To accompany Andrew Cooper’s participation in Speakeasy: SATURDAY MARCH 3rd 2.00pm-9.00pm The Underground,
35 Robertson Street Hastings TN34 1HT. Details to follow.
Will.
1.
Where did my country go, in leaving behind this vapid numbers machine, void of life?
Don’t ask after when I return to my homeland, for I cannot return to what was is gone.
And in tracing a line of history to better understand what went so wrong, seek not to ask when the banker became the butcher. Ask, rather, when the butcher became the banker.
2.
When the mechanic becomes the hangman, and the civil servant is inking death warrants.
When the architect is building camps. When the butcher has become torturer, will you hold your nerve? When the baton has cracked your skull. When freed detainees greet you, with a sodomised demeanour. When life greets you warm, simply because you’re alive, but you greet it cold, because you envy death.
3.
And ask not when the government became a speculator. Ask instead when the public became its shareholder. As Che Guevara’s bloodied final grin froths eternal, don’t ask for revolution. Seek after resolution. Turn fast the screws that fix your mind Let go the grip that holds your party dear. Back slap that fat grocer as the numbers whir. For you did not seek to stop his meteoric rise.
4.
Don’t look to divide, or ask when, or in who’s name your country, your town, your body, became franchised, to the economic war machine. Brave comrades, citizens, keen to be the revolutionary. The one who went that extra mile. The top comrade. But, enough, you are an honourable man. And so are we all honourable men and women.
5.
Do not criticise the colonel and politician, as they visit death upon the hapless. For war does not only rain as fire, from the sky upon the ground. Is not alone the saber for maiming. the dicktat for systematic killing. War’s stricken grimace is with you. Turned smile as you fund it and reap its rewards. Your war. Peace child.
