
but then again
I’m one of its noises
or rather, its noose.
nah, just kidding, yeh,
one of the pavements
is all, spiral chatter, am
eating the voices
the interval cracks
the crossroads, yeh
real devil business
& the cops are there
we crucified em


& the moon / remember that
there are people on it
& they have married us
weird, those consummations
those noises that waken us
roaring & absurdly whistling
& it frightens us
there’s so many of them
curled around us, inaudible
the ages, history, entire galaxies
they are eating us
citizens of raided spheres
the sky / red as a burning flag
a supreme vodka / treacherous stars


who here can speak
the language of the dead
what they meant to say
I wanna be your dog
-the radio is leaking-
they know they’re dead
yeh / & they’re not scared
chewing up the language
-as I was out walking
obscurely thru their brains
those thin metal spheres
subterranean rooms
when I was a country girl
going down to the drugstore

after Rimbaud & Mayakovsky

So rent me a gap in the earth, a fissure in the alphabet. Why does anyone bother to speak. These tedious books, ancient murmurings, glyphs and commands. Posterity is leaking. I have scraped a stiletto through my songs.
The books of the future have crushed the brain of the past. Real people are glued to the windows, streets on all sides. I have learned science in their cracks. Speak the language of the dead. The pathetic evocation of love under other channels, radioactive spheres.
But the distances are insurmountably scratched. Like an Englishman in Bedlam. The time of the Pharaohs. Lenin, his subterranean jail. Stratas of voices, piles of houses, eternal city, night without end.
Listen, poets & domestic jackals, prize-winning fiddle-di-dees. Speak collisions of moons and comets. Speak dead stars, iron filings, fantastic lies.
We don’t understand the slaves in our mines. We don’t understand each other. Explain your word for dictionary, for jetsam. Who are these dead walking through the room. What are these spheres of metal and gas.

London - Moscow
1871 / 1930 / 2009

Document //// out now

My new book is now available here.

"It's easy enough to write poetry that doesn't irritate anybody. It will be liked very much and forgotten the next day. I did not work all my life to caress the human ear by writing pretty poetry. No, on the contrary, I have always managed to upset somebody. My main work is criticising all I think is wrong . . . . . " - Mayakovsky, 1930

Watch Mayakovsky kicking off!

The Commons 2 // get it free (commercial post)

Download the second part of The Commons from the excellent Openned site. You can still get part one, over here at a secret cupboard in the Bad Press offices.
While you're at it, go over to this place and buy some books.
OK, go out and enjoy the sunshine. Death to the BNP.

public service announcement

from a notebook

Document //// any minute now

My new book Document is now at the printers and will be available from Barque Press in about a month. Its narrative runs from the London suicide bombers through to Blair's resignation. Around 90 pages, fully illustrated.
PLUS//// I'm reading on the 18th June at the Parasol Unit, 14 Wharf Road, nr Angel, 7pm, with DOMINIC LASH on bass. Free entry, come along, its gonna be great . . . .

College of Negative Poetics

consider these two quotations from 20th century composers:
"I have nothing to say & I'm saying it" (John Cage)
"a statement should be made . . . without saying it" (Duke Ellington)
how do the possibly incompatible worldviews encapsulated in the above relate to the unbridgeable chasm that exists between differing ideas of what is, in the early 21st century, still called poetry? which of the statements is useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands within poetic criticism?
&
for those of you who don't dig jazz / an alternative question:
discuss the possibility that what is still, in some quarters, rather quaintly called the 'avant-garde' in British poetry, is actually the mainstream (answer with reference to Percy Shelley, John Milton, Aphra Behn, the Pearl Poet, John Donne, Mary Wroth, Abiezer Coppe)
&
for those of you who would rather go to the cinema
suggest three alternative uses for the following London landmarks:
(a) the Natwest ATM Machines, Walthamstow High Street
(b) the ZOO
(c) the Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden
answers, not more than 5000 words, to be sent to me at the usual address. sensible responses will be published by yt communication. get on with it.

The Commons 2 (concluded)

we are geometric problems
in the slots of loveliness
magnetic cores, for example
there goes Thatcher again
inside what I was
ancient & elementary
slaughter the fascist BNP
I know, its obvious
to live in it like a language
that whistling, the law
in the privacy of our
threshold values, this serenity
- you know -
inside the hysteresis loop


"you have now reached
to put into practice
the knowledge you
you have acquired ghosts
in short, are ready
work / crime / magic
secret history number
the properties of ideas
put into ourselves
sorry, local residents
this is how you talk
the body’s acoustics
structurally / tearing
your playhouse down"

The Commons 2 // 40 - 41

nobody knows who I am
my combustion narrative
your meta-knives, clicking
- an alphabet of taxes -
- speaking in runes -
- local residents -
- burnt gust globes -
meanwhile, back in poetry
I have eaten the rooms
the housing cluster
voices clicking inside you
the cracks that you ordered
cobalt / iridium / plutonium
iridium / radium / americium


hello, you are the decibel
what’s speaking, right,
to our ring of ‘curses’
sorry, I meant ‘persons’
the jerking provincial street
roaring in our darkness
we dogs / listen
sign em, they are distressing
this speaking, for example
the word ‘waterboard’
some kind of sincerity?
a tone control, closing?
“not a soul would look up
not a soul would look down”

The Commons 2 // 37-39

there is no one way
to pay it back
i.e. the ‘rich’
that union of familiar
finitely familiar crackles:
the planet crumbles
inside them
the structure of torture
the purpose of
torture is
to enter the language
a provincial street
a biological decision
the enemy citadel


or perhaps just exchange
words / ‘why’, ‘ok’,
say the word ‘number’
ha / say ‘why’
the word ‘interrogate’
the word ‘disrupt’
sounds like
'here’s a pill for your'
-rogues & bandits-
but obviously, what we
-night / animals / work-
-police / crime / magic-
but obviously, what we
in the privacy of our


in the privacy of our
careers / we are eating
zombies, livid ones
oh I don’t wanna
oh I don’t / 'friends'
but, 'haunting europe'
- music / movies / games -
bright magnetic streets
our ancestors are
like safe now.
ok, forget that
o burnt frequency
the dead, so brightly
digging up the dead

The Commons 2 // 35 - 36

it may be distressing
this learning / but may
but can I assure you
we have taken steps
that some laws are disks
are written / on the face
of the dead / inside
echoes / or fraudsters
bright magnetic residents
your personal details
written in red / but may
that we have identified
you are crows, curses
yours sincerely, your


listen / recent research
your city is quite simply
incomprehensibly glittering
-we know its distressing -
- all / fun / people -
due to the nature of
- a thermal pulse -
incomprehensibly / hey,
did you bring me the silver?
did you bring me the gold?
- sorry, we meant to say -
recent research suggests
- a burning ring of -
respectfully, a gallows pole

Communique 158

some advice for the incoming poet laureate
---------
meanings swarm into the forbidden language // ie latent content // to discover previously hidden zones of mind & reality // hahaha // official assertions that meaningful dissent is always welcome, provided it falls within the bounds of legality, are frequently a smokescreen obscuring the invitation to aquiese in oppression // but poetry exists when there is a short circuit between the image it proposes and the one humanity makes of the world and itself // and the poet is of no more use than what is rather quaintly called a RAGAMUFFIN // and the ultimate destiny of poetry is to multiply itself, dialectically, into the bare force of a crowd // but this is a nation which is at war. a nation which is fighting an unjust and a dirty war. you can't slaughter the citizens of Afghanistan without it reflecting itself in some aspect of your cultural experience // and mainstream poetry is a minor component of the state's coercive apparatus // not that anybody is listening anyway // but poets who collaborate with the government should be shot // ie with fear and hecatombs of broken hearts // ie there's something running across the red road now. their voices are silent, but the chains are clicking // from their loud abysses, through a city and a solitude . . . .
----------
stolen, in some cases slightly detourned, from Frantz Fanon, Rene Menil, Angela Davis, Archie Shepp, Ed Dorn, Voltairine de Cleyre, Shelley

The Commons 2 // 33-34

would rather be the devil
a complex organized fact:
customer reference 74074
or moodchanges, e.g. itching
e.g. a boiling gulf, referenced
page 76, slightly torn
would rather, you know
in the year 1525, strangling
coruscating wind of circles
here are your reasons
is a calendar, iatrogenic
or open to attack, yes,
on every level, your call
is important to us, mendicant

page 76? oh please,
I would rather be
you know, moulded
May 68, that crackle
behind police lines
I would rather be
in 1945, you know
what was happened
or my 76 shadows
bursting, most people
have no problems,
excoriated each month
my adviser tells me
what laws are

The Commons 2 // 32

the secondary dole office
situ 656A Forest Road
(E17) / is the planet’s rim
quite obviously, its
opprobrious contempt & fire
barely conceals / a false wall
to rack the noises, a
presumably rich city, a
WAKE UP / you are here
informed, via 2 or 3 nights
of sincere sleep deprivation
& bitter funds / the poem
is merely an arrest warrant
‘A’ is not equal to ‘A’

Franklin Rosemont RIP

Franklin Rosemont, co-founder of the Chicago Surrealists, has died. Obituary here.

And here's an extract from his 1970 Manifesto: ". . . . against patriotism, surrealism attacks with the most sublimely demoralizing anti-patriotic internationalism, which, in uniting Hegel and the wood-carvers of New Guinea, Paracelsus and Marx, the early English Gothic novelists with Lenin, Han Shan and Krazy Kat, Heraclitus and Memphis Minnie, Gerard de Nerval and Lewis Carroll, Black Hawk and Buster Keaton, Mayakovsky and Lumumba, Meister Eckhart and Flora Tristan, Hieronymus Bosch and Charles Fourier, William Blake and Louis Lingg, Pauline Leon and Ambrose Bierce, the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit and the Durutti Column, Amos Tutuola and Basho, Nat Turner and Albert Ryder, Nicolas Flamel and Freud, etc., undermines the traditional national boundaries of human thought and thus takes us further along on the path of human emancipation"

The Commune

(after Rimbaud's "L'Orgie Parisienne", and of course after the City of London demonstrations of April 1st)

Cash & oil. Or maybe / barbarians, a glass
not you: geezers, alleys, rats on teeth
orders / avenues / orders / evenings /
a forged city levelled : SAINT SHIT

on the kill zone (or you call it lib-flux?
nah, burn banks, burn sheer, level all
yeh / yeh / dig my radiation, love
you cream, the red-haired bombs & stars

Cash up. Do the dead leper itch
on jurified riff-raff, traditional, like.
You looking for trouble? You certain, legit?
You in the right place. Drones. Piss haggard

into the streets / o dissolving
golden cream, loved-up rat tazers
have more troops, Afghanistan
& spasmic truths inside this night

BOOZE! Squander-lit / intense illicit stupid
fool / antic LUTHERS, wha? lex raf, risible
void of alleys, THEY SHALL NOT PASS
no gesture, no parole inside their glass

poured upside CROWN fess-up cascadant
UP FOR IT / white dog delete on foot porn
DIT sheer! Up for / satellites, spears & teeth
old farts, geezers, mad fuckers, panting, leaking

THEIR OLD SLAPPED HEARTS / penet mouths
bourgeois man in a bourgeois town, ya terror
MORE WINE / our torpic shame, our barricade
your windows melt your self dissolve / WANKERS

Nephograms! Votemeal! O magnetic puke
& bank stuff. These spheres piss us off, yeh,
like surface nukes. But still, our so clean hands
of lepers v. the lash / 360 degrees / servitude

or paraquat / the rust on your kill silver
just rose up in judgement? Shame. Insert
lamotrogine, my asphyxiant / howl, love,
with scatological equity, goldened charity

ALL DOWN WITH THE SYPH REVIVAL
cash up front / what are you up, why you
blood / blood / look at all that blood
such superb sun-boom seizures, such glue

Hello, I’m the police. Like, you know, serious,
like deliver your purse, or I’ll / with your
red courtesans whirling, and our gross kettle
MEANINGLESS. We have no further comment

like a flat-foot choleric dancer, say what
like flac! or then, cream cop-kill heartbeat
like a quantum piss-up / dog porn / satellites
like transparent bridges, & false, stupid streets

Howl, dole-rust, caustic half-dead city
scrape jet / surprise attack on human head
& its millions doors / a gap obliterate
or oh I’m sober now. have rat will

Bah. Just reanimate him. What?
Sorry, I was thinking about my dick
now flex dis / unit verse, livid veins
& clear love rides our glacial hearts

in quarantine / etc so not bad, level
NEG erosion plus. Or what you say
STRICK: astral vampire derangement
greasy blue sky / tomb degree / RAPTORS

Copernican drinkers: each city splits
re-orders, entangled, sealed / is laws
& ulcered lineaments, nets of peev
is LEPER SPIT or as is total SPLENIC

no beauty admit SIR IMMANENCE
on fast money-back statutory impalation
thats right, gawping Hoxton gas-ropes
want in / mass heart panic shield & LEER

but lets pretend / our sink infirmaries
or whats your forecast, PAL, cast damned
& burn raze LOVING flagellation, give
some kind of synapse flick, we enclosed

wet social / re-establishment of, what, orgies?
& that in ancient flex. Lies & steal, BANDITS
a glass! GAS delight / wipe mouth graffitoid fuck
its nothing. I’m here. I’m here. My life still here.

Provisional reading list / ACADEMY OF OPPOSITIONAL POETICS (Beginners Theory Course)

Karl Marx /// The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte / CAPITAL / 1844 Manuscripts
Walter Benjamin /// Critique of Violence / On the Philosophy of History
HEX ENDUCTION HOUR (The Fall) and/or FUCK DE BOERRE (Peter Brotzmann) to be listened to only while reading ROSA LUXEMBURG /// The Accumulation of Capital
BAKUNIN /// Letters to a Frenchman, to be read in conjunction with RIMBAUD'S Lettre du Voyant
Theodor Adorno /// Minima Moralia
Ulrike Meinhoff et al /// The Urban Guerilla Concept, to be read alongside FEDERICO GARCIA LORCA's The Duende: Theory & Divertissment
THEORETICAL WRITINGS OF KHLEBNIKOV
Frantz Fanon /// The Wretched of the Earth, to be read while listening to Diamanda Galas' WILD WOMEN WITH STEAK-KNIVES and/or Victoria Spivey's Bloodthirsty Blues
The poetry of LOLA RIDGE & Hegel's SMALLER LOGIC /// to be read SIMULTANEOUSLY

further suggestions welcome . . . .

Last Week's Protests

The City of London protests last week, however ineffective they may have seemed to the official media, were absolutely successful in that they tore a hole, albeit briefly, in the process of ‘business as usual’ and normal, alienated everyday life, something a lawful demonstration could never do. It is not the case, as at least one well known poetry blogger has claimed, that a small group of ‘mad and violent’ protesters were there to spoil the ‘fun’ of nice, reasonable protesters. Far from it: anyone who was there knows the real violence was dealt by the metropolitan police. The anarchists smashed a few windows. The police deliberately provoked the crowd, at one point were seen literally booting peaceful protesters in the face, and may well have been responsible for someone's death.

The peaceful and the violent protesters were two necessary halves of a whole that made manifest the latent violence of corporate society. The apocalyptic, that is revelatory, theme of the protests turned out to be superbly appropriate. All of us who were there were faced with the bottom line of our ‘fun-loving’ and ‘sophisticated’ culture where police violence is clearly the borderline between the everyday comfort of a high proportion of the population and the casual murderous brutality dealt out as a matter of course by our ‘elected’ ‘leaders’. The violence of the anarchists, even the violence of the cops, is insignificant compared to the bloodbaths of the Middle East, the increasing institutional xenophobia throughout western Europe, or indeed Barack Obama’s intention to continue the War on Terror. Most intelligent people know this, but most of them like to pretend that nothing can be done, or that they are somehow innocent. The protesters, both violent and otherwise, are at least trying to work out how capital’s bloodlust, and all of our parts in it, can be brought to a definitive end.

Riot police attack peaceful protesters at G20 Climate Camp

Short Treatise on Lying /// Deeds Renew Words

Bertolt Brecht noted that we live at a time when it seems a crime to talk about a tree. Since then, things have become much worse. Today it seems a crime merely to talk about change while one's society is transformed into an institution of absolute violence /// is not the sheer power of this brutality immune against the spoken and written word which indicts it? And is not the word which is directed against the practitioners of this power the same they use to defend their power? There is a level on which even the unintelligent action against them seems justified. For action smashes, though only for a moment, the closed universe of suppression - Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt

State of the Nation Bulletin / Quotes of the Day

The Gypsies rightly contend that one is never obliged to speak the truth except in one’s own language; in the enemy’s language the lie must reign.

*

It is true that I have tasted pleasures little known to people who have obeyed the lamentable laws of this era. It is also true that I have strictly observed several duties of which they have not the slightest idea. ‘For you see only the external husk of our life’, The Rule of the Templars stated bluntly in its time, ‘but you do not know the severe commandments within’.

*

Their preoccupation with objectivity constitutes the legitimate excuse for their failure to act. But this classic attitude of the intellectuals and the leaders of political parties is by no means objective.

*

The imagination is the projection of ourselves past our sense of ourselves as "things". Imagination (Image) is all possibility, because from the image, the initial circumscribed energy, any use (idea) is possible. And so begins that image's use in the world. Possibility is what moves us.

*

The Spectacle is not a collection of images; rather, it is a social relationship between people that is mediated by images.

*

Let us therefore, in company with the owner of money and the owner of labour-power, leave this noisy sphere, where everything takes place on the surface and in full view of everyone, and follow them into the hidden abode of production, on whose threshold there hangs the notice ‘No admittance except on business’. Here we shall see, not only how capital produces, but how capital is itself produced. The secret of profit-making must at last be laid bare.

*

and you will know this only after
you have been landed on the top floor
to set the fire, then you will have
for the first time concern
about your fingerprints
and how you will get down out of there
and that the corruption is true,
organized and distributed
throughout the system

you set fire to the City, burn the City
down

*

If the serious saboteurs
had succeeded / who could say
We would not have a deeper sense of reality
& self

*

’But we have got an idea about this that’s radically different from yours and we can state it’ . . . . What makes it amazing is that it’s hidden, and suddenly revealed. The trip to the moon doesn’t possess this quality because it’s not hidden, and it’s not suddenly revealed . . . the point I want to make is about the call of the creative imagination to do this anyway, and make certain discoveries directly because of its energy, as a result of going out of its energy of the imagination; “to image” a place that you’ve never seen . . .

*

In answer to the lie of the colonial situation, the colonized subject responds with a lie.

*

The violence which governed the ordering of the colonial world, which tirelessly punctuated the destruction of the indigenous social fabric, and demolished unchecked the systems of reference of the country’s economy, lifestyles, and modes of dress, the same violence will be vindicated and appropriated when, taking history into their own hands, the colonized swarm into the forbidden cities.

*

. . . . we penetrate the mystery only to the degree that we recognize it in the everyday world, by virtue of a dialectical optic that perceives the everyday as impenetrable, the impenetrable as everyday.

*

Only the firing squads still know what to do.

*

I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado.

*

This is how the dispossessed organized their speech by weaving it into the apparantly meaningless texture of extreme noise.

*

Simple anticommunication, borrowed today from dadaism by the most reactionary champions of the established lies, is worthless in an era when the urgent question is to create a new communication on all levels of practice, from the most simple to the most complex. Dadaism’s most worthy sequel, its legitimate heir, must be recognized in the Congo during the summer of 1960. The spontaneous revolt of a people . . . . knows how to immediately appropriate the foreign language of the masters as poetry and as a form of action. We should respectfully study the expression of the Congolese during this period in order to recognize in it the greatness and effectiveness (cf. the role of the poet Lumumba) of the only possible communication that, in all cases, accompanies intervention in events and the transformation of the world.

*

. . . . . . . He expected
a message. What he received
was a message. Nothing else.

That the message was delivered
to his thick neck
and his absolute breast
via a knife,
that there was a part tied
to the innate evil of the man
is of no consequence
and as the condolences, irrelevent

*

And there are people in these savage geographies
use your name in other contexts
think, perhaps, the title of your latest painting
another name for liar

*

Each generation must discover its mission, fulfill it or betray it, in relative opacity.

*

all of this stolen from Guy Debord, Frantz Fanon, Amiri Baraka, Karl Marx, Charles Olson, Clarence Major, Ed Dorn, Walter Benjamin, Aime Cesaire, Edouard Glissant

The Commons 2 // 30 - 31

61 wide-eyed numbers
falling out of the sky
sign em, they are your
efforts to find work
help em, they are deaf
but lawful, tumbling
from the slats of the sky
crows, not cuckoos, crows
lepers, evidence, cars
bright magnetic whistling
this is your jobsearch
- friends -
here is the village you ordered
we burned its houses down


you are local resident
alison frost
visiting the forbidden cities /
the graveyard won't hold you
o glittering swarm
of mouths, of everything
whose laws came
smashed together
in this little talk experiment
its loveliness / like laws
in the heads of tyrants
their echoes / local residents
in utter darkness
in gelatine flood

PANIC TWANG

last few pages of the Baudelaire notebook

Thanks &

Thanks to everyone who turned out for Paul's fundraiser Thursday nite // lots of fun, lots of great poetry & music, a bookstall kindly provided by Mr Alan Halsey and others //we raised quite a lot of cash, which Paul promises to spend on his 'research' // yeh // & there's a whole bunch of photos from the nite over here

was given a few presents // Jeff Hilson's new Bird Bird, finally available from Landfill Press, is a very beautiful thing // & a couple of mags, Klatch (available I think from the Openned Site) and the new Axolotl, which can be had from Luke Roberts, who lives in axolotlmagazine (at) gmail (dot) com // both of these are great, goodlooking lo-fi staple in tha corner things // you know, stuff the Blairite corporate business-school-of-poetry tendency would never understand // haha // but if you wanna know whats REALLY going on in, ahem, 'british' 'poetry' then these are the things you'll wanna get // engines! scales! antennae! //

Burn Baby Burn

its tha POST-CARCERAL PAUL PARTY

Thursday 5th March, 7.30 pm

Poems, Music from

Tim Atkins
Sean Bonney
Harry Gilonis
Jeff Hilson
Frances Kruk
Dominic Lash
Mendoza
David Stent
Ben Watson
Steve Willey
Michael J Weller
Johan de Wit
Others TBA

POST-CARCERAL PAUL PARTY: A FUNDRAISER FOR PAUL SUTTON

As many of you know, Paul spent the Xmas period banged up in Belmarsh Maximum Security Prison. We thought we’d raise him some cash to make up for his dismal ordeal! There’ll also be a bookstall the proceeds of which will go to Paul. Please bring anything you want to sell!

The Leather Exchange, 15 Leathermarket Street, London Bridge, SE1 3HN

£5 entry

Readings in March

ok / got a few readings coming up in MARCH. tomorrow (Sunday) I'm in Brighton doing stuff for Desperate For Love at the Kommedia //// following THURSDAY 5th its tha POST-CARCERAL PAUL PARTY with a cast of millions (line-up to be announced here on Monday, probably). This at the Leather Exchange, nr London Bridge. THEN, March 10th, I'm reading at the famous KLINKER, new venue is Tottenham Chances, 399 High Road /// finally, I'm on at the next OPENNED, on the 25th // POSTER ABOVE // this is an OLD poster, the TBA is now to be read as KESTON SUTHERLAND // hooray /////// right, after all that I'll be knackered. BUT, will have just enuff energy for an ARMED ASSAULT on the POETRY CAFE, that palace of MILITANT MEDIOCRITY, FRAUDULENT BOURGEOIS BULLSHIT and FUCKING AWFUL QUICHE/// I've applied for an arts council grant and everything . . . .

The Commons 2 // 28-29

& the sun -
stupid & ludic -
with biting -
in eerie -
tides -
we’ve got -
sorry -
a medium -
dog language -
police earth -
the monarchy -
intersected -
bitter chromatic streets -
bottomless stunned colours -


our sobriety -
cowardice of english numbers -
black & burning pearls -
the philosopher’s / scream -
have your say, o burnt scholarly -
dead inside their houses -
transformed into principles -
our sobriety -
singing like violence -
cold & magnetic, stupid -
our curses -
in thrushes -
have your say, gordon brown -
my little cell -