Blueprint for the revolution - draft

PYRAMIDS

We stand before Pyramids

We stand beneath pyramids built of wires

Built of cargo ships and computation

Built of our venerated law and custom.

That heave from deserts, where the band plays on

Upon the wreckage of old certainties

Upon famished, unwashed, terrified pleas

On legal instruments, players play on.

Watching seasons of reflected sun

On the gold crowned apex, as at Cheops

When the Nile flooded with slave bodies

When the mind budded with new found signs

When Egyptians learned how to split one

Into fractions and built pyramids.

There is no gold atop the pyramids at Cheops.

Their gods long since submerged by grains of sand

Their temples swept by grains of sand and lost

Their dead tongued edicts shorn of old meaning

The broken bodies of their carved idols

Like the scattered jigsaw of a crime scene

We could not begin to know

How to worship Pharaohs now.

We stand before our Pyramids, gold crowned

The gold cap atop Cheops long torn down.

BUTTERFLIES

You are a butterfly, carbon fibre

Butterfly

You, yes you. No lie
To say your wingbeat

May cause hurricanes

In the course of flight

Resonate and amplify

Sweep flat all built overnight.

Butterflies.

You are a rock in the river

The current altered by your mass

We are all rocks in the river

Together shape its flow and course.

See this vast chamber

Roofed by satellites

Your cry will echo in this great hall

Of linked marionettes

That dance in chaos

Each leg pulling on another leg

Nodding and then wagging heads

The ripples in the current spread

The questioned begged
Who tugged the first, starting string?

Why some butterfly's, passing wing.

Know this truth
That rises from our enacted scripture

The god, Market, hears you when you pray
When you perform plastic rituals

It is moved.

The spiders high in the rafters of the web

They see you. Your every move

Moves them.

Tell them of the change you are

Tell them what your heart declaims

You, a carbon fibre butterfly

Your wingbeat causes hurricanes.

ADDICTS

Know there is but one single rule to them.

Glass windows broken, locks crowbarred wrecked

Tall fences and high walls are no object.

To those, the desperate and demon driven

They take like they've right

Sell cheap to escape

To their heavenly and happy haven.

Them, demon willed

The mendacity of alcoholism

The puffed bravado and cruel thuggery

Of balance blind drunks, still bottle draining

The arrogance of cocaine, closed vision

The violence, loudest of all voices

With the busy unquenched lust to return

Quest back, to festering crack house. The den

Scoured of every object but vice

Detritus, cans, smashed glass and ash

All the rest sold off.

And quest back

Addicts

The same dopamine pathway

Pleasure kick

Personhood long lost in lust for a fix

The spirit of reused needles, criminal

Minded, possessed, demon tools

In addict ridden halls of power

In the Pyramids and Ivory Towers.

The same pathway

Each dose deadening receptors

The next fix must be bigger, and bigger

Till drunk on power, crazed, addicted

Till veins scream for needles, hands shake

For drink. There is no rule they will not break

Addicts

They must be institutionalised, like the Priory

In high security, watched round the clock

Till cured, and we can be sure

They are safe

To return to the society.

GERMS

Let's talk about how the germs get in

The parasites and virus

On the matchstick frail and weakened limbs.

Leeches latch on among us

Who wade the muddy current waist deep

Up to our neck, the choicest.

Bully the hungry and short on sleep

On those who work the hardest

Carry most

That's where parasites will find a host.

When broken in, to broken body

Then they multiply again

Begin, select vectors to infect

The whole flock till every sheep

Is sick with ticks. “We gave you freedom”

All the grass you could ever need

Emaciated. So many mouths

To feed.

That's how germs get in and louse.

Influenzas, to name some

Kill the old and kill the young

Knock off all the bottom rungs

Then see how long they have to run.

T-Cells only recognise

After the infections come

The broken fragments of a virus

Make an innoculation.

Germs will still get in unless

We can recognise the parasite

And every body old and young

Has the strength to fight.

OCEANS

We have built oceans in the sky

Glass bottomed that gleam in the sun

They are clouded, the keels of yachts

The slow whales, swift sharks visible

When the clouds part.

The great imperial locks and seals

The black bitumen seams that sweat

High vaulted walls, their narrow shore

The face of safe doors that perspire

Condensation on the steel skin

Creaking gaskets of old money

Dripping. Where the great pipes empty

In a Niagra, spray rises

High into the air and some winds

Set the waves to lap in thin cascades.

There are waterways in the sky

That we have built. Modern pipework

Like the Westbourne over Sloane Square

Canals that sluice, spaghetti mesh

Fairground wheels and yes

It trickles down.

Trickles in increasingly fickle

And unsettled rivulets through deserts

Carcasses, the bones of asses in the dirt

Reapers sickles over wishes, this dearth

Of liquid.

Hackney Brook, hundred foot wide at the Lea

The Tyburn, that Windsor's throne stole as rest

The Fleet with quays, carved Farringdon valley

Are cased in concrete tunnels under us

Like spent mine shafts, the hewn veins once precious.

Hidden in Byzatine marble jungle

The York stone Baobabs with termite blocks

With ants, the concrete mangroves

Where the call of soot stained statues and tin rats

Echo

The penguins and the parrot carouses

Hidden here amid ceremony and veneration.

Are the great pump houses.

Gargantuan pipes, the old hide replaced

By copper, by stainless, in a forest

Concrete towers like a tall coal furnace

The spinning whirlpool

The suction mouths of graft, quotas, licence

Empty all liquid from vast depressions

The great motors turning, bound in velum

Bolted tight with torts. Gearing and levers

Whirring din of paper bladed turbines

With the power of language and routine

The monumental PSI

To force this liquid

To vast oceans in the sky.

The velum casks that bind the pumps are rotting

If they were to rupture, burst

And all this liquidity flood upon the common

A thousand flowers. The Flamingoes would return

And elephant and ibis. The whales in the sky

And sharks, yachts would beach upon glass bottoms

And watch the earth's innumerable flowers

There are oceans in the sky

That take PSI and power.

CAKE

Silk bussel, silvered mirror and wig

She thought leavened eggs

Sugar, risen golden baked,was cake

A hall of silver mirrors and lace.

With a common touch,

Grease fingered and muddied

They called pie

Higher, with deeper slices

Stories tall sliver of filling

Steaming via the podium

From some nation's womb

And it's news.

Pie is how we organise sunshine.

Calm at the eye of the storm, cake

A gyre spread across continents

Wrath or bounty in a wing's breath

Bodies of men and women, steel hoppers

The wheels of lorries, docking ships

Hands in chain across dimensions

Plane brake smoke on bitumen

Cake is not the the thing in the tin

Cake is how we organise sunshine.

Certain as it rises

Balance a pyramid on pin

Set head after tail, after head

After wing, after leaf, after blade,

After photon..

Alfafa, Cock's foot and Timothy

Concentrate blue grass to cream

Organise worms to custard

Box sunshine in steel and ship it

From under the watchful eye of Christ

To glass mountains

Soya beans marching like Napoleon

Rivers be dammed, greenhouses

Built on sand. Blood on the walls

Blood in the drains, for Pie.

This is how we organise sunshine.

IVORY TOWERS

The bones of magic, dead enchanted things.

From the ground the tops look like needle tips

Gaudi's skyscrapers in seperate estates

So high they penetrate the atmosphere

Take the measure of stars.

Golden fire reflects off ivory like a beacon
After the sun's moved on to other lands

And from the high windowed panopticon

You can see all below like satellites,

In days and seasons when the weather's right

Though mostly all is fluffy candyfloss

Bright cottonwool of brilliant white,

Tracking the sight of storms wet eyes

In the pure unbroken cover of the sky.

Yet when it's clear
The earthbound look like black mustard seeds

Spilled from a jar

Cities like scars, you see no nations

From space. In the stacked cream. Right at the top

You cannot hear a scream.

Stretching up to the sun,

The stolen bones of slain enchanted things

Undone. Narwhale, elephant and unicorn

Space scratching scaffold of tusk and horn,

With balconies, with walkways and turrets

Through the troposhphere. And here

At the base, you can still see blood on the tusks

Dried black and brown and inside a prison

Countless incarcerated, trussed

And bound in cloth, leather, card

Shut cramped like slave ships

Billions of crushed trees branded

And silenced like dissidents.

With a telescope you will see space suits

Weaving a lattice of tusks, for ever more shelves

The cells of knowledge, the labrynth of crannies

The walls of these towers built of prisoners

Built of creativity and dissent.

Light and glass. With light and glass

They can be free, shake their cracked binds

Fly from between the tusks and horns

Like a snowstorm,

Like a typhoon of finches, hummingbird and butterfly.

Each carve it's own netsuke.

And let the pages live among the trees,

Live in cities on the rooftops and parks

Eat seed from the meadows and

Drop the letters of their brandings as they throng

So the streets and fields grow flush with wisdom.

The silos in the stratosphere are no good use of bones

Of the lives of elephants and unicorns

Of fishing magic beasts in arctic waters.

These seperate towers into space when we can fly.

When we have an international station there

Above ivory towers rising high into the air.

GHOSTS

Those that pass through walls, the halls, courts unseen

That raise the terrified from their sleep

The rustling papers, the forms of dead

In screens, smiling, seductive, that lurk

The fridge, dark shadows, the laundry machine

That haunt the story high fonts of our streets.

Do you dress in my mind of them?

Do you believe in them?

Ghosts.

Do you wake, dress and wash at ghost's behest

You, of solid flesh, by borders bound

And steel word of law. They pass through walls.

Your desk they pace and press the circled clock

Between your blades, to find a spine

Pushing honey up the twine, 

String lines to marionettes.

Putting money in your pocket.

Do you buy old rope from ghosts?

Do you sacrifice

The pennies, hours, sensibilities and principal

For the invisible

Look your brother in the eye and lie

Steal, turn people from the door

Over to the law for the undead unseen

For the rustling papers

Would you operate ovens

For ghosts?

Crates and paper travel like the poltergeists are puppeteers

The chill hand inhuman

A morality of Gyges, picking the pumphouse lock

Come by, and whistles. The crook.

The dead with unfinished business

Some functionary faked the paper for a cheque

Fiddled while the world burnt. Banal concerns.

The furniture is gone, the railroad and pipes

The miracles of yestyear's endeavour

In flames devoured. They gather

In a semi-circle and rub their hands

Stretch their formless palms towards the flames

Solid flesh blisters, yet ghosts cannot get warm.

Uniformed armies at their beck

Daily ford the river, daily scale walls

Battle blind and raging at their foe

Who cannot see the war

Yet blood let, pillage and enfief their fellow ape 

The corn we tend, the nightingale. From far, far off

With a bottle top taken as a token to a wraith

You choked the albatross.

Do you believe in ghosts?