Lamentation

Our illnesses are mostly political illnesses - Peter Weiss

We greet the dark - Diane diPrima

in the days of our fiercest anger

the precision of beauty
the joy      of the whole world

soaked bread     in their darkness
enemies pressed their mouths on us

a snare is come among us
there are none to comfort us


*


Of music imprisoned, the insulted and truly wretched.
Of the names of those responsible for the recent massacres.

On the numerology of birdsong
On riot replaced by birdsong
Our persecutors swifter than eagles

They pursued us on the mountains. Laid wait for us in the wilderness.




                    And our collective vowels humming like drones.
                    The invisible, whatever that is.
                    As if it didn’t hover above us.
                    Announce itself with blue fire.

                    *

                    The law is a mouth.
                    Glossolalia.

______________________________________________________

these towers and cities
these desert plains
these tasteful burning
skies, what are they
what has been forgotten
in these shanty towns
these parks and legends
solid, bright, concealed
strange and distant
ghosts, our stark ghosts

pass the soul of your body like water
boiling water that scalds forever


*

It breathes, the law, and those it protects it sings inside, and they are like flowers, chaste and tranquil as glass.

It stares at us, the music of the law, and its fingers, they pluck us, as if we were strings, golden, and we are their songs, the inhabitants of the law.

And we have no foothold, and we stumble, backward and backward, hour by hour, as stars or buildings collapsing, into the abyss, of their hearts, the inheritors of the law, and we sing there, unimagined, in the ice of our silence, falling.

And their souls will flow like piss in the streets of the great city.


_______________________________________________________



Say they have enclosed us in blank stone. You wake up, you open your eyes, is simple: we have been consumed like blood and water, and our language - you wake up, sibilants and syntax a jet of bleach and concepts. Think stuff up: the enemy is non-material, we are not.

Say they have choked us with black sugar. Ask who are these custodians of yesterday’s rebellions - insist that it really happened, we are not at all imaginary. You wake up, you open your eyes - there is a border separates us, the deserving, the un-deserving dead. Post no miracles.
______________________________________________________________________

It is the stupid practice of our times to complain instead of acting. Jeremiads are the fashion. Jeremiah is found in all attitudes. He cries, he lashes, he dogmatises, he dictates, he rages, himself the scourge of all scourges. Let us leave the elegising clowns, those gravediggers of liberty. The duty of a revolutionary is to always struggle, to struggle no matter what, to struggle to extinction. - Louis-Auguste Blanqui.


Remember it. You were given laws
to scratch your childhood, were tunes
you knew it, singing for centuries
                                         in cells & gods
stashed below your bed, fairy tales
their blue love, from below the ocean
that stranger, each night, in your bed
takes off his burning skin, hangs it
inside his cell, his Egyptian slaves
his shattered charts -
                                    remember it
to take these tales as advice
an organising vortex
                           each sentence stolen
each word a double claw. Act now.



____________________________________________________________________________


So anyway, insomniacs or the wandering dead sleep by walking through the department, yeh, through the golden city. Well screw them. The choir, if there is one, is a flock of ghosts. The chorus a mob of disenchanted sloganeers. Forget it. Take some sulphate, some hydrogen, whatever, elements, elementals, mash it all up and boil the invisible

                                                                                                                    
                            the ecstasy of oxygen molecules     
                            the mad monks of Westminster

                            One was scried with swallows.
                            One was split with scissors.
                           
                            some grow in dust
                            are not to be picked
                            opponents of day
                            and night’s
                            counter-light

________________________________________________________________
every door is not locked - Ericka Huggins


inside the mayor of London
his gasps of blazing snow
inside his word for coins
a million shuttered doors
of meat and blazing stars
its livid sentence punctured
its staggered scrape of convicts
its corpuscles and laughter
inside his word for London
inside our disk of wages
a poisoned lark is shrieking
its golden voice is leaking



Because we do not exist  the years of our birth are stacked inside the shadows of our mouths like imaginary cities or the pits of heaven and other basic banalities.



                                                                                                                      Say  those rats. Say those rats have names say you know those names. You do not know those names. Say black powder say a lot of things. And then, a fascist victory, say that. And then. Say it seemed like a door was opened like just for a second and we hurtled through that door or was it things hurtled toward us I don’t know and. Say it was just a cloud of powdered blood. Say you know their names and then suffer from beneath those names and live and tunnel inside those names and. Ask what becomes of the motherfucking broken hearted

                                                    

*

Avoid melancholy.
Tell a few jokes.
Blow up Stonehenge.



_______________________________________________________________



                apply gravity to your body
                raw water like butter actually
                made from your body, yes, meaning
                you, we, “a force from the past”
                & on the subject of flowers:



Who are these judges, who made them custodians? Of what? What are these things in the centre of their mouths, that ringed silence, that crushed clock, screams of dead and flying things. The human form, it frightens me, its scratched and monstrous aspects; plague clung to, as spirit of love, and spectres shriek like starlings in the streets of our devastated cities.

it is a storm of monstrous drums

the war has not been declared
                         it only shrieks
the way ghosts shriek &
          ashes are the shrieks
                             of ghosts are
burnt water       are skalds
of coins & lawful slumber
                    
    
and scarlet stars of rotten silver
                                       
*

I want to never forget how I was forced to become a monster of justice and intolerance, a narrow minded simplifier, an arctic character uninterested in anyone who was not in league with him to kill the dogs of hell - René Char

& this sentence
                   un-pronounced        
must not make you bitter
              it has made you bitter
      

_________________________________________________________

there is a law it
patrols the invisible
is dark outside

there are comets as
we decipher them
as law or radio

as then the cities burn
as ash as simple figures
as the sky is an insult


                            name this city

                            it is a bone it is
                            our bones creak
                            as pearl fire will

                            split nets of streets
                            or bone it is
                            no emergency

                            the wealth of the dead
                            their dead friends
_________________________________________________________________                           

That looked the sun in the face and were not blinded - Lola Ridge


five days without sleep
the law is fixed and burns
we who are captive here
each night the same figure
on the same road, stops
roaring, like a brain
roaring out our ghosts
hyacinth and snap-flower
my ghosts, a river of bones
my ghosts, narcissi my
spinning, my laws, stay here
“evil-doing falls like rain”

*

And when they say “we”, they are only trying with their drivel to mold what the people think and how they think it. - Ulrike Meinhoff


“We” the liars. “We” the obedient, “we” the imperial teeth.
No birds, no suits, no sacrificial spiders.
This history passes through us like ghosts.
Various acronyms. Nostalgia for electric colour.
Black and murderous pink.




___________________________________________________________________________

the ghost of your father
gave words to the storm
trapped rain in his songs
have torn his mouth apart

the rain will not speak of this
- it is your beauty, apocalyptica -


But for you it would be something of a duty in that you could perform in Tübingen the role of a waker of the dead. It is true that the Tübingen gravediggers would do their utmost against you. - Hölderlin to Hegel, 25 November 1795.

Letter Against the Firmament

this is a fairly extensive reworking of this, from a few weeks ago

Well, I dunno, it feels like we all just lost our minds. I mean, if you remember, not so long ago I tried to convince you that plague is the only solidarity we might have left, as if that plague might lead to some kind of new force of collectivity, on both molecular and social levels, wherein a new utopia might open up before our eyes, a rose-garden of strange harmony, new forms of human and inhuman love. Perhaps I got it wrong. I mean, I’ve been ill for quite a while now, and if I feel solidarity with anything at all, its simply with the forces of namelessness and invisibility, as if my body was less an ordered system of molecules and more a negative community of shattered, cannibalistic and stupid sub-atomic particles, and some of those particles are mine and some of them are not, as if my body had become an anti-linear intersection point where hail and domestic locusts had somehow mingled with the original recitation of Thomas Müntzer’s “Protest About the Condition of the Bohemians” - that would be 1521, something like that - and those two only coincidentally anti-capitalist forces have manifested themselves as a red, black and slightly painful rash that’s made it even more difficult than usual to leave the house. And if you can’t see just how politically inconvenient that is, its probably only because you’ve still got some kind of job, and your wage-slip still has the ability to stitch you together into some kind of utopian facsimile of, what, maturity, satisfaction, calm and good health. Like you’re a walking vaccine, or something. Don’t get me wrong, its not like I blame you or anything. There’s plenty of people, plenty of us, who have just carried on as if nothing was happening, as if the grievous black wind beating through our minds and our skies and our homes was either totally invisible, or simply something that didn’t apply, as if we had conjured up some kind of immunity to the swarms of metallic tumours that have for decades now replaced whatever it was used to pass for reasoned discourse in this, or any, country. Yes, it is of course more than reasonable to wander through all of this wreckage, this peevish radioactivity as if it was just another landscape ripe for gentrification, as if all of this was just the normal way of things, as if it was the way of the world, as if everything had always been like this, and it has, because as everybody knows, the projectile vomit of the present moment - in whatever “historical era” -  has always spattered and poisoned the entirety of written and unwritten history, all the kings and queens of England simply tiny worms wriggling about all over it, that vomit, that history. And all of those tiny little worms have by now been re-interpreted as a golden and glowing currency, the basis of our tradition, a word which rhymes oh so neatly, well almost, with radiation and rendition. Oh beautiful stinking England. And other blah blah blahs. I thought about making a copy of this letter, sending it to the Daily Mail. I’m serious. Because, and I don’t really need to tell you, I’m sure you’ve noticed, over the past few years, since the current administration “took power” or whatever it is you call it, I’ve become a monster, absolutely intolerant, psychopathic in my hatred for every cop and tory on this entire planet, and that would be fine if it wasn’t so clear just what a comfortable place in which to live that hatred has become. And I wonder how close that comfort is to whatever warm, titillated bliss your average Daily Mail reader feels as their own suburban hatred is tickled into being by, for example, the way they so fondly believe their taxes are being made to subsidise huge masses of starving people, the way their hard earned xenophobic cash goes to pay for all those unsavoury Victorian diseases the poor seem to feel so entitled to. That’s right, it must be very cozy in there, inside that glowing, subsidised hatred. There are, of course, some very serious differences. Because, for one thing, they actually own the hatred they live inside, they put a deposit down, they pay their mortgage, they ring it around with flowers, with birds and other things, the immense screeching of starlings, the avenues of devastated cities, all of it transformed by who knows what magic into a neatly mowed lawn, gadgets, polite chat about interior design. Not me. I have to rent mine. And every day I have to worry about the landlord, about how one day the rent will be too much too afford, because the landlord will have worked out that even embittered, quasi-principled political hatred can be converted into a slab of real-estate. That’s right, a slab. A slab composed of tungsten and dense micro-shrapnel, which explodes in deep, fabular silence somewhere on the other side of the planet, a dense micro-nebulae in which all of us - Daily Mail readers or not - are either vaporised or transformed into a dense organisation of molecular bullshit, a ring of roses, rigid and ossified, a foul-smelling network of bones, and all of those bones played upon like holy trumpets, because what is bone is also teeth, and when those teeth are scattered across the soil, the floodplains and the scorched tory desert, they start speaking, and the noise is tremendous, at frequencies no living creature can hear, but the dead do, and they crawl out from underneath their shattered houses, and the music is intolerable, because the time for tolerance is long past, and at this point I collapse, all of the creatures from which I’m made, all the constellations, they implode, they divide themselves, tear themselves to tatters, as if the heretics of Saturn and Venus and whatever remains of Hackney had been compressed into some kind of bacteria and preserved for years in a secret laboratory located several miles below the magnetic gulfs of the Bank of England, Threadneedle Street, London EC2R 8AH and, when released with great triumphalist fanfare by a gang of fearless anarchists, when those bacteria are released into the atmosphere like a huge trumpet-blast of invisible comets they achieve absolutely nothing, people breathe them in and sneeze and that’s about it, and that’s the type of solidarity I’m feeling right now, its like a vacuum, a microscopic black hole, an occupied territory, a supermarket, a net of protons passing through matter with no effect whatsoever, a hospital crackling and burning in the heat of the midnight sun. That’s right. Hatred is a very comfortable place. I’ve been living on speed and whisky for weeks. Come over if you fancy some. I’ll try not to puke.