After Slumber

by Dominic Fox

i)
YE ARE MANY hailed from overseas by megaphone, the poet rising from his couch. But were they ever, your people, leonine? Diasporic on their home turf, even, like ex-pats in training; swept out from slum-clearance, unregenerate mall denizens. Picture them birod in with small defiance, misdirected pride answering for squandered strength. Say we have greatness in us; show it where it is. That it is greatly to be feared is shown elsewhere, in mirrorvisor, reinforced perspex riot-shield; the sabre swung from horseback, cleaving the ruck.

ii)
THIRTY YEARS OF HURT astonishingly refers to English football. Consider HARM as substitute; SELF-HARM as last resort. (That would be Brighton; or would have been not even lucky once). Show anarchist with fizzing hand-grenade. Elicit due opprobium. Still, the Belgrano didnt sink itself. BACK OF THE NET! Indelicate to call on you so soon, Baroness, but accounts are overdue. Take cheap shots, where available. Point but dont laugh at Hartlepool, ceremoniously swathed in ermine. Wanting direction, follow chariot of Pluto, capering with open malice.

iii)
MORE TEA, GENERAL? I have in mind to write this minus consonants, as one long ululation with its teeth knocked out. One hears such stories. Were you, Baroness, not copied in? Deniability the least of it. Do pass the sugar tongs. One lump or two? News leaks out of the worst places. Are we certain there is judgement inescapable, that all will come to light? Check memo for authenticity. Who is this brother Lazarus? Source unavailable for comment: better bury it. No need to upset the markets, although miracles do happen. Fingers crossed for amnesty.

iv)
NO MYSTERY in street-apocalypse, sweet rout of Babylon. Where fat oppression squats, upheaving force accumulates, enfranchising in anger. There you are also matching your tempo to the hot bloods pulse, accountable in every measure. STEADY ON. What language is this? I transliterate and lose everything: theres no future in pentameter. DISPOSITION TOWARDS VIOLENT PROTEST being noted, take MacPhersons officialese to name its own inertia: stolid without granting purchase, nebulous yet ill-affording grace - CONSIDERATION OF SIMILAR INITIATIVES shelved for the duration.

v)
OUR FALKLANDS, little cared-for, moved quiet Lambeth to contrite rebellion to unrejoicing, which was not forgiven. If there is genius in the English church, it is for trenchant subtlety, fixing the halting point of equivocation. LET ME HEAR BOTH SIDES. No comment possible from F. U., being both fictional and dead; as you too, Baroness, may be when I am finished. Let Chingford have his snarl. Give Blaby back his bottle. Thenford may holler. Opposition cat-calls indiscernible over background roar of vertical take-off, weaponised finance reaching for the skies.

vi)
AS I WAS SAYING - best laugh of your career, but no chance of resuming former service, socialist largesse with its wallet full of herring-vouchers. LA LOTTA CONTINUA. Docklands now docking station for alien vanguard, lizard-people with borrowed skin Timelord intervention pencilled in for yesterday. Neutralise anti-semitic odour in script workshop. Integrate regeneration plotline: make him over as young creative, space-hopping freelancer. LONDON, CAN YOU WAIT? Hymenochirus curtipes infestation traced to source: rogue breeder trading in captivity.

vii)
WHATS THE STORY - wheres your leverage? Lift up the bonnet to inspect the single inscrutable fused block, etched with sigils of unknown derivation. Fetch NECRONOMICON. Recite Black-Scholes to balance vital fluids; get chariot of Pluto back on track for lap of honour. Driver looks famished though. Join us on winners podium for ritual champagne supernova, end-of-history commiserations. Hey - what bonehead summoned GOAT WITH A THOUSAND YOUNG? Transmission ends in sudden indecipherable static, which may well be a mercy. Final frame shows unfleshed mascot swiping victors crown.

viii)
TO SERFDOM. To the disembodied claw, iron pincer of adjustment; to another glorious four years of being all right - Jack. To freedom in a single bound. To furious pedalling into gale-force wind. To dereliction: to becoming one of us by slow deregulation, sloughing conscience as you near the brimming trough. To dying of ignorance. To token resistance. To your constituents, ungrateful rabble though they may be. To the camera, inert force-multiplier; to the tooled-up Met, their horses shamming injury. To cancer, wild obsolescence, at unheard-of length.

ix)
FROZEN TO THE CORE, to synthesized accompaniment, algorithmic ice-crystals swarming in the air. The lyric plays both ways, wins over the stop-whining crowd whilst spoofing aspiration. Formally were trapped, wherever; substitution feigns mobility in stasis, like a sliding block-puzzle, shunting the empty square from place to place. Hard to imagine this as a hit: what were the punters thinking? A DEAL WITH GOD the best you can make out for unless young-moneyed, darling of the age: no pact or reason possible with anarchythe-skeleton dancing in our worthless hides.

x)
EDUCATION - scored in triplicate meaning wage-elevation through sponsored cramming, telegraphically assessed by barcode reader. What distills attainment from accomplishment? Must we enhance our bride-price by attending typing school? Brave of you to bunk off and go marching: I wouldnt have; wrote poems in free periods instead, or bandied gay rights with the C. U., citing celibates vocation. Those who cant, make policy. Enframe teen heroine in sketch of cordoned dust-up defence claims schoolgirl rioters hormonal, depraved by music, possibly heartbroken.

xi)
UNDERSTAND LESS almost a Dadaist slogan, anarchist oppugnancy voicing the truth of power. Some are left as ghosts in their own lives, materialising under assumed names, ventriloquised by grief. Destruction is safer to contemplate than healing, I find, although my appetites are strange even to me: I cling to gallows-humour as others cleave to the cross. Cast CRUCIATUS and see vengeance realised, bowels frothing with boiling lead. You understand / condemn and either way are caught in an imposture, scrying closed-circuit footage, hearsays undead certainties; the imagined reek of blood.

xii)
THE ENEMY WITHIN is occupiers cant for native truculence - DOWN WANTONS DOWN, shrilled as a battle cry. Their law is checkpoints, riot vans in trysting-places, curfews stale enclosure; yet overground the guisers swarm, chanting rebellions snatches of song, the oldest catches known. Men stand together, shirtless in the sun at Orgreave; women crouch beside the batonstruck and trampled. Gobbets of scrap metal go volleying over, improvised defence against short-shielded masters of concussion. Some fall to savagery; some rise to courage. The rider leans in; the cosh begins its swing.

xiii)
SNEER OF COLD COMMAND I read in Foots rouged Shelley, his upstart-demotic fervour impacting - time and again - that fist of ice. The vision is commanding: agitation as lifes work, as the triumph in slow-motion of life over its least self; the once-drowned dried and rekindled, replenishing the earth. Shelley at full warps something else, though lacking impulse control, careening off the walls of the launch-tunnel. Not a nick on the unfazed grimace of Westwell, even so, nor any skin off Aberavons nose. The look of men who have had others flayed is not the least perturbed by these excoriating verses.

xiv)
INHERENT IN THE SYSTEM, or adhering like a bully-lover, unevictable deliquent tenant of a neighbouring hell. Watch them at sabre-practice and they seem like someone elses business, void of malice as workers in an abattoir. At bay the body language angles as the brute breaks through, all mouth and trousers, kevlar-clad Old Adam strutting as the Overman. Try not to be one-sided - note the splendid black bloc choreographing provocation, totemic insurrection. In the systems glitches force discovers its occasion, bears down black-winged on its inheritors.

xv)
FERAL RATS, racailles, addressed as raca: virulent emptiness, the scowling void uncowled before the cameras. Call them eaten ones; whip up the circus beasts starved fury. Projectionists on double-time, sharp fixers weaving through the strobed light by which poet and statistician align their columns. No soul-gape in Eton boys, no want of any kind in boozed-up Buller men, their bladders bulging, slackening at whim; the stream called purifying which strips flesh from bone, shows anarchy the skeleton cavorting with bobbys helmet, his bleached grin unflinching before the lawless force of law.

xvi)
OUR RIOT, for once; although that may depend on whose you mean, a riot of ones own being the latest simulacrum - the multiplayer massive out for antic lulz. (Check usage with anon. informant; queries outstanding on rahtid, Abaddon. Feds is U. S., surely?). Mimesis abounds like baseball caps or God-talk, un-Promethean wildfire through hermetic messaging burn after reading, and/or disseminate at your own risk. Risk also of becoming strange even to yourself, unknown before the magistrates, plaything of many tongues reduced to monolingual stammering.

xvii)
EXCITED DELIRIUM in stress position, the torn spleen venting humours. Tunnel down through etymology towards concealment WRAGG IS IN CUSTODY the watchword, sotto voce inflection of our anarchy. Self-harm always an option: for conditions, see below. Most things an improvement on Villa Grimaldi or any such house of demons; its a short circuit, though, from taser to parilla. Compliance at least cost their prerogative, their fatal competence, to mute complaint or drown it in the noise of your own flesh: phrase-making breaks against this, even as AN EVIL CRADLING is owed to Keenan.