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

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 

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. 

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? 

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. 

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. 

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.  

Image 1

Image 1

An approach through wet 

air pin-sharp & blown under; 

sidelong a body

and over then down, papery brown, 

eyes, hardened, concreting: drenched 

in sky surface tension 

depth surface spread plain & 

nearly still, a temptation 

for hand heels let the body 

let itself dipping a pair of wrists 

wet hard cold knees dip 

knees saturation. Ossifying light. 

Like unlike crystal. Concrete 

light breath teeming drops. Look; 

looking; the ground being 

hard beneath. The still film 

all autumnal. Rippled 

with 500-odd stony. 

The body crawling

stony-hard. Sky-wet. 

Mug

Reflection a shine dimly

porcelain extending into late soft air.

Quotidian

hard certainty gathering

a glowing evening hubbed, when attended;

passive & resistant; a

weak force partnering and combating –

sublime quantities of worlding energies.                    

   A vortex

of chinking & a

 comical shuffling to orders, through varnishing mists eating

semi-skilled lungs, anti-septic shadowless light,

bent heads in ear-muffs,

heartsick & dreaming.

Ride

surging hot curves & falling dips falling back negotiating rural night black full beam

staggering hairpin one in four flashing of chrome and shine head lit ‘phantom black’

paint; midday seashine sunflash arseache . . .  yawning morning motorway windblast

high speed corridor legsore boredom & anxiety lookingout for red flash; getting on summer 

leathersweat I Wanna Be Your Dog; passing shining yellow smudge greengold

leaning past surging through & up high velocity flowing blood rush to climbing cloud immensity

sublime white on blue, the whole universe is natural, petrol rubber powerhouse metal heat with

my baby 'bout half past eight dipping and cresting waves of asphalt sky headfull howling, roaring

legs fucking horseboxed & queued cages & cage riders dreary distances exhausted

                                                                                                                       gorgeous

benumbed drop-off seascape dusking purgatorial night revelling dream legs arm up with

                                                                                                                       bottle. 

Summer

Fuck

Rain greening; I sliding head we turning palm to grip spasmodic

                    fuming breath quiet & a dirty brow sheening; a doppler

wailing phantastic obscenities imploding concentrate furrowing dis-

                     unity good lost broken differential slipping and con-

junction. Acid teeth. Predatory stumbling, tottering clumpy drunk. 

                     Inflating zones of contraction; squeal. Impulsing outer night 

dusting sill, damp sheet / heaving flank. We

                     exquisite tentative magnesium aggression, we scarlet & white, 

I black silent ecstatic shocks, sharpening in green air,

                     wet-night concrete & the hungry stench of fluid acrid musk

erotic olfactory feasting, a flip-top head, a twitching pulsation of a shoulder-blade,

                     a drift of smoke through an open window. 

Proletariat (fragment)

chains drenched in sea spray. A raising arm in a

grey vortex of murmuring & a spinal optimism.   Determined intestinal  despair.  City sky

rising cloud shifts; a dripping drop amongst picket-line head hairs. Refusing,  

forging. Roaring fingers, picking, piercing, gripping, throbbing &

her head is bobbing acquiesence but her shoulders palpitate

with fury and desire.  To be a robber, a conquerer. Living through shards

of glass.  The grass is soft and damp between her fingers, greening her nostrils.  

I blink and sting in the sweating sun. He blinks and stings

under a weak sarcastic force.

A shove in the back. A crack to the head.  

Drifting exhausted & taking normalisation. Being realistic.

Come back another time. Having a  cigarette & a pint;

laughing scattered.  To the revolution. Let's have another round.

The sun is shining outside, with fuzzy dreams of running. An edge of nicotine craving.

Ankles skinned with iron chafing. Clocking off for a piss; live for pleasure, not pain.

All you have to lose is boredom and a throat clogged with boxes, cement,

the stiff voices of pissed-off punters and the inevitability of being cheated.

ifyoulikeitsomuchwhydontyougolivethere.com; bypass the gates in the first place.

Sheltering from cracking smoke under a wagon wheel, her chest might break with 

dry dizziness, scarlet salt, a sexual thrill of tearing open the future. 

A pinnacle of murmuring affinity as salt is passed; consideration negating trepidation:

aggravation in terms of fucking nonsense all the same, canting prattle infecting my own mum's speech 

and yours. A grinning crowd jiggers and giggles and frays around the edges with a gun rising up,

her furious love flows with intent around a rifled barrel.  

Our fingers flicker, dawning,  for an alarm

Dog

clicking concretion, sun sliding across brilliant multihues

caramelising an easiness of gaiting drawing in singing & scenting &

depth of rapid  beating. A muscular & memorial line

through fecal multitudes, quavering forces of roarings;   

fearsnaps; fierce intrusions of blue light or dark

bathing cold amber. Wriggling milky multiple warmth tearing

sightless iron walkless black drift.

Presenting a lit clickpadding brief and fleeting at a trot 

feral, domestic, into running summer grass.  

House

Forcing infinite microdimensions temporal & standing

a flowing; labouring from footings always sweating rhythmic

waves rimpling tympanic sheets & sheer scouring

construction tears upper layers and beats through

earth to sky. A blossoming decaying. Simultaneously through immense 

varieties of speed. Filling with flesh life & multiplying at that and 

beyond streams of hairy wind-sacks conjoining with 

cosmic multiplicities & dancing galactically, mountainous creep and slippage

Partition 2

The proletariat is the working class but the working class are not the proletariat

The significance of all this for my current argument is simply that the individual proletarian is an assemblage and an event, a life, that is composed of, and with, the society, the economic structure and the collectives of which he or she is a part. He or she is a part of them; they are a part of him or her. She is her membership of the proletariat; the proletariat is what it is in part because of her membership of it. There is no opposition between the individual and the collective. The proletariat is itself an individuation as an event that becomes through the individuals that compose it who are themselves, along every trajectory, events and collective assemblages. 

However, it also needs to be understood that the event that is the proletariat is not a ‘people’, which is a bourgeois concept that suggests a definable collective identity and culture. This is why, at this point in my argument, I am deliberately not using the term ‘working class’; it is perfectly possible to project a working class identity or a working class culture, and I would argue that this is a reactionary project, an argument that is somewhat supported by the (limited) success of the fascist BNP in doing precisely that. It is reactionary because it suggests that workers have a collective identity that is discrete and separable from the wider society and the economic system within which it exists. It is the collective correlative of the individual bourgeois subject. The proletariat, on the other hand, is purely an event composed of the common interests of individual workers within capitalism – their ultimate common interest, as I have already stated, being a surpassing and dissolution of capitalism that would also and simultaneously be the surpassing and dissolution of the proletariat. 

No communist future can be based in the proletariat as such; no communist practice in the present can be based in notions of proletarian identity in the present. The proletariat is immanent to capitalism and will disappear along with it: there will be, there can be, no proletariat in a communist society.

This suggests that the proletariat is the only necessarily revolutionary group in relation to capitalism. Other minoritarian collectives – women, ethnic minorities etc. – can conceivably win full ‘equality’ with men, with white people, with heterosexuals, which is to say that they can be accepted into the majoritarian, within capitalism and without disturbing its fundamental structures. These collectives may have been, and may continue to be, exploited by capitalism but they are not immanent to it. It is, however, utterly inconceivable that the proletariat can gain equality with the bourgeoisie; the idea is absolutely oxymoronic. This is perhaps why Deleuze and Guattari state that ‘The power of minority, of particularity, finds its figure or its universal consciousness in the proletariat.’ The only two courses of action open to the proletariat as such are either amelioration – which might make some workers more comfortable but will leave them in the same subaltern and precarious class position – or the surpassing of capitalism and of the proletariat itself.

Window 4