Our Death 21 / Vitriol

The buildings collapsed inside the ruins a black light shining.
One day we fall down In the street Great waters are growling.

*

There is no rain inside the invisible creatures
their sounds are not ours -
                                                   bullshit, try and say
poison is mathematics As evacuation
of all known cities Say it once and scream it
Our ghosts are going nowhere

                                        are waiting to burn out our houses

*

Were lying inside a system of ashes a System
of nothing but teeth were Trapped
                             in something’s willing mouth

Our Death 20 / Carrion

It’s all visible now. Everything. Its just that all the meanings have changed, and the names no longer apply. We lean against walls, our hands over our faces, and watch the parade. We are naked and frightened. Everything that passes before us we name and the names mean nothing. We mention old publications, old musical forms, and our voices sound like shredded paper in the archive. I would like to gather that paper. I would like to write upon it a charm to the ghosts of the suicided. Those who walked into the oceans. Those who clambered out from their windows. I would like to write this so they might have some form of revenge, but I don’t know how. We pull our hands from our faces. We have no faces. The names we gave ourselves remade as a very ancient form of plague.

Our Death 19 / Anywhere Out of The World

“The hospitals are empty. We, the patients, are still inside them. It is nothing like they said it would be in the films: the shutters are drawn and we converse softly with our souls, that is to say, the shattered pieces of equipment our enemies have left behind. How dearly we would like to leave. We list cities. Ruined ones. Imaginary ones. The ones in which we think we might have been born. If we could draw them on the walls, they would look like a collection of demons, some kind of cosmos of trivial monsters. We think we are probably very far from home. We talk of suns and minerals, of monotony and fear. Of settler colonialism, of capital and slavery, and of the seventy-nine royal bastards that block out the lights of Heaven. But screw Heaven. All its lights ever amounted to were screams of contempt and pain, lodged in our trachea and in the centre of our names. It is so silent here, so gentle. Nothing left to do, but awake from our dreams of ourselves, and walk on the earth like reflections of the fireworks of Hell”.

(after Charles Baudelaire)

Our Death 18 / Orchids (after Anita Berber)

I am not a garden
there are no orchids
I will never kiss them
these women and boys
their spectral offices
they devour me
this storm of ghosts
I am cold as silver

*

Take this man. Draw a diagram of the catastrophe.
Draw as many borders as you can, across the various states of his body.
Fill his mouth with contraband. Take his borders. Contravene them.
Draw our lives across his body. The catastrophe that is his body.
When he shits gold kill him.

Two Films

Recorded at my desk in Kreuzberg, early evening.

Our Death 17 / "Thrash Me!"

These days everyone is writing their final book. Whatever. I’ve lost everything as well. My body is made up of three needles, several coins, a system of nitrates and something wankers would call ‘a philosophy’. I see in the dark and like to smash mirrors. For many other people things are far worse. I roam around the town, reciting an old poem by Anita Berber: CORPSE. KNIFE. CORPSE. KNIFE. LIGHT. There are moments each evening when I think I can see that light. It shines inside all the rooms I have lived in, all those rooms and cities that we have always despised. COINS. MIRRORS. LIGHT.