(Circa 2011)
The movement moves fast
There’s a patchwork of placards
And a river of marchers
Flowing by the Thames
And the endless succession
Of classrooms and basements and bars
Where we devised the making of a new world
‘Stronger together, shoulder to shoulder’
Impeccable logic
But sooner or later
You also have to stand alone
And suddenly everything’s slow.
Heart thunders in my ears
Utterly legless but pulled up by my
Grandmother’s hands and jostled
By the ghosts of my class to SPEAK!
To say something, point somewhere,
Anywhere but backwards
In the face of all this savagery
The manifestation of all they warned
Capital would be
And already seeping into the bones
Of the Next Generation
Hate to say it because, you know,
“Pessimism of the intellect optimism of the will”
But it probably isn’t never too late
For the Beast to be killed
So we sort of need to move on this…
And it’s not like I had nothing to say
(How can anyone who’s seen any of this
Have nothing to say?)
So I stood
And my Nanna’s invisible shoulder
Kept me upright
“We’ve had enough of the bombing
And the lying and the thieving
And of living in a world where
Nothing is held sacred
Nothing is free
From the mechanised grip
Of the Company
Of the politics of hate
And the economy of madness
That consumes all matter
And tosses it like so many
Dead bodies on the
Altar of Infinite Growth
The Priests of Progress
Gather around their acronyms
And their projections
(Which never go down)
And perform voodoo
Against the body politic
Feeding the market on human flesh
Chanting constantly
About the End of History.
We’ve had enough of that too
What an insult!
This, the end of the line?
This violent, garish,
Poisonous mess,
This all-encompassing apartheid
Of all people from all people
And the planet
And from knowledge?
This carnival of spiteful caricatures
That calls itself a ‘discourse’
Little more than a
Chorus of slogans masquerading as
Free expression?
Enough of that too
Don’t talk to us about freedom
From the Penthouse Suite on the 43rd floor
You, who climbed up there
On the backs of blacks
And the dreams of great women
And the fingers of the factory kids
And kicked away the ladder
Now you’re going to talk about
‘Natural inequality’?
Ten thousand years of darkness dispelled
By… ‘equal opportunity’?
And opportunity to what?
Climb over each other to kiss the ring?
Trade ipods for the right to sing?
Drop democracy for the right to vote?
Settle for this
And surrender hope?
The prince of Wall Street
His Priests of Progress assure us
History is ended and we have no choice
But not
While we still have a voice.
