modernity

Silence of the Gospel – after Paul Éluard (1926)

We sleep alongside red angels who show us the desert without microscopics and without soft, sad awakenings. We sleep. A wing breaks us, escape, we have wheels older than flown feathers, lost, to explore the graveyards of slowness, the only luxury.

*

The bottle which surrounds the cloth of our wounds gives in to the slightest want. Let us take hearts, brains, the muscles of anger, let’s take the invisible flowers of pale little girls and tied children. Let us take the hand of memory, let us close our souvenir eyes, a theory of trees liberated by thieves hits us and divides us, all the fragments are good. Who will reassemble them: terror, suffering or disgust?

*

Sleep, my brothers. This inexplicable chapter has become incomprehensible. Giants pass by, breathing terrible moans, giant’s moans, moans like the dawn wants to push through them, the dawn which can’t complain anymore, after all this time, my brothers, after all this time.

Aphorisms II

There is a joy of history in the fact that the totalising force and the absolutist will always be dogged by those with a voice, a blog. The might of the word, of knowledge, is similar to the might of the ocean. You may divert its force for a time, but it will flatten all land eventually. You may think you can divert it. But once something is realised, it stays realised.

You can’t stop someone being right, even if you take everything else from them. And that is beautiful. The pen is longer than the sword.

*

When I hear someone exasperate about the internet, I always think – which comment annoyed you today? Which site fractured your sense of comfort in knowledge? Because of course, there is no such thing as the internet. There are only individual users, and groups… But then, that’s not quite right. The word – internet – like the word – society – has an image or sectional meaning whenever used in this way. It comes accompanied with – a comment section filled with drivel – the endless mass of opinions – lists of reviews, one to five stars, each with their set of entries… And I can’t help but think of this, whenever someone says ‘what’s wrong is the internet’ or jokes that… If it weren’t for the internet, we’d all be happy. The internet, they say, like a compulsion, their fingers itching to pick up a dustpan and brush, or an EMP device. I wonder if they know how they seem to us? We who have lived in the internet. They merely adopted the internet. We were born in it, moulded by it…

*

To rehash an old philosophical kick – It is an image with a great inner weakness that is destroyed simply by the existence of difference.

*

Since the old world is dead on its feet, we need only to keep living how we want, in order to push it softly into its grave. Culture is dead, long live culture.

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V.5

I forgot what I was writing
and a sign of modernity
is that that can’t stop me! Wow
such grace. I will watch TV now

as I write this series of Vs
and as per usual series
never finish, yet another
sign of endless modernity

or at least we hope it is, or
at least hope is endless within
modernity, or at least fine
despair that is based on rumours

is endless within our modern
appliances. Make sure to write
anything that comes to your head
space. But lets not go there, despite

yourself you may have just gone there
Okay. What a gross confidence
trick our world is. What a real gross
product our world is. But mostly

garbage, like this poem, of which
only one survived. And now for
one more amazing denouement
are you ready for it? here it

Two Fragments

I –

The rain sets a gradient on greens –
old lithograph fade, with yellows
as if cloud, slate-dark depressed
is mindlessly flicking through filters.
Only at twilight, such a light.

After, the streetlamps, pale as soggy
worm corpses, settle on the streets.
I miss the phosphor orange glow
of the days when I was younger.
Today, I miss it. Maybe not tomorrow

II –

Pylons grew out of the flesh of the land.
Iron bones of blood-rust thrust through
scaffolds to hold up the sky – how
insufficient were the rocks, now
heaven had grown heavier and heavier –
only metal and electrics could halt it
as it dropped off hurtling downward
toward the cold earth’s plates