Confession 2

while people are starving, wealth
is a crime. I am not willing to argue.
if you are hungry, no laws apply.
glass breaks easily. weapons
can be made from anything.
crime should not go unpunished.

the meaning of royalty
it too can be killed

New book

get it here

Our Death by Sean Bonney

A reckless voyage into the apocalypse against which we hurl ourselves night after night, entirely political and thus relentlessly personal, self-lacerating, perhaps a bit disordered, no doubt perilously lucid. Moving through the shards of the decade’s social movements and the torments of persisting within the wreckage, the book forms a complex web of lament and refusal. Its guides are Pasolini, Baudelaire, and especially Katerina Gogou, the great Greek poet, anarchist, and suicide. Our guide is Bonney himself, and there is none like him.

Heroes

1.

Mustapha Khayati, I got a question. When you were writing your dictionary, did you have any sense which words might be snitches and which might be scabs. While the Eiffel Tower continues to mean what it does, sending out signals no-one could ever translate, these questions continue to matter. Mustapha Khayati, say something. Fascism does what it does without a need for language.


2.

Jean Genet, if alive today, would be somewhere at the bottom of the ocean, entwined with all the other human bones. No-one would say his name. His fingerprints would be stored in an obscure data-mine. But his hatred for your world would be the same. His fist, his knife, his negligee. As the final oceans evaporated, his bones would begin to move. The kindness in his eyes long gone.


3.

If it turned out that Dante’s cosmology was true all along, then I would like Artaud to be the guide to Hell. He’d know how to deal with the tourists. He wouldn’t say a word or look you in the eye, and the screaming in your ears would be your own. If you were lucky, he would grasp you by the wrists. Somewhere, far from where we were standing, the earth’s final clock would explode. Basic flowers.


4.

If all of the letters in all of the alphabets of the world were pronounced simultaneously, they would not spell out the name Arthur Rimbaud. That name was taken out of commission some time ago. But still, try it backwards, in the hour before dawn. Watch the statues erected in his honour as they do not implode. Listen to his poetry, as it wanders the ruined cities, invisible to our sight.

5.

Baudelaire you knew it all along. Your skeleton compelled without question to scrape the earth forever, to ward off the bitter need that comes on it like a living clock. Smack makes death eternal, you know that well. As does its respectable twin, wage labour.

Confession

So anyway, I killed Boris Johnson.
You know who he is, yeh?
Not much of a crime, really.
It was, I dunno, 2005, maybe 2006
he was on his bike
going down the Charing Cross Road
and me, I was on foot, of course.
Anyway, there was a bus behind him
and I took my chance. I pushed him under
the bus went over and then he was dead.
Noone saw me. Noone stopped me.
Everything that’s happened since has been
a dream. A deep and horrible dream.
Wake up. For the sake of us all, wake up.

Antimatter 2

The name was not Antonin Artaud. Nor was it Sophie Scholl. Not even Walter Benjamin, or any number of others, disappearing backwards into what we once called history, or fairy, or meathook. It could be the names of people, or entire countries, planets, paranormal phenomena. All were scooped up, left in secret sites just outside the map. The invisible, indelible marks of the border where meathook is a tranquil word, and real names are withheld and made irrelevant.

    said 2019 to 1933
    you the cutest massacre
                     I ever did see


the rats are in the corner
the baby’s in the sack
they took them to the lost and found
they’re never coming back

the rats are on the table
the baby’s on the sill
they’ll stay that way forever
till we do the fascist’s will

the fascist is the ferryman
from the stolen to the lost
it knows the words for everything
the baby knows the cost

the fascist is the ferryman
its boat is going down
into the seas that bind the world
of the living to the drowned

we’ll be this way forever
the rats are in the sack
vengeance is a pretty word
fight them back

*

We count the coming of the debt. The persecutions. Our enclaves boarded up, even those of the past. It feels as if the only inhabitable places left in the city are its songs, the forgotten ones and the sad ones. The sounds they begin to make when listening has been made impossible. The sounds they make are destitute and eerie. The names of the nameless, the holes in their necks, running toward us. Their mouths on backwards. Their language clear.

    says Mother Goose to the Fairy Mab
    old London Town is a Frankenstein Lab
    that feeds the greedy and shelters the rich
    and burns the poor and I can’t stand to finish this

Antimatter

1.

When you were scratching your name into the mirror another few hundred people died. I guess they exist outside the borderline of what you call ‘kindness’. Kindness which in your mouth has the consistency of raw sewage. When you laugh it sounds like boiling lice.

2.

Antonin Artaud was buried alive and while he was rotting he knew what he was doing. Large worms ate into his body. Then came the small worms. Then that species of aroma that has no scent, no history or country or body. Those souls that fascists call refugees or deportees if they give them a name at all.

But wait, we are no longer allowed to use that word fascist.
It is impolite, we are told, to call them that.
And so the silence that used to get called a city gets filled with noises.
Larval screeches that sound like they are alive.

        number 9 said to number 4
        we”re not living now and we weren’t before
3.

Sophie Scholl never died
Not in 1944 not 2014
      not in the years too old or new to be named

She paces the major cities
Hands out dry white roses

Take one. They are good luck.
Take one. She is lonely.

Just don’t ask about the hole in the back of her head.
Only idiots would do that.
Idiots and laughing fascists.

When she died she was in great pain.

5.

It is ice cold in this room
Where the fascists are breathing

No-one has told them
They have been dead
Since the birth of all planets

That Saturn ate his children


       
        for tranquil and safe are the arms of the cruel
        and tranquil and safe is  the mind of the fool
        those minds that hate and those minds that sleep
        and those minds that kill and those that weep


6.

be kind
       but do not be kind to me

be clean
       but do not be clean near me


call it cleanliness call it kindness

do not call it kindness to me

your nobility your spirit
keep it far from me

7.

In this place there are no cities or noises

Once a year there is a parade.
It is compulsory for the dead to attend.

In this place we call living
Long past the end of our life

        for we’ve been dead before and we’ll be dead again
        we were dead just now but we ain’t no more

And then there are those who cannot move without shitting bone, standing in the freezing back rooms, breathing inside other people’s deaths.

You can see them in old photographs, as if birds had scratched them, and those scratches are what fascists call history and hammered nails and human hunger and other words they use to express pleasure. The night of the earthquake. The 300 houses destroyed. The mouths scratched to pieces.


        and so says the master and so says the slave
        who is cooking your dinner and digging your grave