Friday, December 16, 2011

Second Letter on Harmony


OK lets try again. Though bear in mind, this is gonna be naive as all hell. I mean, I haven’t done the requisite study, of what harmony is and what it has been etc. What I can gather, from a careful reading of some of Lenin’s Notes on Hegel - he’s got something in there about the Pythagorean harmony of the spheres proposing a perfect cosmology, a hierarchy built on scalar realities that justifies social conditions on earth, where everybody is in their place, and nobody is able to question the beauty and perfection of these relationships. Straightforward. And for it to work, for all these justifications to hold true, a fictional body is essential: the antichthon, or counter-earth. Thus, at the limit, the gravitational pull that holds the entire system of hierarchical harmony together is an untruth, but an untruth with the power to kill. But if this untruth is the site of justification and corporate (ie ritual) slaughter it’s also the site, magnetic as all hell, of contention and repulsion, which can transgress its own limits until something quite different, namely, crime, or impossibility, appears. For Ernst Bloch, the revolution was the crossroads where the dead come to meet. For Lorca, music was the scream of dead generations - the language of the dead. But our system of harmony knows so well it contains its own negation that it has mummified it, and while we know we live within a criminal harmony, we also know we are held helplessly within it as fixed subjects, or rather as objects, even cadavers, of an alien music. But never mind, just as protest is useless only because it stays within the limits of the already known, so the hidden harmony is better than the obvious. Heraclitus. Music as a slicing through of harmonic hierarchies etc, poetic realities as counter-earths where we can propose a new stance in which we can see and act on what had previously been kept invisible etc. Ourselves, for one thing. That sounds just great, absolutely tip fucking top, until you remember that, equally, the harmony of the money fetish is that of the commodity fetish only now become visible and dazzling to our eyes, ie we don’t have any kind of monopoly on harmonic invisibility, and all of those occultist systems that some of us still love so much have always been bourgeois through and through. That is, its not a question of gentrification, but that the whole process has always started from the invisible spot where your feet are, tapping whatever fetishised rhythms right into the star encrusted ground. That famous green door with its sign “no admittance except on business”. That is, however much we may claim that it is not protest, but a fast alteration in the structural scansion at the city’s core, the hidden contours of our songs are still a nasty little rich kid fluttering his hecatombic chromosomes all over our collective history. Shit. Its why I still hate Mojo magazine. OK. Now lets get really obvious. Once, revolutions took their poetry from the past, now they have to get it from the future. We all know that. Famous and so on. In its contemporary form, the slogan Greek anarchists were using a couple of winters ago: we are smashing up the present because we come from the future. I love that, but really, it’s all just so much mysticism: but if we can turn it inside out, on its head etc we’ll find this, for example: “the repeated rhythmic figure, a screamed riff, pushed its insistence past music. It was hatred and frustration, secrecy and despair . . . . That stance spread like fire thru the cabarets and the joints of the black cities, so that the sound itself became a basis for thought, and the innovators searched for uglier modes”. That's Amiri Baraka, a short story called “The Screamers” from 1965 or something like that. That is, metallic, musical screeches as systems of thought pushing away from, and through, the imposed limits of the conventional harmonic or social systems, thus clearing some ground from where we can offer counter-proposals. Slogans. The battle-cries of the dead. Tho, obviously, Pizza Express and the Poetry Cafe have done as much as is in their power to neutralise any truth content that might be lurking within that possibility. On September 30th 1965, Pharoah Sanders, McCoy Tyner, Donald Rafael Garrett, Jimmy Garrison, Elvin Jones and John Coltrane recorded the album “Live in Seatle”: it is, according to someone quoted on Wikipedia, “not for those who prefer jazz as melodic background music”. Its one of those examples of recorded music that still sounds absolutely present years after the fact, because it was one of the sonic receptacles of a revolutionary moment that was never realised: that is, it has become a Benjaminian monad, a cluster of still unused energies that still retain the chance of exploding into the present. Play it loud in the Walthamstow shopping mall and you’ll see what I mean. Yeh yeh yeh. I’m thinking about a specific moment on the album, around thirteen minutes into “Evolution”, when someone - I don’t think its actually Coltrane - blows something through a horn that forces a dimensional time-loop through the already seismic constellations set up within the music’s harmonic system, becoming a force that moves beyond any musical utterance, while still containing direct, clear communication at its centre: ie fire and death on your uptight ass. Among many other things, obviously. I guess Seattle, like anywhere else, is sealed up in its gentrification by now. But anyway, that horn sounds like a metal bone, a place where the dead and future generations meet up and are all on blue, electric fire. CLR James once said that “the violent conflicts of our age enable our practised vision to see into the very bones of previous revolutions more easily than before”. Go figure. Due to its position in the Pacific Ring of Fire, Seattle is in a major earthquake zone. On November 30th 1999 Seattle WTO protests included direct and rational attacks on, among other things, the Bank of America, Banana Republic, the Gap, Washington Mutual Bank, Starbucks, Planet Hollywood etc etc etc. “Cosmos”. “Out of this World”. “Body and Soul”, you get what I mean. Two years later, in Genoa, the anarchist Carlo Giuliani got a police bullet in the centre of his face. Remember that name. Capital’s untruth, its site of corporate slaughter - ie ritual slaughter - the silent frequency at the centre of its oh so gentle melodies. Ah, I can’t see to finish this, I’ve had a lot of valium today. But anyway, to put it simply, the purpose of song is not only to raise the living standards of the working class, but to prevent the ruling class from living in the way that they have been. The violent conflicts of our age make it impossible to recollect musical emotions in tranquility, unless it is the kind of tranquility that makes clear the fierce shrill turmoil of the revolutionary movement striving for clarity and influence. A high metallic wire etc. The counter-earth rigged to such sonic stroboscopics that we, however temporarily, become the irruption into present time of the screams of the bones of history, tearing into the mind of the listener, unambiguously determining a new stance toward reality, a new ground outside of official harmony, from which to act. Or put it another way, next time some jazz fan tells you that late Coltrane is unlistenable, or something, punch em in the face. Seven times. More later.

Friday, November 11, 2011

First Letter on Harmony


Somewhere in London there is a judge who, every seven days, pays a prostitute to re-enact the crimes of those he has sentenced that week, while he looks on and masturbates. Sorry, I've been trying and I just can't get that sentence right. I read about it this morning on Facebook and, you know, it kind of made me want to puke into my cornflakes. Its annoying, I was hoping to make some progress on the thoughts I’ve been developing on the Pythagorean system of harmonics, and how it relies on a consciously fictional central point in order to keep its symmetrical force stable. There’s a passage on it in Lenin’s Collected (Vol 38), and I think it might be helpful, tho for what I’m not quite sure. But anyway, I couldn’t stop thinking about this judge. And then I started thinking, well, what if - and sure its a pretty big if - but what if he was producing these emissions quite deliberately, as the source of a central vibration through which the judiciary could impose a new and extremely rigid analysis of the city, within which a sterile atmosphere could be maintained for the propagation of a limited number of official sentences (say, for example, seven) from which all possible thought could be derived. Sex magic, yeh. All of that ludicrous shit. Don’t think I’m turning into one of those wankers in David Icke masks: in terms of creation myths its a fairly traditional narrative structure. What this judge probably doesn’t realise, however, is that each of his particle jets will necessarily invoke an adjunct sentence, which while in its weak form may only be manifest in certain cries of disbelief and fear, in extreme conditions may - and that's a very big “may” - may ultimately manifest as a ring of antiprotons, otherwise known as attack dogs. Hackney, for example. These attack dogs are stable, but they are typically short-lived since any collision with an official sentence will cause both of them to be annihilated in a brief but highly intense burst of energy. In other words: buy a gun, learn to shoot it, get a rudimentary job in the high court, and then do some very simple equations. Hope you’re well, by the way. The sky over London is milky and foul.

Sunday, November 06, 2011

Tuesday, September 27, 2011

Commons //// Happiness //// out now etc


available here

The work was originally subtitled "A Narrative / Diagram of the Class Struggle", wherein voices from contemporary uprisings blend into the Paris Commune, into October 1917, into the execution of Charles 1, and on into superstitions, fantasies of crazed fairies and supernatural bandits //// all clambering up from their hidden places in history, getting ready to storm the Cities of the Rich //// to the bourgeois eye they may look like zombies, to us they are sparrows, cuckoos, pirates & sirens //// the cracked melodies of ancient folk songs, cracking the windows of Piccadilly //// or, as a contemporary Greek proverb has it, "smashing up the present because they come from the future".


launched at 7pm, Oct 6th, The Blue Posts, Rupert St, Soho alongside Ray Challinor's The Struggle for Hearts and Minds - Essays on the Second World War. Further info here

It is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation.

Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in 1871, just as the Paris Commune was being blown off the map. He wanted to be there. It’s all he talked about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. It’s only in the English speaking world you have to point simple shit like that out. But then again, these poems have NOTHING TO DO WITH RIMBAUD. If you think they’re translations you’re an idiot. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie.

Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Letter on Silence


It's difficult to talk about poems in these circumstances. London is a razor, an inflamed calm has settled, we’re trapped outside on its rim. I’ve been working on an essay about Amiri Baraka, trying to explain the idea that if you turn the surrealist image - defined by Aimé Césaire as a “means of reaching the infinite” - if you turn that inside out what you will find is that phrase from Baraka: “the magic words are up against the wall motherfucker”. Its going very slowly - hard to concentrate what with all the police raids, the punishment beatings, the retaliatory fires. It’d be too much to say the city’s geometry has changed, but its getting into some fairly wild buckling. Its gained in dimension, certain things are impossible to recognise, others are all too clear. I wish I knew more about maths, or algebra, so I could explain to you exactly what I mean. So instead of that I’ll give you a small thesis on the nature of rhythm - (1) They had banged his head on the floor and they were giving him punches. (2) He was already handcuffed and he was restrained when I saw him. (3) He was shouting, “Help me, help me”. (4) He wasn’t coherent. (5) I went to speak to his mum. (6) He couldn’t even stand up after they hit him with the batons. (7) They knocked on her door three hours later and told her “your son’s died”. I can’t remember exactly where I read that. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in a literary magazine, but I guess you’ll have to agree it outlines a fairly conventional metrical system. Poetry transforms itself dialectically into the voice of the crowd - René Ménil made that claim way back in 1944 or something. But what if that’s not true. What if all it can do is transform into the endless whacks of police clubs - certainly you get that in official poetry, be it Kenny Goldsmith or Todd Swift. Their conformist yelps go further than that, actually, as the police whacks in their turn transform into the dense hideous silence we’re living inside right now, causing immediate closing of the eyes, difficulty breathing, runny nose and coughing. Because believe me, police violence is the content of all officially sanctioned art. How could it be otherwise, buried as it is so deeply within the gate systems of our culture. Larry Neal once described riots as the process of grabbing hold of, taking control of, our collective history. Earlier this week, I started thinking that our version of that, our history, had been taken captive and was being held right in the centre of the city as a force of negative gravity keeping us out, and keeping their systems in place. Obviously I was wrong. Its not our history they’ve got stashed there - its a bullet, pure and simple, as in the actual content of the collective idea we have to live beneath. They’ve got that idea lodged in the centre of Mark Duggan’s face - or Dale Burns, or Jacob Michael, or Philip Hulmes. Hundred of invisible faces. And those faces have all exploded. Etcetera. Anyway, this is the last letter you’ll be getting from me, I know you’ve rented a room right at the centre of those official bullets. Its why you have to spend so much time gazing into your mirror, talking endlessly about prosody. There is no prosody, there is only a scraped wound - we live inside it like fossilised, vivisected mice. Turned inside out, tormented beyond recognition. So difficult to think about poems right now. I’m out of here. Our stab-wounds were not self inflicted.

Saturday, August 20, 2011

Letter on Spectres


We’re beginning to suffer here. Obviously I’ve not been getting much writing done. But I’ve been thinking about the conversation we had, the last time we met. You remember, about Milton? Christ. Yours was such an obvious bourgeois response. Pandemonium is suburbia, pure and simple. The rioters are speaking in perfect English. Its the middle-class, the magistrates, and you, who are all talking some weird, ignorant slang. All of your mouths are stitched up with some kind of weird gaffer tape. Your laboratory is a slum. Sorry. I don’t mean to be rude, but things have been pretty stressful: last week the butcher put the prices up even on rat-meat. Today its all he’s got left. You know how it is when you read an account of a situation you’ve been directly involved in, but each one of its constituent parts has been extracted, polished, entirely rearranged? Last week was exactly like that. I got home and tried to phone you, but all that came out the receiver was a complicated, monstrous hiss. I did my best to explain it and came up with this, let me know what you think. Was it (a) you were speaking in a strange new language that had no place in my part of town, or (b) you were speaking at a specific frequency that only particular dogs could hear or use, or was it (c) the static that's left after the tape containing all your reason and superstition runs out and everything’s revealed as it really is for one beautiful moment, all brightly lit in shopping mall reds and flickering striplight yellow. I’ve been wearing a black balaclava for days. From what I can tell, your part of town has been taken over by a weird parade of quacks, magistrates and fortune tellers, all yelping as if everything that happened over the past week was the result of a possession by some kind of evil spirit, and they could only ward it off with a display of archaic gestures, vicious combinations of letters and numbers. The magistrates have taken on the condition of people, and the people round here are no longer to be honoured with even a human shape. Its a curious process. We see it everywhere: in the movements of musical notes, of chemistry, steam and water, of birth and death. Each syllable is a different tonal cluster, penned in with police-wire and used electricity. I hear you’re thinking about becoming a bailiff. In any case, I’m glad they burnt your laboratory down. Now send me some fucking money.

Friday, August 05, 2011

Letter on Riots and Doubt


just to note, I wrote this a couple of days before everything kicked off. & more on that later . . .

*

Anyway, I’ve totally changed my method. A while ago I started wondering about the possibility of a poetry that only the enemy could understand. We both know what that means. But then, it might have been when I was walking around Piccadilly looking at the fires, that night in March, my view on that changed. The poetic moans of this century have been, for the most part, a banal patina of snobbery, vanity and sophistry: we’re in need of a new prosody and while I’m pretty sure a simple riot doesn’t qualify, your refusal to leave the seminar room definitely doesn’t. But then again, you are right to worry that I’m making a fetish of the riot form. “Non-violence is key to my moral views”, you say. “I am proud of the fact that I never invented weapons to kill”, you say. But what about that night when we electrocuted a number of dogs. Remember that? By both direct and alternating current? To prove the latter was safer? We’d taken a lot of MDMA that night, and for once we could admit we were neither kind, nor merciful, nor loving. But I’m getting off the point. The main problem with a riot is that all too easily it flips into a kind of negative intensity, that in the very act of breaking out of our commodity form we become more profoundly frozen within it. Externally at least we become the price of glass, or a pig’s overtime. But then again, I can only say that because there haven’t been any damn riots. Seriously, if we’re not setting fire to cars we’re nowhere. Think about this. The city gets hotter and deeper as the pressure soars. Electrons get squeezed out of atoms to produce a substance never seen on Earth. Under such extreme conditions, hydrogen behaves like liquid metal, conducting electricity as well as heat. If none of that happens, its a waste of time. Perhaps you think that doesn’t apply to you. What inexhaustible reserves we possess of darkness, ignorance and savagery. A hundred million people use electricity and still believe in the magic power of signs and exorcisms, in the nightmare of their lives as slaves to the rich. Don’t pretend you know better. Remember, a poetry that only the enemy can understand. That's always assuming that we do, as they say, understand. Could we really arrive at a knowledge of poetry by studying the saliva of dogs? The metallic hydrogen sea is tens of thousands of miles deep.

*

note the use of quotations from Engels, Trotsky, Lautreamont and today's Guardian

Thursday, August 04, 2011

Happiness (after Rimbaud)


download a recording of me reading from my forthcoming book "Happiness" here, or you can stream it over here ///// it's gonna be published by Unkant in the next month or so /////// also, The Commons will be coming out from Openned in September ///// facebook page for the launch is here /////// yeh.

Saturday, June 25, 2011

Letter on Poetics (after Rimbaud)


So I see you’re a teacher again. November 10th was ridiculous, we were all caught unawares. And that “we” is the same as the “we” in these poems, as against “them”, and maybe against “you”, in that a rapid collectivising of subjectivity equally rapidly involves locked doors, barricades, self-definition through antagonism etc. If you weren’t there, you just won’t get it. But anyway, a few months later, or was it before, I can’t remember anymore, I sat down to write an essay on Rimbaud. I’d been to a talk at Marx House and was amazed that people could still only talk through all the myths: Verlaine etc nasty-assed punk bitch etc gun running, colonialism, etc. Slightly less about that last one. As if there was nothing to say about what it was in Rimbaud’s work - or in avant-garde poetry in general - that could be read as the subjective counterpart to the objective upheavals of any revolutionary moment. How could what we were experiencing, I asked myself, be delineated in such a way that we could recognise ourselves in it. The form would be monstrous. That kinda romanticism doesn’t help much either. I mean, obviously a rant against the government, even delivered via a brick through the window, is not nearly enough. I started thinking the reason the student movement failed was down to the fucking slogans. They were awful. As feeble as poems. Yeh, I turned up and did readings in the student occupations and, frankly, I’d have been better off just drinking. It felt stupid to stand up, after someone had been doing a talk on what to do if you got nicked, or whatever, to stand up and read poetry. I can’t kid myself otherwise. I can’t delude myself that my poetry had somehow been “tested” because they kinda liked it. Because, you know, after we achieved political understanding our hatred grew more intense, we began fighting, we were guided by a cold, homicidal repulsion, and very seldom did we find that sensation articulated in art, in literature. That last is from Peter Weiss. I wondered could we, somehow, could we write a poem that (1) could identify the precise moment in the present conjuncture, (2) name the task specific to that moment, ie a poem that would enable us to name that decisive moment and (3) exert force inasmuch as we would have condensed and embodied the concrete analysis of the concrete situation. I’m not talking about the poem as magical thinking, not at all, but as analysis and clarity. I haven’t seen anyone do that. But, still, it is impossible to fully grasp Rimbaud’s work, and especially Une Saison en Enfer, if you have not studied through and understood the whole of Marx’s Capital. And this is why no English speaking poet has ever understood Rimbaud. Poetry is stupid, but then again, stupidity is not the absence of intellectual ability but rather the scar of its mutilation. Rimbaud hammered out his poetic programme in May 1871, the week before the Paris Communards were slaughtered. He wanted to be there, he kept saying it. The “long systematic derangement of the senses”, the “I is an other”, he’s talking about the destruction of bourgeois subjectivity, yeh? That's clear, yeh? That's his claim for the poetic imagination, that's his idea of what poetic labour is. Obviously you could read that as a simple recipe for personal excess, but only from the perspective of police reality. Like, I just took some speed, then smoked a joint and now I’m gonna have a pepsi, but that’s not why I writing this and its not what its about. The “systematic derangement of the senses” is the social senses, ok, and the “I” becomes an “other” as in the transformation of the individual into the collective when it all kicks off. Its only in the English speaking world, where none of us know anything except how to kill, that you have to point simple shit like that out. In the enemy language it is necessary to lie. & seeing as language is probably the chief of the social senses, we have to derange that. But how do we get to that without turning into lame-assed conceptualists trying to get jiggy with their students. You know what, and who, I mean. For the vast majority of people, including the working class, the politicised workers and students are simply incomprehensible. Think about that when you’re going on about rebarbative avant-garde language. Or this: simple anticommunication, borrowed today from Dadaism by the most reactionary champions of the established lies, is worthless in an era when the most urgent question is to create a new communication on all levels of practice, from the most simple to the most complex. Or this: in the liberation struggles, these people who were once relegated to the realm of the imagination, victims of unspeakable terrors, but content to lose themselves in hallucinatory dreams, are thrown into disarray, re-form, and amid blood and tears give birth to very real and urgent issues. Its simple, social being determines content, content deranges form etc. Read Rimbaud’s last poems. They’re so intensely hallucinatory, so fragile, the sound of a mind at the end of its tether and in the process of falling apart, the sound of the return to capitalist business-as-usual after the intensity of insurrection, the sound of the collective I being pushed back into its individuality, the sound of being frozen to fucking death. Polar ice, its all he talks about. OK, I know, that just drags us right back to the romanticism of failure, and the poete maudite, that kinda gross conformity. And in any case, its hardly our conjuncture. We’ve never seized control of a city. But, I dunno, we can still understand poetic thought, in the way I, and I hope you, work at it, as something that moves counter-clockwise to bourgeois anti-communication. Like all of it. Everything it says. We can engage with ideas that have been erased from the official account. If its incomprehensible, well, see above. Think of an era where not only is, say, revolution impossible, but even the thought of revolution. I’m thinking specifically of the west, of course. But remember, most poetry is mimetic of what some square thinks is incomprehensible, rather than an engagement with it. There the phrase went beyond the content, here the content goes beyond the phrase. I dunno, I’d like to write a poetry that could speed up a dialectical continuity in discontinuity & thus make visible whatever is forced into invisibility by police realism, where the lyric I - yeh, that thing - can be (1) an interrupter and (2) a collective, where direct speech and incomprehensibility are only possible as a synthesis that can bend ideas into and out of the limits of insurrectionism and illegalism. The obvious danger being that disappeared ideas will only turn up ‘dead’, or reanimated as zombies: the terrorist as a damaged utopian where all of the elements, including those eclipsed by bourgeois thought are still absolutely occupied by that same bourgeoisie. I know this doesn’t have much to do with ‘poetry’, as far as that word is understood, but then again, neither do I, not in that way. Listen, don’t think I’m shitting you. This is the situation. I ran out on ‘normal life’ around twenty years ago. Ever since then I’ve been shut up in this ridiculous city, keeping to myself, completely involved in my work. I’ve answered every enquiry with silence. I’ve kept my head down, as you have to do in a contra-legal position like mine. But now, surprise attack by a government of millionaires. Everything forced to the surface. I don’t feel I’m myself anymore. I’ve fallen to pieces, I can hardly breathe. My body has become something else, has fled into its smallest dimensions, has scattered into zero. And yet, as soon as it got to that, it took a deep breath, it could suddenly do it, it had passed across, it could see its indeterminable function within the whole. Yeh? That wasn’t Rimbaud, that was Brecht, but you get the idea. Like on the 24th November we were standing around, outside Charing Cross, just leaning against the wall etc, when out of nowhere around 300 teenagers ran past us, tearing up the Strand, all yelling “WHOSE STREETS OUR STREETS”. Well it cracked us up. You’d be a pig not to answer.

Wednesday, June 08, 2011

(after Rimbaud)


June 30. militant diagrams in the stratosphere, o ethanol-
we were arresting anarchists, objects of contemplation, or of art.


the photos prove that we know what we are talking about. on the critical date, we had been ordered to put a bomb somewhere - an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. ten people perished during the attack, and distances tumbled into nothing.

magic nights of hideous study
paychecks horrific as phantoms


dear friends. the world, I believe, is full of so many marvelous cities. but everyone I have ever met has only been to places where they didn’t want to be, and they have only done what they didn’t want to do, and they have died in ways that they didn’t want to die.

give us stones, magnificent stones.

goodbye to all that, we have done nothing wrong. victory to the occupations. victory to the imagination. o radiance, we are so respectful we demand to be boiled

after Rimbaud


dateline x. new cargo. innovative bloodstains in the atmosphere
encircled like language or birds. the point is that you do not agree
certain separations in the poetic word. certain landscapes or ghosts

cash & oil. or maybe / barbarians, a glass
do the leper itch / dig my radiation, love
not you: geezers, alleys, or lets pretend
you cream, the red-haired bombs & stars


or the content of corporate capital spreads routinely across the surface texture
of the bodies of middle class militants aflutter in the heart of cheap pharmaceutics
multiplied by several completed minutes each disconnected by social flattery

copernican drinkers: each city splits
re-orders, entangled, sealed / is laws
& fast money-back panic impalation
& clear love rides our glacial hearts


meanwhile. certain emblematic subjectivities. certain time-zones taken out of commission.
worthless chemistry, impossible melodies, passports and mercury. content deranges form.

Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Dogs (after Rimbaud)


------------------ here at the centre of the official world, they’re making a chart of all of our secret thoughts. They know everything about our cities, our rented glue

(a) the fusion of transnational capital with reactionary political power
(e) arbitrary militarisation
(i) a racist mobilisation against selected scapegoats
(o) public opinion’s spectral ditch
(u) a fanatical ideology based on hypocrisy and sentiment

Its all so exotic, a renewal of sectarian violence: like circus tyrants, they are bestial and tender / like sentimental magnets, they will occupy our territory for a single second, or maybe for months, maybe forever.


Trafalgar Square is solid meat. Dogs.

Sunday, May 01, 2011

Metropole (after Rimbaud)


We invented colours for the vowels, rich people live there: a mobile holding cell where reality would go on reproducing and representing itself endlessly where we could not exist, a systematic & carefully charted series of political assassinations. Now study this.

12th October. A sudden drop in consumer confidence, like a ridiculous water-nymph burning on some river’s bed. All hotels, industrial units etc, to be occupied. Nightingale. Polar sun. This is a pastoral.

But how could what we were experiencing be simply down to police tactics - seriously, try thinking about the first letter of the alphabet. For thirty minutes just do it. Those public buildings that will never again be buildings. Infinitely dense petals of social perfume. Methanol, turpentine etc. Physical attacks on all excessive displays of personal wealth.

We flattered ourselves we were in on some secret, we kidded ourselves that ferric aristocracies were not patrolling our networks, patrolling us on pure lymph level. As in a blockage on all major routes in and out of the city. As in electric pink. Or the kind of fucker who would squeal on the gallows.

They who tell the people revolutionary legends, they who amuse themselves with sensational stories, are as criminal as the geographer who would draw up false charts for navigators.

Saturday, April 16, 2011

BLOC 1 (communique - after Rimbaud)


incidentally > one harmless tourist / secretly
was a highly politicised ruling class > endless
their repetition, their endless combinations
& stereotypes / like us, in fact, peacefully
drinking in an ancient city < where “they”
- and we know who they are - where “they”
continue to pelt us with scorn / those living
worlds > from which we have disappeared
endless / their repetition, killing skinny dogs
in relative opacity < public opinion’s spectral
dogs / the eighth ditch is < stupidly burning
like westminster abbey > weird, that formula
or the jobcentre < where worlds are engulfed
mass without number < harmless walls of flame

don’t bother telling the truth if you can’t spit in its face

Monday, April 04, 2011

communique - (Bloc 1/// after Rimbaud)


tactic A: we are channeling public opinion’s
central panoptic > each shop window > is
equal to a specific convulsion > a spectral
split where London can pay to view its past
its face < each face a specific idea / fixed, as
dictionary level A < here is fresh vowels, as
against “them” > plated glass as widened split
the eighth ditch is Piccadilly < is that simple
bloc 1: wherein I have been saying / & ever
since we became their plated glass of public
shit > well I have been saying lies > like we
was the centre of London < I was yelling to
some cop > was an enemy ghost I thought
or trapped outside his circled limpid world

Sunday, March 27, 2011

communique - (after Rimbaud)


anyway > how exactly does ammonia
does it get into a lightbulb / tell me
before the universe > that phony
paymaster i.e bailiff > it disrupts us
our ring of clicking seconds < is each
encircled // ring of cops & piss roses
it is a plague: & yet to smash the Ritz
is tactics etc < in epileptic time, was
fucked up by a non-violent majority
as in government department, lit up
tossed into the crowd / and implodes
in moth stutter < blame that, my tiny
crowd of wages:: a bone flutter, fuse
inserted < is lock universe, just kill it

“what I write at this moment in a cell at the Fort du Taureau I have written and shall write throughout all eternity - at a table, with a pen, clothed as I am now, in circumstances like these” - Blanqui, 1872

Sunday, March 13, 2011

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

Tuesday, March 08, 2011

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

Thursday, February 10, 2011

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

Sunday, January 23, 2011

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

Monday, January 17, 2011

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 . . . .

Thursday, January 06, 2011

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.