Smash, Grab, Run
Let the minutes unleash
The bullets Brixton wishes
Barbed wire is the ivy on my walls
Acrid cordite like mist in autumn
Dissolves the harsh street into pellucid cameos
Think how the striking truncheon outpaces thought
How the burgeoning Molotov cancels discussion
And for just this once in my black British life
Exploded the atoms in me into atoms of power
Let each viewfinder’s instant exorcise
The pictorial myths complacency devises
Each hurtling brick aimed to smash this enchanter’s glass
Aimed to loot the truths for so long packaged in lies
I am the hundreds of putrid meat in English prisons
In derelict houses, in borstals, the millions of condemned meat
Who let the grim minutes unleash their canned grime.
No object of any dignity in any jewellery drawer would allow itself to nestle randomly against its neighbours. But, mute, dumb, without motile power or mind, they do not choose their dioramas. Accordingly, their only option is to retrofit symbolic coincidence from the scenes they must motionlessly enact.
The majority of trinkets, tchotchkes & ornaments make themselves religious references. Back-project minor cults & orders whose teachings they abruptly illustrate. Here, four pieces perform the Parable of the Wise Procrastinator, from the Gospel According to Jonah’s Great Fish.
The punditocracy knew who was responsible. It wasn’t pretty to see the righteous certainties of Islamic savagery crumble in the face of mere truth. The efforts to continue to apportion blame where all blame must lie have been fervent but disappointing. The attempt to defend Breivik as a paladin of The West displays a regrettable lack of savoir faire: one may indulge such strategies, but one does not speak of it at table. Insinuations that multiculturalism is to blame feel a little oblique. Insistences that yeah but still Islam is the enemy have the whiff of fire-fighting.
We’ve come to a pretty pass if court experts are going to allow bagatelles like irrefutable proof that they are talking bullshit to undermine the baiting on which their livelihoods depend. Fortunately, we can build on by far the most ambitious of the rhetorical strategies deployed in rearguard defence against the terrorist’s white Christianness: the impressively ex nihilo insistence that the Muslim-hating fascist learned his craft from Muslims, ‘adopted the language’ of jihad. In fact the perfidy is worse even than that.
Avant-garde physics is open to the idea that the future can affect the past. It is not disputed that Breivik technically did it: the question, surely, is who is going to have made him do it?
Europe awake. Yestermorrow there will was be going to have been Jihadi retrocausality to contend with.
Elements
The earth elemental manifested in a form combining indolence & destruction. Even its evicted victim had to say well played.
Static, or what scientists term ‘poised’, fire.
In the pugilist science created to beat up the air, kerchiefs loosely tied serve roughly the same purpose as boxing gloves. Injuries to the fists are, nonetheless, common.
The - not silver! - lining to the tragedy is transmutation. That such-&-such a place is ‘paved with gold’ is bastardised gibberish of course; but it is a folk-memory of alchemico-urban aspiration. Sufficient footfall does render a surface potent. Streets become alembics. Most matter remains stubbornly not-gold, but minor alterations are feasible. Dead favourites, for example, become jewels.
Such beasts of London
anything less would never have done, & it was that revelation, that what she had thought a tree had always been a web but an old web, unglued, pendulous with dust from corridors; that the predator was not whatever suburban Shelob had spun it but time, that had out-waited that filament trap & quietly drunk its inhabitant & dropped its husk to earth. All the cars were dead spiders
Go
France to Women: ‘You’re Welcome.’
An Algerian man’s Bad Sexism precludes him from qualifying for French citizenship. ‘[H]is idea of sexual equality is not that of the republic’. Hurrah for the French state! One feels certain this man’s sexism had a kind of Muslimness to it, rather than displaying any fidelity to long-protected Republican traditions of ‘machismo … sexual predat[ion] … salacious remarks … paternalism … infantilization … aggression … male domination … & phallocracy’. One feels sure that were he to sexually assault a domestic worker, for example, he would do so with a complete lack of any suave Gallic élan.
many places where, during the night, that thing slouching, inevitably, towards Bethlehem, rested en route, leaned on mesh that at a squint has something of the hammock or trampoline about it, leaving what-rough-beast impressions as if invisible trees have fallen
In 2011, the British Con-Dem coalition government imposed massive cuts to public spending, ostensibly to reduce the national deficit. The funding shortfalls produced by this austerity programme were to be met by opening up essential public services –schools, hospitals, universities, hospitals, libraries, and so on – to corporate investment and, where the profitability was likely too be too small or too distant in time, voluntary work within the affected communities. This latter option, known as the Big Society initiative, met with little success and was quietly dropped from political and news agendas. Not, however, before introducing the country to an array of costumed crimefighters and, eventually, a handful of genuine heroes.
Memos and recordings of secret high level meetings leaked to the press in 2015 show that, in an attempt to reduce the cuts to the police service, senior officers conspired to provoke the wave of protests sweeping the UK into violence. They reasoned that the greater the threat to property – one tape reveals officers agreeing to use ‘public order’ as a euphemism – the more likely corporate bosses were to pressurise politicians into maintaining, perhaps even expanding, the police budget. This strategy proved disastrous. Many aspects of police work were suddenly opened up to competitive tender, with tax-payers’ money diverted into the coffers of multinational security consultant companies. The size of the police force was massively reduced. Many former officers found themselves employed by these new ‘security providers’ as freelancers or on short-term contracts, doing the same work for little more than minimum wage. Only the least profitable of police work – crimes against people, particularly in the poorest sectors of society – were left to the police force.
Meanwhile, the Big Society initiative encouraged neighbourhood watch schemes and other community groups to police their own streets. And while many people were concerned about the violence and injustices this introduced, the media lapped it up. Steven Seagal presented four seasons of the reality TV series Have-A-Go Heroes, a ratings hit that inspired numerous imitators, including Ross Kemp’s Britain’s Hardest Heroes and Danny Dyer’s Village Vigilantes. Richard Branson, Simon Cowell, Andrew Lloyd-Webber and Alan Sugar joined forces to produce Britain’s Got Talents, a show which uncovered the nation’s would-be superheroes, and The X-Factory, which followed each season’s finalists as through superhero boot camp. For a while, every school-child wanted to be the next Wicca Man, EastEnder, White Van Man, Hammer or CiderMan, the west country cyborg.
Most irritating of all after the interventions of knights is the debris of the defeated.
This city is a fucking scree of dead parts.
Such acts of worship are conducted with a fervour that seems wholehearted but defensive
If our spans, like antique notebooks’, were contained by endpapers! Two, three days before a baby is born, a great flat page appearing in the prepared room, by the crib, silent, intently examined by parents-to-be. They strive to parse patterns. They might smile guardedly at gilt filigrees & pleasing coloured stock, wince at ogees or particular paisleys, seeing troubled adolescence.
Much mottled, that paper to appear again, graveside.
Again, & again: handstand
