Poem (after Sappho)

the wealthier homes
have occupied my voice
can say nothing now, yes
my language has cracked
is a slow, creaking fire
deadens my eyes, in
high, contorted concern
fuses to protein and rent


*

because your mouth is bitter
with executioners salt, perhaps
when you die, perhaps
you will flutter through Hades
invisible, among the scorched dead

may you vanish there, famished
through the known and unknown worlds

Letter Against Drowning

I haven't written to you for a while, I know. There's not been much to write about, to be honest, apart from the recurrence of a few elementary social equations. Here's just one, to be going on with - (1) the forced removal of the homeless and benefit claimants from commercial zones (2) the subliminal encouragement of suicide for everyone with less than twenty pounds in their pocket (3) random police checks, arbitrary incarceration, racial profiling. If you take any one of those elements, or any one combination of same, and turn it inside out, the results will be all too simple: one royal birth, one state funeral, pageants, olympic panegyrics, etc etc etc, all expressed via the square root of silence, fast acquiescence and bewilderment. I thought, this morning, that I might be able to put all this together for you, as some kind of wondrous mathematics, a monumental calculus, but I can't get it to fit. It keeps coming out more like an oracular scattering of starling bones, of meat and shrieking larks, an extrasolar dog world made up of three parts rat nationalism divided by the given names of every human being who has died in police custody since the riots. Their names, all paid for with the collective revenue the government has collected from the manufacture, sale and distribution of third degree burns, multiple organ failure, and tiny droplets of phosphoric acid. And that's just the piss-stained surface, yeh. Pretty simple. Manage to boil it down into an infinitely dense, attractively coloured pill and you too can imagine that all of this is just a golden swarm of dragonflies and pretty moths, and not merely an injection of rabies into the group mind of every well-meaning liberal in this entire town. And you ask me why I don't write poetry. As if a metaphor could actually be a working hypothesis, and not just a cluster of more-or-less decorative alibis. I can't do it. I haven't slept since Thatcher. Curses on the midnight hag.

Letter Against Ritual

So I guess by now you'll have recovered from the voodoo routines at St Pauls. Guess its nice that we won't have to pronounce the syllables Margaret Thatcher again. It all seems very distant now, like when you've been up for four nights, finally get some sleep, and then you're sitting there drinking a cup of coffee trying to remember what the hell you've been up to. You still know that feeling? You'd better. Anyway, the thing I remember most clearly is Glenda Jackson's speech in parliament, when all the rest of them were wittering on about Thatcher and God and the entire fucking cosmos and there was Jackson laying out a few home truths. But really, it's a measure of the weirdness of those few days how fearless that speech seemed: and, obviously, a measure of the weirdness that it actually was some kind of act of bravery. Tho the best bit was when the anonymous Tory MP started wailing “I can't stand it” in the middle of it. Like, that's right, motherfucker. Anyway, so I listened to Jackson's speech on Youtube a few times, and then I went and checked her voting record in parliament - bit of a letdown, yeh. Abstained on the workfare vote, yeh. So that's her, she can fuck off. She made a much better speech back in 1966, I think it was, playing Charlotte Corday in the film of Peter Weiss' “Marat-Sade” - I guess you remember it, she's up at the top of a ladder, going off her head, and screaming something along the lines of “what is this city, what is this thing they're dragging through the streets?”. Christ, if she'd done that in parliament, I might have rethought my relationship with electoral politics. Well, maybe not. But seriously, what was that thing they were dragging through the streets on April 17th, or whatever day it was. Through that silenced, terrified city. I thought of Thatcher as some kind of rancid projectile, and they were firing her back into time, and the reverberations from wherever it was she landed, probably some time in around 1946, were clearly a more-or-less successful attempt to erase everything that wasn't in a dull, harmonic agreement with whatever it is those razorhead vampire suckworms in parliament are actually trying to do with us. Firing us into some kind of future constructed on absolute fear. Or that future is a victorious vacuum, a hellish rotating disc of gratuitous blades, and they are speaking to you, those blades, and what they are saying is this: “one day you will be unemployed, one day you will be homeless, one day you will become one of the invisible, and monsters will suck whatever flesh remains on your cancelled bones”. They're not kidding. And the grotesque and craggy rhythms of those monsters are already in our throats, right now. In our throats, our mouths, the cracked centre of our language, fascist syllables, sharp barking. You know I'm not exaggerating. What they're planning is nothing small. We're talking about thousands of years, their claws extending into the past and into the future. A geometrical city of forced dogs, glycerin waves, gelignite. And what a strange, negative expression of the scandalous joy we were all feeling, at the death-parties, pissed out of our heads in Brixton, in Trafalgar Square, all of those site of ancient disturbances suddenly blasted wide apart. A pack of Victorian ghosts. Nights of bleeding and electricity. Boiling gin and police-lines. White phosphorous. Memories. It was like we were a blister on the law. Inmates. Fancy-dress jacobins. Jesters. And yes. Every single one of us was well aware that we hadn't won anything, that her legacy “still lived on”, and whatever other sanctimonious spittle was being coughed up by liberal shitheads in the Guardian and on Facebook. That wasn't the point. It was horrible. Deliberately so. Like the plague-feast in Nosferatu. I loved it. I had two bottles of champagne, a handful of pills and a massive cigar, it was great. I walked home and I wanted to spray-paint “Never Work” on the wall of every Job Centre I passed. That's right, I'm a sentimental motherfucker when I'm out of my head. But no, already that foul, virtuous fear was sinking back into me, taking possession of my every step. I was thinking about Blanqui, right at the end of his life, sitting in his prison cell, knowing full well that what he was writing he was going to be writing for ever, that he would always be wearing the clothes he was wearing, that he would always be sitting there, that his circumstances would never, ever change. How he couldn't tell the difference between his prison cell and the entire cluster of universes. How the stars were nothing but apocalypse routines, the constellations negative barricades. I was thinking about the work-ethic, how it's evoked obsessively, like an enemy ritual, some kind of barbaric, aristocratic superstition. About zero-hours contracts, anti-magnetic nebulae sucking the working day inside out. Negative-hours. Gruel shovelled into all the spinning pits of past and future centuries, spellbound in absolute gravity, an invisibility blocking every pavement I was walking down. I wanted to cry. In fact I think I did. Actually, no. I was laughing my head off. A grotesque, medieval cackle. No despair, just defiance and contempt. Ancient disturbances. Ghost towns and marching bands. Invisible factories. Nostalgia crackling into pain and pure noise. No sleep. No dreams. An endless, undifferentiated regime of ersatz work. All of us boiled down into some stupid, Tory alarm clock. A ringing so loud we can no longer even hear it. But whatever. It seems pretty obvious we should adopt the Thatcher death-day as some kind of workers holiday. Actually, scratch that, lets just celebrate it every day, for ever and ever, like a ring of plague-sores, botulism and roses. A barbaric carnival of rotten gold and infinite vowels. Sorcery. Rabies. You know what I mean? I hope so. Anyway, things have been pretty quiet since then. I've been thinking about paying you a visit. Oh shit.

*
a rewrite of this piece

Letter Against Hunger / A Foodstamp for the Palace

I'm spending most of my time hungry these days. A real hunger; sharp, greedy and endless. Sometimes I have to stay in bed all day because of it, this maddening weakness, hollow nausea. I bet you think I'm exaggerating. So fuck you. OK, I'm sorry, that was a bit rude. I'll try and explain what I mean by “fuck you”. The High Street. Walthamstow, or anywhere else. Everyone gazing at their reflections in all of the empty shop windows, weird technicians digging up the pavements. Don't think this is delirium, or paranoia. Well maybe it is, but maybe that doesn't matter. The perceptual shifts related to hunger as a means of interpretation. Hunger as beginning of thought. So bear with me. All of those empty shops, full zombie, the absolute calendar. Comedy. History. Masks and plague sores. Mass renunciation, reactionary weather systems, everything. As if the world had shuddered and a massive, spiraling Medusa had scampered through some cheap sci-fi wormhole and was biting us to death. Swallowing and biting. The shop windows, the reflections, are the only hiding place, the only escape. And don't think I'm getting all mythological on your ass.  Try to understand that Medusa to be simply the accumulated historical pressure of pure bullshit, or molecules and radio gas, all of it forming a mass intracranial solid neoplasm that, if decoded, may at least give us some sense, the beginnings of an actual map, of what we have to do to reach the next stage - the first stage, it feels like - of what some people still rather quaintly refer to as “the struggle”. Yeh, I know, I'm one of those people. Sometimes my vocabulary makes me cringe. But if those shop windows, those reflections operate as some kind of safety valve, then they are also, put simply, the visible points of an inverted world nailed onto this one, violent, unresting, an insect system where each abandoned hour of what was once called “socially necessary labour time” becomes detached, on its own orbit, like some absolute planet, but habitable, the way an abandoned office space or a derelict private home is habitable. It turns the city inside out. We become property, pure and simple, with no disguises. And so we rent ourselves out, we got no choice. We become derelict storefronts, vacant buildings, fire-traps. We rent ourselves out to a pack of corporate tenants, glass sapphires and enemy systems. Starbucks etc. Just to be obvious. Tesco. A ratpack, sitting there, inside us, eating. All the while eating. Ah, maybe its not so bad. Maybe we can use it, this hunger, this coded swarm. To get a sense of what the murderously rotational teeth of a key, for example, actually mean. To understand what eating actually is. To know what biting is, and subsumption. To understand the secret secular fuck-toys of the entire social labyrinth to be a simple sheet of buckling and starving glass. A brick through the window. A message. And all of that is pretty much what I mean when I use the words “fuck you”. But anyway, that's not why I'm writing. Like the ghost I've become, I'm now looking for a job, and I was hoping you'd write me a reference. You'll do it, of course, I know it.

*

For sale. Everything the management dictated. Celestial dirt and the western scale. The victory of the sailors at Kronstadt. The victory of the miners at Orgreave. The odour of sanctity. Fictional factories. Special discounts on bossnappings, modern landlords  and the seekers of lice.

For sale. Top people of all descriptions. Chewing lice, sucking lice, bird-lice. The victory of the rioters at Poundland. Ed Miliband fucked by lice. The defect in the law and the dream deferred. Cameron as nightingale. For sale. Wrapped in wire and torched. For sale. The gospel of saving and abstinence. The victory of the Mau Mau at St James' Palace. Infrageography. Microtomes. Tactical spectrums. Sudden harmony and affliction. The corrosive victory of the unemployed. A carbomb for the DWP.

------------------------------
versions of earlier pieces here and here

Letter Against Sickness

Couldn't sleep again last night. Someone had paid for a couple of nights in a hotel, down by the coast, I've no idea why, or who, for that matter. I sat there for hours, nervous, watched the rolling news with the sound down, inventing my own dialogue like I used to do when I was a kid. Anyway, George Osborne came up, his little mouth moving at unpleasant angles and, weirdly, it occurred to me that I couldn't remember what his voice sounded like. Not sure why, I mean I've heard it often enough. So I thought I'd better plug this somewhat embarrassing hole in the centre of my knowledge: I turned the volume up and just as I did he was saying the words “our NHS”. The weight that pronoun carried was unbearable. Because Osborne, who presumably doesn't actually use the NHS, who probably has never sat in a waiting room in, say, the Whips Cross Hospital, was claiming some kind of possession that was entirely stolen, and claiming to share it with some kind of absolutely occupied “us”. It changed everything: the bland hotel room, the banal beating of the sea, all of it congealed into Osborne's pronunciation of “our”. There was a sickness to it that hung far outside the radius of any hospital. A vacant pestilence, or, if you like, a bricked up pestilence, and the “us”, which itself was some kind of shattered twitching mass left over from Osborne's thrusting invasion of “our”, this “us” was in hopeless distant orbit around this pestilence, some kind of arrangement of speckles in the night sky, a more or less orderly glyph, a surgical fracture in celestial time and, well, I guess you know what I mean. It did my head in. I changed channels and watched some kind of documentary about monsters fighting muscular people holding guns. But it was pretty boring, and the sun was starting to come up, so I thought I'd go out for a walk. And the first thing I saw, when I walked out the hotel door, was a seagull eating a pigeon. Serious. Right there in the middle of the road, tearing it to strips, swallowing the motherfucking thing. There was nobody around. Just the sea, some pebbles. And this peculiar compressed violence I was staring at. I couldn't move. I just stood there, staring, wishing I could reduce it down to some kind of metaphor, or analogy, or starting point for a bit of bourgeois literary criticism, something to add to my CV, anything, rabies, anything. The gull, the pebbles, pronouns, the rolling news, the sea, the muscular people, the dead thing, all of them forming into some kind of knot or eclipse. I thought about you at this point. I wondered which of them you would identify with. Which part would you take in this little horrorshow, which would be the marker of your position, which would be your representative on earth, which would be your signature. I ask because I really don't know which one I would be. I mean, if George Osborne was lying there in tatters in the middle of the road, right in front of the ridiculous sea, would I eat him? I'm sort of serious. If I walked out of the hotel and he was lying there, whimpering like a burning dog, what would I do? Shit, I was sweating by this point. I was no longer even a human being, just some glowing monster of anxieties and vicious isotopes, storms and circles. Revenge. Law. Decency. I think I puked. I felt I had become a tiny fissure in the decay chain set off by George Osborne's voice. One among countless disinterested scalpels, hanging there, in the grains of his voice. And those scalpels are us. Well, obviously not. But that's what he wants. That's what he thinks about each morning as he grimaces into his mirror. Anyway, I couldn't take it. I crossed the road and went down to the beach. I'm still here. I wrote you this letter, but I probably won't send it. If I do, do not answer it.

Letter Against Fear (unsent)

I don't quite know how to say this. A couple of  nights ago I had some kind of terrible dream. I don't remember anything about it, not the narrative, not anything, just a sense of black beating wings at the centre of, well, everything. Perhaps there was no narrative, or rather, only the flipside, as if I was hanging from it, from all the threads and unrevealed disclosures, the nets of place dangling, a sublime matrix I was, well, choking inside. The Surrealists were wrong, obviously: there's no “marvelous” in the dream, it runs diagonally through your body, like that lightning rod that spears Patrick Troughton in The Omen. You know the bit, yeh. He's running through the churchyard, some kind of storm, some kind of panic weather - I don't remember very clearly, I haven't seen it since I was a kid. Anyway, just as he reaches the church, his workplace, whatever, the lightning rod at the top of the spire, or is it a weather-vane, I dunno, it plummets forward, snaps off, and it spears him. Rivets him to the ground, and to time. That's what a dream is. That's what it signals, some kind of policed rift, some kind of brutal radio wave, where everything you've ever feared or loved or both is compressed into one infinitely dense anti-magnetic spike, an anti-magnetic barricade, and you are left there, fixed into place, dangling there, trapped, like some kind of imaginary animal. Sorry. That's pretty depressing. But I woke up out of it at 3 that morning, and I haven't been able to sleep since. I got up and paced around in horrible circles, couldn't stop. I haven't felt like that since, you remember, we mainlined all of that ridiculous speed, and it wasn't fun, all of our talk shattered into spirals of dust, and we decided we could see the “world spirit”, and, well, I dunno. Like a perfumed rapture turned inside out: the city as rat-trap, as unreconciled bondage and chicken-wire. Anyway, thanks for your letter. I think your ideas about psychogeography are idiotic, actually. I can't believe you ever took that shit seriously. I mean, yeh, obviously, the city is a giant clock, but still, I would have thought the recent explosions, the networks of racist attacks and so forth, would have made you adjust your interpretations just a little. How the hell do you think we can read the silent workings of the city's risible little head via slightly exotic walking tours, table-tapping and ghost stories. Like, we're the fucking ghosts, yeh. It's the signals from the future I'm interested in. I dunno, maybe its different for you. The fact you get paid, I guess, the fact that you're on a salary, does give you a point of entry that, for the time being at least, I don't really have access to. To be unemployed is to be a stowaway, at best. From where I'm sitting, all I can hear is a dull metronomic beating, sentimental rants about extermination and terror and the like. What are the psychogeographical signals set off by a fascist mob, for example, what galaxies and rhythmic swarms are they colliding with. Absolute magnetic compressions. History as a separable particle, a damp electric rag shoved down our kidnapped throats. I dunno, maybe I'm wrong. I wish you'd tell me. I wish you were capable of saying just one word that would convince me all narrative structures - including those of the so-called avant garde - haven't been reduced to something as basic as a crowbar, a massive memory lapse, a constellation of chemical dirt and bizarre melodies that no-one is dancing to. Sorry, I can't get to whatever it is I'm trying to say. I daren't, in fact. Every day I leave the house at least once, to go for a walk. Usually its just to the supermarket, but sometimes I go as far as the railway tracks. Its all overgrown down there, its kind of peaceful. A damp landscape of rust and brambles, where the signal-towers and voices can begin to seem like the components of some barely remembered dream. And actually, now I can remember, that was the dream I was trying to tell you about, that was its structure, that was all it was. I was in an abandoned station house. The silence was endless. And then I woke up. There was some kind of ticking in the corner of the room. I couldn't tell what it was. I couldn't see to switch on the light. What was that ticking. Why did it sound like it was coming from the centre of my chest. Why was I so helpless and afraid.

Letter on Time and Work

So I guess by now you’ll have recovered from the voodoo routines at St Pauls. Guess its nice that we won’t have to pronounce the syllables Margaret Thatcher again. It all seems very distant now, like when you’ve been up for four nights, finally get some sleep, and then you’re sitting there drinking a cup of coffee trying to remember what the hell you’ve been up to. Do you remember that feeling? I still get it every now and again. Though obviously not very often these days. Anyway, the thing I remember most clearly is Glenda Jackson’s speech in parliament, yeh, when all the rest of them were wittering on about Thatcher and God and the entire fucking cosmos and there was Jackson laying out a few home truths. But really, it's a measure of the weirdness of those few days how fearless that speech seemed: and, obviously, a measure of the weirdness that it actually was some kind of act of bravery. Tho the best bit was when the anonymous Tory MP started wailing “I can’t stand it” in the middle of it. Like, no, motherfucker, we can’t stand it either. We haven’t been able to stand it for years. Anyway, after listening to Jackson’s speech on youtube a few times, I went and checked her voting record in parliament - bit of a letdown, yeh. Abstained on the workfare vote, yeh. So that’s her, she can fuck off. She made a much better speech back in 1966, I think it was, playing Charlotte Corday in the film of Peter Weiss’ “Marat-Sade” - I guess you remember it, yeh, she’s up at the top of a ladder, going off her head, and screaming something along the lines of “what is this city, what is this thing they’re dragging through the streets?”. Christ, if she’d done that in parliament, I might have rethought my relationship with electoral politics. Well, maybe not. But seriously, what was that thing they were dragging through the streets on April 17th, or whatever day it was. Through that silenced, terrified city. I thought of Thatcher as some kind of rancid projectile, and they were firing her back into time, and the reverberations from wherever it was she landed, probably some time in around 1946, were clearly a more-or-less successful attempt to erase everything that wasn’t in a dull, harmonic agreement with whatever it is those vampires in parliament are actually trying to do with us. Firing us into some kind of future constructed on absolute fear. Or that future is a victorious vacuum, a hellish rotating disc of gratuitous blades, and they are speaking to you, those blades, and what they are saying is this: “one day you will be unemployed, one day you will be homeless, one day you will become one of the invisible, and monsters will suck whatever flesh remains on your cancelled bones”. And the grotesque and craggy rhythms of those monsters are already in our throats, right now. In our throats, our mouths, the cracked centre of our language transformed into the fascist syllables that are ring-fenced right in the middle of electoral democracy. Sharp barking. A geometrical city of forced dogs, glycerin waves, gelignite. What a strange, negative expression of the scandalous joy we were all feeling, pissed out of our heads in Brixton, in Trafalgar Square, all of those site of ancient disturbances suddenly blasted wide apart, as if for even one minute we were actually alive. We were the defect in parliamentary law on those nights. That is, we were absolutely lawful. I walked home and I wanted to spray-paint “Never Work” on the wall of every Job Centre I passed, but already that foul, virtuous fear was sinking back into me, taking possession of my every step. I was thinking about Blanqui, right at the end of his life, sitting in his prison cell, knowing full well that what he was writing he was going to be writing for ever, that he would always be wearing the clothes he was wearing, that he would always be sitting there, that his circumstances would never, ever change. I was thinking about how the work-ethic these days is evoked obsessively, like in some kind of ritual, and how that work is absolutely fictional, an invisibility blocking every pavement I was walking down. I wanted to cry. In fact I think I did. Oh shit. Ancient disturbances. Ghost towns and marching bands. Invisible factories. Nostalgia crackling into pain and pure noise. No sleep. No dreams. An endless, undifferentiated regime of ersatz work. All of us boiled down into some stupid, Tory alarm clock. A ringing so loud we can no longer even hear it. Oh christ, I’m sorry. You don’t need to hear this shit, I know that things are getting bad for you as well. I kind of think you should ignore this letter. But please, I need you to reply. I need to know there is life out there.