communique - (after Rimbaud)

but, if commodities could speak > their
imaginary friends grabbed your arm, their
barren life > is as simple as blossom, as a
musical phrase < beautiful as driving nails
deep in the skull of William Hague, that
vicious pink < imagine cultivating warts
as if commodities could speak > or fired
lived bullets & teargas, as crackling words
encircled the last of the liberated cities
or the fierce buzzing of flies > but anyway
imagine commodities could think, their
scraping hands on your sleeve > musical
beams of love < barren, respected life

after Rimbaud

it is not the cops > but geometry, from
this perspective is eerily silent about
its more scandalous projections < we
have scraped its clocks clean, we have
inserted a brown cigar, a cheap and easy
proto-tone, we have called it a village.
> oh hell. we are your population, turning
at 360 degrees, where King Charles I is
equal to or lesser than Ian Tomlinson, or
we already said that, forget it > we press
hands together, as scars of circling bone
where silence is also prohibited, funded
guns surround the city banks’ networks
of compulsory metaphors speaking aloud

after Rimbaud

no signal > here find enclosed
one partial landscape, scraped
inoffensive language or like birds
meaning sexual theorems <
Iain Duncan-Smith is one, &
is prosodically useless, that much
is clear, invades the poem as
if it were social life > & this
too is a trap / its rational form
a contagion upon the world
< here find enclosed one crow
landscape in cop mathematics
i.e. Blanqui couldn’t say a word
the telemetric sky in crackling white

Interference Note (after Rimbaud)

I understood money as a knife, would
use that centrifuge > London, rotating
embers of an abstract city, capital
in red & black. It was sleeping, we were
awake inside it > the opposite is also true
has blocked the anti-matter of the speaking I
has secreted memory < confronted its being
as bourgeois love, that cannibal monstrosity
wherein government is at war with thought’s
productions of transparency < a pretty little
enzyme dissolved our face’s history, privatised
the place and the formula > consciousness
in exile, mass without number, insurrection
is value. Meanings excoriate the enemy language.

*

It is impossible fully to grasp Rimbaud's work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx's Capital. Consequently, none of the poets for the past half-century has understood Rimbaud. - Lenin, Zurich, 1915

Notes on Utopian Astronomy

The City of Dis

here's something I was working on about a year ago. I never really finished it, but thought I might as well stick it up . . . .

after Rimbaud

here is a picture > is a kind of glass
a simple stone would define < the year
is that particular and no longer is our

ie friend < specific locks refined our vision
& history returned. was armed > we didn’t
die there, those angles were unavailable

fire is physical time. is absolute unrest
or total war < interior logic of music’s
new definitions. millbank > build bonfires

say we choked their mirror, a heated
flicker > or we know what people used
to eat in pictures < we are eating stones

*

- There are sirens in this city. Their songs are grim and surgical.
- There is an alarm clock ringing sixty minutes a second.
- There’s a hole in the ground filled with gas and white plague.
- There’s a burning cathedral. A wedding of vampires and stealth.
- There’s a bully van painted red and black.
- There are figures on the rooftops. Archers and cameramen.
- And when you stand up and say 'enough of this', there’s always someone to shoot you in the face.