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.

Film 4

Early evening, final day of 2016, Kreuzberg with fireworks and much bitterness.

Our Death 24 / The Torture

They draw a red line across the neck. It is a map, of sorts. The beginnings of a map. The marks there, they are apartment blocks. But they are also alphabets. No, not alphabets, magnetic clouds. In each of those clouds there is a vowel, and those vowels are in the hands of the enemy. You are inside one of the apartment blocks. There are two of you in the room, but you are only aware of a third. It is the third that speaks to you now. The questions it asks are ridiculous. Are there ghosts on wasted planets. There are no planets. No vowels. Just a wet crack when they remove the head.

Here are three chords, three marks on the calendar: Occupy, whenever that was, Seattle 1999, and whatever it was happened in London in June 2005. They may be separated electric strings, or optional planets, or the thoughts of liberals, or basilica, or chromatic meat. Who cares what they are, play them loud. Think like a gun as much as you like, but whatever you do, don’t form a band.

Our Death 23 / "We Are The Dead"

This is a different landscape. There is a desire to kill here. And this desire ties us together as sinister brothers of the sinister failure of an entire social system. - Pier Paolo Pasolini, November 1st, 1975.

“Defeat is among us, and war, and prophecy.” That’s a line from Muriel Rukeyser. I was thinking about it a couple of days ago, asking myself whether the words followed a sequence, or whether they could only be taken simultaneously. That is, were they like marks on a calendar, or were they a kind of cacophony, a form of sky, an enormous black sky at that, in which we are all basically like haloes or pinpoints or stars, and so to be destroyed. There are no simple answers to questions like that. To try and find one I walked up to Sebastianstraße, and I roamed up and down for around three hours, screaming Rukeyser’s line over and again until my voice began to fall apart. Luckily, there was no-one around, because in the third hour things began to go wrong. Rukeyser’s words had started to become weird shreds of impossible meaning that once spoken could never be repeated because once they had been spoken all else would disappear. The sky was a hoax. The stars were border guards. Etc. I held my hand in front of my face and could see nothing but a bland white light, like a murderer’s mirror, a vicious and impassible glass. Not glass, a gaze. Not a gaze, a glare. Not light, but “Prophecy”, a word that for the past few months I’ve only been able to associate with surveillance, with cameras and with judges. Why? Well, if you have to ask, etc. Put simply, “prophecy” implies a prediction of the future via excessive and possibly aberrant interpretation of all available elements of what we like to call the present. And who are the current powers that survey and interpret the present to such an aberrant and excessive extent? It isn’t poets, and it isn’t mystics either. Anyway, whatever. I kept screaming, past all voice, all body, all of my borders. By borders, of course, I mean senses. And I thought at this point of Marx, about what he said about the five senses, imaginary or otherwise. You know the passage I mean, I’m sure. And the cut that it implies in the sensory calendar. Because these days I very much doubt that I can say with any certainty that I have five senses. Certainly, as I screamed out Rukeyser’s line it seemed I had only three. That’s right, surveillance, cameras and judges. Actually that’s not three senses, that’s just one. One enormous black sky, one enormous pit of cancelled language, one enormous voice rasping out one final, incomprehensible sentence. And it was mid-day. It was very dark. There were no stars. I think the buildings were burning. There were a few of us there, standing outside them, inventing language. We were wondering if that bastard the sun was ever going to return, and what it was planning on doing when it got here. We were talking about prophecy, about defeat and war, about how nobody knows what those words really mean, and what they will come to mean.

Film 3

A sub-zero evening in Kreuzberg. Quiet, slightly agitated, refusing to be fearful.