Gods of the Plague

From now on new writing will be going up at my new blog Gods of the Plague.

Thanks and love to everyone for reading all the stuff I've been putting up here for the last decade.

Many Walls (after Miyó Vestrini)

Don’t take your children to the countryside. Don’t teach them hymns, or tell them stuff about clean water. Make them stand in the rain. Talk about torture, talk in cries and groans. Walk with them for days across the starkest of plains. Then they will know how pointless it is to listen to those who would praise the colour of the sky. They will want to go to Hiroshima, to Seveso, to Fallujah and to Grenfell Tower. There they will stare at you and you will fall to the ground, horrified as anyone who has ever really listened to a bird’s song. They will build many walls. They will make small additions to your memories, will tell small stories about the knowledge of those who know they have nothing.

Landscape with Burning Truck

You are walking through a city-centre wasteland, a constellation of abandoned trucks, and you are worried you may have murdered your closest friend. The astrological consequences will probably be severe: it will be 5 in the morning, there will be sirens. You will have passed some kind of border but you won’t have validated your ticket. There won’t be any tickets. There will be burning wheels. And in the thickets, some kind of long black veil.

we’re lying on the ground and everyone’s dead
obviously don’t include the enormous middle class
theirs the smoke theirs the vast stone sea etc
all murdered by the sun tho. ha. “murdered”
they all folded up inside the inexplicable sun

It is not a constellation and the trucks are not abandoned. You try to remember the first time you listened to the song “Long Black Veil” but all you can do is repeat over and again the phrase ‘I am not from your world and your laws do not apply’. Whose world, you wonder. Cops in Kotti this afternoon. You wander across an imaginary landscape hollering implausible songs. Where there are songs are dance-moves. Where there are dance-moves are diagrams and systems. Inside those systems lines of burning trucks. Not trucks, burning stars. Don’t sing. Kick till you break.

Landscape

And so you wake up in the morning and say there is someone encircling the city and you don’t know what they want. Something to do with hospitals, with whiskey bars etc. When the sun flashes everything disappears. Mercury in place of salt. The serial number of the knife that will do Theresa May. You open your eyes, everything is the same as it was before - a fatal shift entirely imperceptible. Black trees make thin sounds across the sky. Our collective pain an infra-red means of seeing in the dark, of tracing the constellations of footsteps that keep us fixed inside this place.

and as for those who no longer wish to live
don’t let them head off to quiet places
let them stand there in the middle of the street
let them leap like rats from the wildest bridges
let their ghost scratch our eyes oh contemptible mirth

You try to remember what it was first made you so hate what you still like to call the so-called ‘straight world’. You grew up in the 1980s. Most nights you would dream about the nuclear war. American planes would fly across your town. Every hour, across your small town, huge invisible noises. Planes and missiles. You barely thought about them, but they set up new numbers. Every hour a new sentence was spoken. It would end before our death it would continue long after. Etc. You wore badges, went on demoes. But the noises, you decide, were something else. Long afterwards, you are still making calculations based on the numbers they left in the weirdness of the air. The other half of the firmament, you call them. It was Pasolini’s term for ‘death’. Its ghosts still circle the town. A sheer murderous rock that cannot be murderous because it is not human.

In Fear of Memory (after Pasolini)

Of all people it is straights I hate the most. Especially the the old ones - they hold hands, they share their love like some kind of cowardly bond. Decades it lasts, like some kind of comet, some kind of prophecy of a horrific disaster. An illusion, a pact with a devil. Our love, of course, was nothing like that. No blessings, no stupid cryptic reasons. You would hold my heart in your fist. No blood, nothing there at all. No mythology, no sun, no maps of the stars.

I can’t tell what it means. I’m out with friends, I think, and also some kind of apparition, something I can’t quite remember. There is no smile, no frown either. And certainly no disdain. But something is bothering me, and I don’t know what. So hard to believe that once we said we were happy. It's much later now. The night shows no light whatsoever. And no gods to tell such stupid lies.

It was around five in the morning. The wind was blowing through Kottbusser Tor, as if it was a kind of church. No garbage anywhere, which is usually the only thing about by that time. I was talking to a couple of guys. All they wanted was my cash, and though I knew they had no dicks, I was trying too hard to touch their hearts. Then it happened again, someone I vaguely remembered showed up in a car, with a guy holding some kind of knife. I don’t know why I got in, can’t remember, but I guess I must have. I was found in the morning. Recognised by my teeth, what was left of my fingerprints.

There was, deep inside this so-called world, something that had no price. No gold could buy it, no church could sing it, no-one could understand it. It appeared directly in the middle of life, and it meant nothing but itself. For a while I hated it, like everybody else, then all of a sudden it filled my entire reality. I still don’t understand it. What it was. Why it mattered so much, and what is the nature of the hole that is left now that it has gone. But most of all I can’t understand the rage with which we would tear it apart, such hatred against a love so impossible, and so beautifully broken.

On Bomb Scares

And then a bullet replaced all of history. We couldn’t recognise ourselves in it - all of its dates compressed to a phalanx of immaterial noise. And then we ignited, were permanently stained. We had always guessed it would be cities that would fall, but how wrong we were, transformed in our sleep to an alphabet rearranged as a disc of cranial time. You can be this letter, someone said, and I will be that one. The separation was endless. Oh cancelled dreams, let those who know how to sleep close their mouths forever, and remember to never again open their eyes.

In Fever: Notes on Les Chimères de Gerard de Nerval

for Eva Collé

Don’t wait up for me tonight, the sky will be black and white

Yeh I’m in a bad mood as well. Cops are everywhere. But we know that - we murdered them. Lets talk about black stars.  Something stretched strings between them, and now they flutter like chords. Stars, a very bad mood. Pasolini wrote about singing, called it the “divine wind that doesn’t heal but rather makes everything sicker”. This is the fifth day of our fever. Cops make everything unreal. Songs get sung outside their cellular systems, from the centre of some kind of secretive world. Whisper those songs, then scream them. After that, kill all straight men. You know they want it.

Was thinking about that for a while this morning, then I thought about the human world. I’m sick of it as well. Was thinking that murder in the suburbs is the only real expression of the continued need for human love, where everything is turning to ice, yet everything is frozen in gold. When the sun hits the earth it shatters into all human data, calendars of the places music goes when its notes disappear. The same places the dead live, I guess. But this has little to do with what we say when we’re wasted, and everything is flooded with animal light. The human horizon covered in ashes.

A guy walks into the ocean. Kill him. The gesture is futile. He walks out of it again. Won’t shut his mouth, talks for several centuries about the devil and the hunger of screaming birds. Don’t waste your sympathy. The sky is packed with them, terminal birds that screech of all the terrible things that might happen. And behind them, timeless bells transforming all to the metal stains of what has already happened. And behind all of that are stars tracing out the fixed raptures of what ought never to have happened. There is no death anywhere. Our hatred of the rich is entirely justified.

Toward the end of his life Antonin Artaud wrote a poem complaining that no-one ever touched his body. But he seemed to think it was a good thing, that if anyone did then it would split to a million fragments and fill the known sky. Poor Artaud. Little did he know this goes on every night. There are bodies that fragment each dusk, that split into countless wild lenses that fall to earth at dawn and form a strange calendar of imaginary incidents, frozen cities, addictions, etc. What this implies is not utopian. The straight world never touches anything. It’s victims never do anything else.

Because I’m fearful the sky will shatter I would like to turn it to stone, to turn it to seven pebbles, each to mark a day of our fever. As in set fire to cars, put glue in locks, sugar in petrol. Also include bodies. Also include the shock and the curse of our loss. As in recite that curse, until the voice becomes a song, or the word becomes something outside its borders, the barricades we built across this life of great mourning in which the seeds of our hurt would bloom. The fascists who murdered Pasolini are now the owners of the world. Do not mourn or forgive. Shriek one time. Shatter glass.

The thirteenth returns, and everything we once thought inaudible. There is gunshot, there is fire in the suburbs, the fixed stars falling like cops or roses, the darkened rituals of the middle class. We replace them with pinpricks, with new forms of arson, and the dreams of a thousand archers haunting Trafalgar Square. Nothing returns. Our bodies, the names of stars. But nothing is forgotten, everything falls. Thirteen the only number, the sounds of thirteen fevers crackling inside our dreams. There are no dreams. We never sleep. An unknown light in the corner of our room.

Our Death 35 / Abject 2 (after Baudelaire)

Great love, that will crush the human world, I wish we could do something to help each other. But today we are separated by so many tedious enemies. They smile at us all day long and ask us about our fever. What is there to say?  That “fever”,  in the way they pronounce it, isn’t much more than a weird reflection of their smile, which in itself is a symbol of their sense of rightness within the so-called world. But that we feel that the five characters that make up the word “fever” - or indeed the word “smile” -  are actually indicative of the illusory nature of the ownership of their senses, or of their history, which from another angle simply means the deleted histories of the cities of the sun and the devastation that continues to be inflicted there. Great love, if only we could whisper to each other the language needed to describe that devastation, so we might fill their mouths with the thorns of our great loss. It seems that everything we once knew has been stolen from us, and now idiots are reciting it, idiots who don’t know how to close their mouths, and the sounds those mouths make are razors scratching words into our chests. Great love, we cannot read the language written there. I wish I could say to you just one soothing word. But today I am the filthiest of brides. Only the stains around my mouth make me less repellant than those whom I most despise. 

Our Death 34 / Abject (after Baudelaire)

Wine is a dull disk that encircles the law. It will check your passport, will make sure that your sense of rhythm never exceeds the accepted patriotic patterns. Opiates, meanwhile, will run subtle holes through the length of the calendar. The city’s windows, your systems of memory, both of them become an alien landscape, an inaudible language that speaks at times of human love, which apparently is all we are ever supposed to desire, a golden net about as plausible as the sounds made by cash, that fictitious mirror, that city of no language where every night you lock the door and scatter coins across the floor until they reflect the farcical stars: “oh you tedious razor'd meat, you pompous junky filth. When will the day come when you can die beneath some weird lovers’ fists”.

That Thing Out There

in the interest of promoting William Rowe's recently published Collected Poems, here is the afterword that he asked me to write. The book is available here

The catastrophe has already taken place, it’s just that all of its light has yet to reach us. It’s not clear from what or when that light might be coming. A burning city. A barricade. A refugee stumbling out from an already decided future, an insistent and illegible memory of something that happened long before any of us were born. A light that might yet illuminate the location of the emergency brake. A brake that by now is glowing far too hot too touch.

Its five years since the riots. Sometimes I think I might have left an important part of myself back there, leaning against a wall, completely at my ease as a gang of kids ran past all screaming “let’s go shopping”, the crack of joy in the final syllable seeming to articulate everything I understood about Johnson’s London, about austerity Britain. The windows in the shops were boarded up for weeks afterwards. These days it all seems about as real as the time I woke up in my room in Berlin to find some kind of night-demon, some kind of plastic ghost staring me down, terrifying and somehow familiar. That thing was illuminated too.

The same kind of irreality runs through these poems, a stark heat-shimmer, an absolute realism. A central text is simply a list of all the businesses that were looted in the weeks of the riots. As far as I know, they are all still trading, are still living, are un-dead. Counter their names with a list of all of those who have been suicided since Cameron’s gang of spectres took power, say that most days Britain stinks like a charnel ground, and if you’re not with the dead you’re with the vampires. This is the cargo Rowe’s poems carry. The darkness is dazzling. A bomb goes off in Athens. Thatcher’s corpse opens its mouth. The ghosts of the miners slaughter a thousand cops at Orgreave. The body of Boris Johnson is tossed into an oubliette somewhere on the other side of the border, any border. Solar winds on the rim of the system. Missiles on Blackheath. Nothing stops. Nothing speaks.

On the day of the last Tory election victory, Rowe ended a poem with the line “start the civil war”. Now, a couple of days after the referendum, it looks like that war has started. It won’t be declared. Every declaration, every sentence spoken by every public figure has been a lie. The poems that Rowe writes seek to take measure of those lies, of the public wound those lies would deny - to break open the mephitic syllables of a Johnson or a Farage and find inside them the voices of their victims, all of the nameless and insulted dead of the centuries. We’re deep inside the apocalypse now. Rowe’s work can now only be seen as part of a collective effort to get us through to the other side. No sleep. No dreams. Just a grim determination to defeat those fascists who would murder us, and to cast them intact into the hell of worms.

Sean Bonney
Berlin, 27th June 2016.

Our Death 33 / On the Hatred of the Sun

Every evening its like the sun smashes into the earth. Its been doing it now for a few weeks. The sky splits into two and all the details of our lives - desires and facts and seizures - flare up from somewhere behind the horizon and produce embittered maps, random shreds of detritus that seem almost to be meaningful. All human data is scrawled across the sky. There is the date of your birth, for example, that arbitrary pivot. There, next to it, perhaps, a set of fairly random memories. Somewhere further off is the tenderness you feel at the thought of a loved one’s beating heart. But then unfortunately that tenderness gets entwined with the screams of the victims of the Peterloo Massacre, gets entwined with the hideous noises something like George W. Bush would make when they look into the mirror at midnight. The darkness of that mirror, which is not quite equal to the darkness and silence inside the opened mouth of someone being burnt alive. So many things to hear and see etc., in the dreams of the dying sun. Fortunately, all of this passes after half an hour or so, the sky closes and the calm night begins, but still it leaves us feeling raw. The calendar, that particularly esoteric version of music, was invented as a means of warding off the fear associated with that rawness. But us, we embrace it. What else are we supposed to do, as we sit here waiting for the end of everything. Re-invent prayer? Behave yourself. As the sun nears the rim of the planet we stare directly into it. We are unsmiling and terrified. We can feel it etching itself into our retina. The shapes it makes are repellant. Here is the burning hospital. Here is the salivating fascist. Here is the eternal ringing of the imaginary city walls. When the sun goes down we can still hear that ringing. It is our voices. A huge cacophonous reckoning before the night silences us with its fists.

Film 8

On the Refusal of Spite / Discipline / Memoir (after Miyó Vestrini)

Our Death 30 / On The Refusal of Spite

extensive rewrite of this here

On the fourth day of my sickness I lay in bed getting more and more freaked out by the status of a memory I couldn’t shake: a village at twilight, uninhabited houses, several animals burning. I had never been to this village. The texture of the sky, the nameless blue of the mist, everything suggested an apocalypse it was impossible for me to have lived through. It reminded me slightly of the early scenes in Haneke’s film The Time of the Wolf. You know the bits I mean. The father has just been shot dead. They have yet to reach the wasteland. Great gusts of silhouette. No shelter to be found. The countryside a splinter of spiteful knives. Blah blah. It put me in mind of the mass incineration of farm animals that happened in Britain, in 2001. Remember that? The foot and mouth thing? When they burnt all the animals? I remember watching that on TV, back in 2001, and saying to everyone who’d listen that Britain was in danger of putting a hex on itself, behaving like that. I mean, obviously. Ghost mathematics. The absolute content of the 1990s. From the Poll Tax Revolt to the death of Diana Spencer. From the Criminal Justice Bill to the insipid immolation of Britpop. Bang bang. All of it compressed and spun, baked and loaded, until it was transformed in its sleep into incinerated invisible villages. That type of thing. Obviously I was right. But it wasn’t that was bothering me. It was simply the light, the unnameable blue at the centre of this nameless memory, a still-point that could but shouldn’t be passed through. Thats what the end of the world looks like, in The Time of the Wolf, which is a film I watch quite often, three times a week etc. The end of the world, and how you can’t tell whether its just happened or is merely about to happen. An endless stillness. An aching blue. A scraping sky. A screeching of blackened burning bells. A sleepless night. An endless regret. All of these things stripped of their names. Their dates. All constellations aimed and loaded. Typewriters and falling bombs. As if you had 87 parallel lives. And each of those lives was passing from you. Was falling from you. Like a hex that you’d dropped. Like the eyes of boiling pigs. You would recognise nothing. Like that part of the land that is also part of the sea. A sadness so great you have to invent new words to express it. Like in The Time of the Wolf, when they’re all standing there, outside the station, waiting. All of them saying to each other “I have, of course, been sick for a very long time”. So what. Who hasn’t. New bombs squealing. New reasons to be fearful of the stars. Oh blah blah. To hate the stars. To dream that one day you will go out into the streets of this quite possibly non-existent village, and it will be very quiet, and there will be new constellations in the sky, and you will know they are new because they will already have names.The Body Fluids of the Electorate. The Kids Who Jumped Into the Fire. The Boiling Bones of Boris Johnson. The Blood of Horses. The Strangled Bird. The Broken Strings. The Incineration of the Pigs. The Deserted Houses. The Marriage Feast. The Defence Speech of Emile Henri. Devotions and Buildings Falling. A huge meteor will be approaching. Contains all of your unlived memories. Your 87 unspoken names. The other half of a helplessly oppositional sky.

Our Death 32 / Memoir (after Miyó Vestrini)

I would wake up. I would hate. I would fuck. I would rarely think about Bakunin. I would walk around the town. I would think about the careful differences between anarchism, epilepsy, addiction, psychosis, the dialectic, various syndromes and panic. I would think about their rhythm. I would get slightly horny. I would refuse to leave the house. I would spend 20 euro on a bag that was barely worth 5 then consider murdering the dealer. My biggest fear is that one day I will murder someone. I like the rain. I won’t tell you why. Instead I will tell you how much I am fearful of food. I chew it thirty times. I spit it out onto the ground. It makes me sick. I am losing weight. I don’t care. When people tell me I am losing weight I say so what the sun, the sun too is losing weight. It is the law of the cosmos. I actually do say that. After I say it I start to cry. Someone puts their arms around me. I rarely care who. I think about the wind and the insects that live there and make a mental note of the number of my friends who are in analysis. I am not in analysis. I would rather be like the insects who live in the wind and do something remarkable with silk but instead I am crying in a strangers arms and they would really rather I would stop and this has fuck to do with the magnificent silk made by the laughter of insects. I remember meeting a hippy once who told me I was going to have a very long life. Shit in your mouth, I murmur, to the memory of the hippy. I run out into the middle of Kottbusser Tor. Its 3 in the morning and there is very little traffic. I go crazy again and start to recite poems. The ancient poems known to all of us. The ancient poems that could kill us if they wanted, each single syllable. I fall asleep in the bar. I don’t go home. I think a little about the moon, its relation to marxism, to the riots of five years ago and the predicament we find ourselves in now. Its a full moon. It hides very little. There is a great pain in my chest. Please don’t leave me.

When you were born, which you were told on several occasions was 1969, there were a group of Americans tramping about on the moon. You didn’t think about them. You were screaming your head off . Whatever. The furniture changes places every night. There is blood in your nose. You don’t know who your family are. That’s ok. Each morning they break your arms. They tell you it is fatal. They tell you it will help you breathe better. Alphabets come from your mouth and they tell you they are fake. Fake the words that come from your throat and fake the unpredictable furies. Fake your burnt skin. Fake your blue eyes. Last night you said to yourself I am so sick of being unable to sleep I will take 37 of these pills. They are like milk in my mouth. Like spittle and spectres. Like childhood. And all those other things. You don’t know what those things are. You drink some beer. You go out looking for smack. The men stomping around on the moon didn’t think about beer or smack, you’re sure of it. You lie down in some kind of stupor singing Beethoven to yourself. The men in the moon didn’t think about Beethoven. They said to each other, do you love me. Wankers. There are stains on all of your clothes. You don’t know what the stains are. You lie in bed and wonder about the men on the moon, and if they are still there. Dying, you decide, takes much time, much dedication.

Our Death 31 / Discipline

Destruction of self is never voluntary. But our judges claim not to know that. They stare at us as we walk past. Something inside us freezes them, and after we vanish, their eyes close. We keep on walking, our deaths concealed inside our mouths. In a way we protect them, our judges, for if they could hear the hoarse and desperate alphabet our broken mouths keep hidden they would crumble, and never again recognise the things they claim to believe. There is nothing worse than a judge. They have whispered specious shit to us for all our lives. Our lives measured in canisters of teargas. In blockades and bombardment  For centuries they have been standing outside our doors. They do not believe in doors. The images we carry. Secretive, in the false cellars of our mouths. Poisonous as oceans. The terrified  night of the middle class.

That there will be no light. Day breaks too late. Too early and too late.

Film 7

Four sad poems. Lyrics for Kruk. Morphine. from Cancer. From Deep Darkness.

Film 6

Two poems from last summer and two recent ones. Methodologies of the wrong apocalypse.

Our Death 30 / On Ways to Say Goodbye

On the fourth day of my sickness I lay in bed increasingly concerned by the status of a memory I couldn’t shake: a village at twilight, uninhabited houses, several animals burning. I was sure I had never been to this village. The texture of the sky, the nameless blue of the mist, everything suggested an apocalypse that it was impossible for me to have lived through. It reminded me slightly of the early scenes in The Time of the Wolf. You know. The sections after the father has been shot dead, but before they reach the wasteland. Great gusts of silhouette. No shelter or food to be found. The splintered meanness of the countryside. It put me in mind of the mass incineration of farm animals during the foot and mouth outbreak that took place in Britain in 2001. You remember that? When they burnt all the animals. I remember seeing the images on TV, and saying to everyone who’d listen that Britain was in serious danger of putting a hex on itself, behaving like that. The ghost mathematics involved in that: smug lifestyle journalism plus retro guitar chords plus the 1990s compressed until they are transformed in their sleep into incinerated, invisible villages. That type of thing. Obviously I was right. But it wasn’t that was bothering me. It was simply the light, the unnameable blue at the centre of this nameless memory, a still-point that should but couldn’t be passed through. That’s what the end of the world looks like, in The Time of the Wolf, which sometimes I think is my favourite piece of apocalypse cinema simply because you learn precisely nothing, except for the simple fact that you can’t tell whether or not the end of the world has just happened or is merely about to happen. Like a sleepless night, an endless regret, or a hex that you dropped in a parallel life. You feel far from yourself, like that part of the land which is also part of the sea. A sadness so great that you have to invent new words to express it, and when you say those words either you or everything else vanishes, and you’ll never be able to quite tell which. Except that you will go out into the streets and it will be very quiet, and there will be new constellations in the sky, and you’ll know they’re new because they will already have names. The Kids Who Jumped Into the Fire. The Strangled Bird. The Blood of Horses. The Incineration of the Pigs. The Deserted House Burning. The Defence Speech of Emile Henri. Etc. A huge meteor will be approaching. It will contain all of your unlived memories. All your unspoken names. The other half of a helplessly oppositional sky.

Our Death 29 / The Ghost Dimension

We don’t know their names or their faces. They are gathered in ruined houses, in water-damaged pictures. They are not our gods, our hypocrisy, your chastity. Who are you anyway. The cities consumed by the winds. Theirs is not your glitter. It is not their stars that encircle your cities where cold and evil bastards are building something hungry. Their names are very different. We use them, those names. New uses for gravity. Methodologies of the wrong apocalypse.

Film 5

Early evening at my desk in Kreuzberg. Quiet mood, grief and rage.

Our Death 28 / Dancer (after Emmy Hemmings)

I guess they’ve probably got me on their death-list somewhere. Probably quite far down. Not that I’m bothered - I’ve always been fairly careful inside my life, am quiet and am often frightened.

One day they smashed my heart. Since then I’ve been getting sicker. So what. The Angel of Death - if that’s what they call it - is on my side. I’m going to keep on dancing till they get me. They can nail me into whatever filthy little grave, I’ll never snitch on anyone.

All these banners and people and songs. Its like I’m flying through caverns, through grottoes and mythical tunes. I have bit-parts in other people’s dreams. I interpret their faces. The old, the sick, the beautiful, etc, none of them mesmerise me. A black cross in the centre of my room.

Our Death 27 / Under Duress

Whatever with that fascist shit Bannon. He can have Darth Vader. He can have that whatever-its-called from Lord of the Rings. But he can keep his paws off Satan. Satan is one of ours. Always has been. But having said that, it is very boring to write a poem about Satan. Baudelaire did it, and it was great. Milton too. And Blake. It is very boring to write a poem about Bannon. Like, for example, I’m speeding like fuck right now, and earlier on I was in a bar, and I was hanging out with friends and they are all complicated and wonderful and I love them, and all of our worlds are falling apart, and I would like to talk about that, about what we were asking, about phone reception in the land of the dead, and etc and other things. But instead I feel that I should be talking about Bannon. Imagine doing drugs with him. I can keep going for five days at a stretch. Monsters appear and ghosts and that, and they are uglier than Bannon. Except they are not, because their conversation is interesting. Like there we'd be, chatting away for days and Bannon like he would just be dead on the floor. No-one would notice. You know, he’d just be dead. We’d have to dump his body somewhere. Like in one of the new developments or something. How annoying. How tedious this all is. I guess this has something to do with the sun, that solar bastard. I guess this poem is lame and I feel kind of lonely and blah but. Remember this. Our word for Satan is not their word for Satan. Our word for Evil is not their word for Evil. Our word for Death is not their word for Death. I hate the word ‘kill’. Will continue to use it.

Our Death 26 / "Let's Not Chat About Despair"

There are certain things we take that help us to murder sleep, that appalling privilege. You know what I mean, those silent golden landscapes, those gardens and cancers and hollyhocks. Its sickening. Our shadows live there, would slaughter us if they could. But instead they are trying to speak to us. Like, for instance, there is a sky inside the earth. There is no light but everything there is visible. No-one can visit, and no-one can leave. But those who are held there, they are manufacturing the noises that will shatter all of our dreams. Think inside those noises. Think inside them, become nothing else. The fist in the fascist’s face must always be wide awake.

very vaguely after Georg Trakl's "Der Schlaf"
title from Diamanda Galás

Our Death 25 / "Where Have They Been?"

And so you wake up in the morning and tell yourself that ‘psalm’ means ‘vitriol’. Otherwise known as the popular song, or as the work equation, or the noises you make as you put on clothes, drink coffee and stare through the window at the unbroken, partially objectivist sky. Songs are holes in that sky, in those noises, those you sing and those you don’t know how to sing. Some are monuments. Some are oubliettes. Some will likely be your accomplice, others should simply be shot. All of them are collisions, and your body is always inside every one of them at exactly the same time.

You wake up in the morning and say that to praise is the same as to curse. That the songs come to you in the dead of night and each one is a memory-net, and most of those memories entirely predictable. There are many songs are simply cops, have set up border patrols inside your memories, have confiscated your passport and replaced it with an endless scream that blocks out the words of the songs you have known since before you were born. Songs still unwritten. Songs that you conceal under your breath as you walk down the stairs and cross the street to the station. There is no longer any station. How insignificant, these scraps of symbolic devotion, these mumbling musical statistics. All you can hear is the ringing that remains when the notes fade away. All you can see is the stone in your hand. The lights of the town signalling through the cop-ridden fog.