Gods of the Plague

Please consider contributing to this. I’m working with a group of Greek poets on translations of Katerina Gogou, and it will be a lot easier if I am in Athens to do it

Baudelaire you knew it all along. Your skeleton compelled without question to scrape the earth forever, to ward off the bitter need that comes on it like a living clock. Smack makes death eternal, you know that well. As does its respectable twin, wage labour.

my new book

Katerina Gogou

complete text of Cancer: Poems after Katerina Gogou

Not the rest of you dead things

When you were born, which you were told on several occasions was 1969, there were a group of Americans tramping about on the moon. Whatever. The furniture changes places every night. There is blood in your nose. You don’t know who your family are. That’s ok. Each morning they break your arms. They tell you it is fatal. They tell you it will help you breathe better. Alphabets come from your mouth and they tell you they are fake. Fake the words that come from your throat and fake the unpredictable furies. Fake your burnt skin. Fake your blue eyes. Last night you said to yourself I am so sick of being unable to sleep I will take 37 of these pills. They are like milk in my mouth. Like spittle and spectres. Like childhood. And all those other things. You don’t know what those things are. You drink. You shoot up. The men stomping around on the moon didn’t drink or shoot up, you’re sure of it. You lie down in some kind of stupor singing Beethoven. The men in the moon didn’t think about Beethoven. They said to each other, do you love me. Wankers. There are stains on all of your clothes. You don’t know what the stains are. You lie in bed and wonder about the men on the moon, and if they are still there. Dying, you decide, takes much time, much dedication.

Whatever with that fascist shit Bannon. He can have Darth Vader. He can have that whatever-its-called from Lord of the Rings. But he can keep his paws off Satan. Satan is one of ours. Always has been. But having said that, it is very boring to write a poem about Satan. Baudelaire did it, and it was great. Milton too. And Blake. It is very boring to write a poem about Bannon. Like, for example, I’m speeding like fuck right now, and earlier on I was in a bar, and I was hanging out with friends and they are all complicated and wonderful and I love them, and all of our worlds are falling apart, and I guess I’d like to talk about that, but instead I feel that I should be talking about Bannon. Imagine doing drugs with him. I can keep going for five days at a stretch. Monsters appear and ghosts and that, and they are uglier than Bannon. Except they are not, because their conversation is interesting. Like there we’d be, chatting away for days and Bannon like he would just be dead on the floor. No-one would notice. You know, he’d just be dead. We’d have to dump his body somewhere. Like in one of the new developments or something. How annoying. How tedious this all is. I guess this has something to do with the sun, that solar bastard. I guess this poem is lame and I feel kind of lonely and blah but. Remember this. Our word for Satan is not their word for Satan. Our word for Evil is not their word for Evil. Our word for Death is not their word for Death. I hate the word ‘kill’. Will continue to use it.

You go to a fairly good university. Are middle class. You learn several languages couple of dialects, at least one specialist jargon. Shortly after this you walk across two mountain ranges cross a handful of oceans and die twice Each day between 7 and 3 time stops You stand on the ubahn platform, sell white and brown To trapped things. ‘People’. They look ‘normal’. Not at all what you’d expect. You take their place inside the countless police cameras at the centre of their lives, the wreckage Of your Unimagined city. If you don’t work you get eaten All we’ve got this ruptured past Buried under that much bone The pedagogy of spiked rubble the Tension that Police call music. We pass it between us A substitute for language. Sirens everywhere.