"If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever."

George Orwell

Snakes and Monsters

The dreams that fall to interpretation
We leave untouched.
The breakdown was a political gesture.

So I left myself behind,
In the snakeskin that they removed
On the operating table.
Under a blue light

I saw this other thing emerge,
A monster of excess.
But an excess made penitent by structure.

Untitled

If it should
One day
Be proven;

That boredom is the avoidance of horror,
That hatred runs through life –
Like a cat scampering through wet trees at dawn,
Like a knife over the surface of an ice cube –
That all things are unknowable
That daring is a falling with purpose:

Then
And only then
Will the need for vindication arise.

Re-conditioned

Crawling in the desert

There is dust

Growing my mouth

I have scrambled in-between parallel lines

Cracked my head on a hidden hypoteneuse

Which hurts.

My palate turns dust-gray.

To set my limbs:

That is the meaning of this dust,

So finely pressed to skin

As to appear one with it;

But it is an outside violence.

Reason has passed

Through the Gut .

And trapped by intestinal wisdom,

Dust is outstripped.

I fear nothing else.

Sub/Ob/jectivity

"True, the more artists have journeyed into the interior, the more they have learned to forgo the infantile fun of imitating external reality. But at the same time, by dint of reflecting on the psyche, they have found out more and more how to control themselves. The progress in technique that brought them ever greater freedom and independence of anything heterogeneous, has resulted in a kind of reification, technification of the inward as such. The more masterfully the artist expresses himself, the less he has to 'be' what he expresses, and the more what he expresses, indeed the content of subjectivity itself, becomes a mere function of the production process…"

Theodor Adorno - Minima Moralia

The Thing

I don't know what it is;

But many seem to think that they have it.

Some of them are even convincing.

Some even think, I think,

(Quite honestly)

That they do.

Because there's nothing to it.

Not a thing at all.

It is done

In the moments stolen from expectation

1. Unkept appointments

2. Long and terrible silences

3. The sickness of speaking

Until the machine is before you,

Like a mother taking her child in her arms

(Not like your mother ever did)

(Or mine for that matter)

(Or even many people's).

For you know; that

Whatever is said

However true

And however many lies it contains;

That

Like other people's dreams

Like a gush from a levee

Like a bullet from a gun

It goes on.

Practising cruelty

"Emotion that is not tied to the opening of a horizon but to some nearby object, emotion within the limits of reason only offers us a compressed life. Burdened by our lost truth, the cry of emotion rises out of disorder, such as it might be imagined by the child contrasting the window of his bedroom to the depths of the night."

Georges Bataille - The Cruel Practice of Art