Sunday 24 November 2013

Fresh Swarms

he realised we are an individual but I 
is any number and so are we



whorling starlings of her skin her moral clarity flying
with two thousand excited biceps dreams an itself indistinct 
but growing out of her enemies' fingers out of their lights and 
their imposing communicative organs entwining eight hundred 
in simple lies and the sun orbiting the earth as is common self-evident sense,
anger at those fuckers absorbed and laughed off to the bank



moral clarity expelling with abstractions of fear and hate
the horizon shifting to a side that makes our heads spin let’s
kill these fuckers evil fuckers and air still attempts to 
fill my blocked lungs as I barely breathe    he can’t even see what
he wants because it’s self-evident that the sun is still above the horizon



like this like that like the other
blank wall blank screen sometimes a bullet in the face
is a temptation stuttering in a chest and a belly clenched



an impersonal material structure of social relations and 
she is hungry and sick and scared and it is bad for her and she 
can't even see     anybody     infected with them




in a tearing night sheets are grating his skin

Saturday 19 October 2013

. . . and still more Swarms . . .


personal views relentless onslaught pain in the rush to Shakespearean complexity
a head aches
              global opinion
                         challenge will        fingers slide amidst hair
                    will glow 
                             it will be challenging it will be fucked up for tired feet
a solid majority fury at a coolness in glass pressing sweaty film 



and realising that that radiant fluorescent shining across the surface of a plastic 30 litre 
container, brushed on the fly with a sensual ecstatic gasping gaping grasping 
of  damp eyeballs and electrified optic nerves will always be 
different and will never return



and passing what passes for
turmoil and electricity and
an autonomous
arse and a drifting of uncertain light and
an eye's shivering pupil and public
fury manufactured in the public interest 
and like a rush to war and a stiff and painful
knee an itching between toes



bars of near-black crossing a shining wall of air a 
              h e a v ing
   of breath

Friday 30 August 2013

More 'Swarms'


Near unanimity a raised arm producing a space/time place swirling through

an event, gesture ordering a trajectory               rumbling gut  ...

leaving, the talk is pessimistic and wind ruffles faces turned to each other or

glancing away in overlapping twists of unease and vague reflective furrowing

over shivering unrest anger short-sighted grumbling lengthy occasional hair's breadth
 
skewer pricks desiring a final fucking downfall of the fuckers and a spark of loving thrill

 

 

 

The idea that rain is information is a kind of transcendent nihilistic mystification

and a scalp feels it teeming among follicles slogans are deadening to her

he's feeling a force of tradition she's in front of a car looking in a grey light

a thigh aches shouting somewhere a nose aches cold & brittle lungs she

honours history but there's a chord of light there's a trembling surface of skin

Friday 9 August 2013

A first fragment of a new poem . . .


Swarms

arm brushing arm, pressure cotton skin fleet pleasure; 
roaring under notice and warmth, shining, in hair. 
Moving, hard ground muffled through soles
and socks; aching calves, a rhythmic mist of sound
rising and then falling. A rhythmic fire sound rising
sustaining a lifting and a vein of anger. Red dominating 
with black; juxtapositions flap and ripple. 
A tickling, barely perceptible, above an ear, 
inside a hairline; a hand touching,
palm down and fully, a damp woollen weave; 
a detected simultaneous drifting of fag smoke. 



Cold and constant multiplicity of running water over fingers rubbing a soft smooth spoon.
Light flaring and a warm metallic taste, a smell of tea, of rotten damp, of warming. 



Binding purity mad goose he was better I didn't realise
give you the option hub      bub      There's a mental 
fucking cyclist going to get himself killed. 


Making its rapid way a pleasure agitation easy tumescence sniffing a breeze
against a muscular intellect & fires burn in the collision as another raises 
an eyebrow in cool question at molten justifications  hammered out
sucking nicotine & muted grainy cinematic desire a beautiful misery & feeling 
fat & disgusted & grinning satyrism blurred unfocussed vitalism beautiful
light after rain astride a saddle edged with anxiety about the time 

Sunday 28 April 2013


She’s taking the ludicrous 
the facialised sky
her own lights on an obscurity
of drives jostling for a seat
murky as they mingle
sunflares spitting across her
constant changes of velocity 
as the sun both rises and sets;
now it's health. Lights flaring, 
a sense of expansion through 
sunlit leaves against rich
new blue, an itch near the rectum
and a pulse in the left sole. 

Thursday 11 April 2013

A Carnival of Anger and Joy at the Death of Thatcher


The visceral anger and hatred, the bitter joy, the hilarity, the impromptu street parties - all of this constitutes a kind of carnival. This is what the po-faced liberal hand-wringers and the leftists proud of their controlled and rational refusal to feel are failing to understand, it's the point they're missing (I won't say much about right-wing outrage, most of it cant, all of it hypocritical - they are the enemy, implacably so, the other side in the class war, and to give a shit what they think would be a terrible mistake. Of course, I include the Labour establishment in this).  

A vital element of carnival is delirium in opposition to authority and to all it’s pomposity and seriousness. In the medieval period, carnival took place simultaneously with official Church celebrations and festivals, which were anything but festive and which served to cement power in the status quo, to extend and deepen their legitimacy. And that’s what the politicians and media are doing now, this is how they’re using the death of Thatcher. And that’s why this is precisely the right time to buy ‘Ding Dong The Witch Is Dead’, or to have street parties, or to write filthy and furiously joyful messages about Thatcher on social media - because this is a time when the mainstream politicians, the bosses and their media gobshites, including those who consider themselves sympathetic to what they think of as ‘the Left’ (rarely extending beyond soft-left social democracy) are in full pomp. The capitalists and their State are burying one of their greatest leaders and warriors with massive solemnity, weighted with significance, reinscribing in the process their own importance and power. 

The carnival of happy, silly songs, death parties, dancing on her grave, riotous joy, cheap champagne, cigars and lager in the streets, is all a big ‘fuck you’ to all that. It might not be revolutionary, but it is a rebellion, a refusal to allow them to claim unopposed a fictitious national unity under their own rule. As such, it is political on that level at least, although that doesn’t mean that it’s not really felt; real politics, the politics of ordinary people, of the working class, is always really felt, it’s visceral, of the body. It’s the difference between having a decent living and being in poverty, between keeping yourself and your family together or having it all fall apart, about the standard of health care or education you can get access to, about whether your life is enjoyable or miserable, fulfilling or wasted. 

That’s another thing the people who are ‘disgusted’ at our joy and anger can’t understand. It’s not because we didn’t agree with her policies. We can’t say, even if we wanted to, with the cowards and careerists ruling the Labour Party, we disagreed with her policies, but we respected her as a great politician. Because politics is not a game for us; it’s not a career. The fact that she was a ‘great’ politician means that she was successful, and success for her didn’t just mean that Neil Kinnock didn’t get the job he wanted, or that it took a long time for Gordon Brown to get into the cabinet. It meant that people - some of us, people we knew - were thrown out of work, that children went hungry, that lives were wasted, communities fucked. It meant that we were hungry, or cold, or that we worked for peanuts at the mercy of vicious ignorant fuckwits. Her success also meant that we found it much harder than it might otherwise have been to fight back, to improve out lives - and we still do. 

She wasn’t just a politician whose policies we disagreed with, and she certainly wasn’t just a frail old woman who ceased to matter a long time ago. If she failed to matter a long time ago, the enemy wouldn’t be making such a big deal now - because that’s what they are, they are our enemies; and she was a particularly successful, vicious and intransigent enemy leader. That’s why we’re celebrating her death. 

But the war goes on. Her death doesn’t really change anything; at best, it might galvanise people into fighting back again, harder, reigniting anger and optimism on our side of the class struggle. In the meantime the current government are, if anything, more vicious than she was, although they also seem quite a lot more stupid, and it’s with them and with the bosses that our fight really needs to be. 

There is a suspicion that carnival, while never officially sanctioned, was unofficially tolerated by those in power because it allowed people to blow off steam, to express their misery and frustration, in a short burst of freedom before returning to servitude for the rest of the year. We hope that this won’t be like that. That people will wake up next Thursday morning rejuvenated and with a clearer sight of the enemy, rather than exhausted and hungover.

So if you’re disgusted with our behaviour, if you find it risible, childish, hateful - then you are either with the enemy - in which case the angrier it makes you, the more disgusted, the more uncomfortable, the better as far as we’re concerned - or you simply don’t understand the realities of the situation, in which case think about it. Think about it hard. Whose side are you on? 

Wednesday 3 April 2013

Image 4


Image 4

Running into light the others the hundreds or 
thousands going after or before; a huddling 
against a breeze into rumbling 
and juddering. There is always a split 
flash of instantaneous porridge-coloured splurge 
or rather there never is a split flash of anything 
there is a chilling draught or an infection of
light or nearly visible currents of heat as air comes 
close to liquifying; unpleasant stinking and vaguely 
erotic whiffs of bodies, sweat and cold 
cloth. She runs ragged and her eyes scanning for 
rest comes stumbling against gravity, a 
drift of crawling blank sight, rubbing softly along
black brick walls, bulging under pressure from 
a million tonnes of violent frustration. 

Sunday 24 February 2013

Image 3




Image 3

Smearing brushed in time & 
motion exquisite modern light 
of convenience; a mechanical 
smoothing of climbing in
a swarm of disruption and 
complacency. Veritable. Sheets 
of glass, reflections and feet 
variously moving in intersections
planes of light & waves of children. 

Tuesday 12 February 2013

Image 2





In a course of life. A scoured eyesight unsettled, slowly extracting
Slowly extracting a head a prickling palm of a hand. Arresting. In dark
dirt. Hard dirt. Torn suck hole. Scoured. Scoured, pouring slowly. 
Parallel dizzying turns sucking heartguts, cool cloth drifting across a
calf. Pandemoniacal, airborne, swarming drifts of particles, vicious
affirmation of despite & bracing. Loveliness under a skin, exhaling streams 
of smoke & there, the imaginary faciality of searching & constructing despite. 
That primitive anxiety, a mop of whitegrey hair emerging from a slowly rippling
plane of life & continents of sublime & blasted dreariness, dramatic invigoration.