Antimatter

    1

    When you were scratching your name into the mirror another few hundred people died. I guess they exist outside the borderline of what you call ‘kindness’. Kindness which in your mouth has the consistency of raw sewage. When you laugh it sounds like boiling lice.

    2

    Antonin Artaud was buried alive and while he was rotting he knew what he was doing. Large worms ate into his body. Then came the small worms. Then that species of aroma that has no scent, no history or country or body. Those souls that fascists call refugees or deportees if they give them a name at all.

    But wait, we are no longer allowed to use that word fascist.

    It is impolite, we are told, to call them that.

    And so the silence that used to get called a city gets filled with noises.

    Larval screeches that sound like they are alive.

            number 9 said to number 4

            we're not living now and we weren’t before

    3

    Sophie Scholl never died

    Not in 1944 not 2014

          not in the years too old or new to be named

    She paces the major cities

    Hands out dry white roses

    Take one. They are good luck.

    Take one. She is lonely.

    Just don’t ask about the hole in the back of her head.

    Only idiots would do that.

    Idiots and laughing fascists.

    When she died she was in great pain.

    5

    It is ice cold in this room

    Where the fascists are breathing

    No-one has told them

    They have been dead

    Since the birth of all planets

    That Saturn ate his children

            for tranquil and safe are the arms of the cruel

            and tranquil and safe is  the mind of the fool

            those minds that hate and those minds that sleep

            and those minds that kill and those that weep

    6

    be kind

           but do not be kind to me

    be clean

           but do not be clean near me

    call it cleanliness call it kindness

    do not call it kindness to me

    your nobility your spirit

    keep it far from me

    7

    In this place there are no cities or noises

    Once a year there is a parade.

    It is compulsory for the dead to attend.

    In this place we call living

    Long past the end of our life

            for we’ve been dead before and we’ll be dead again

            we were dead just now but we ain’t no more

    And then there are those who cannot move without shitting bone, standing in the freezing back rooms, breathing inside other people’s deaths. 

    You can see them in old photographs, as if birds had scratched them, and those scratches are what fascists call history and hammered nails and human hunger and other words they use to express pleasure. The night of the earthquake. The 300 houses destroyed. The mouths scratched to pieces. 

            and so says the master and so says the slave

            who is cooking your dinner and digging your grave

    ← back to front page