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