Dear Florence,

It is 13.30 on Saturday afternoon, 12 January. You have asked me to write something about poetry and anti-fascism. I am trying to work out where to start.

I’ve wanted to try to write down my thoughts about this since at least February 2017, when I was drawn into the campaign to close down the ‘neo-reactionary’ art gallery that had started running talking shops for fascists in Hackney. It feels surprising to me that that was two years ago already, that it’s election year in the US next year. 2020 felt like an age away then. That moment around Trump’s election felt so chaotic to me; it was like a hole had been punched into my expectations and suddenly all of these things that I had been dimly aware of were slithering around inside of them with horrible unignorable clarity. I was so frightened by everything that was going on around us. It seems important to me now to be able to admit that, that we were not thinking very clearly, to be candid about it. 

And now that I have the space to get my thoughts down about all of that stuff its significance seems to have diminished again: the lights have come back up, the monsters in the closet testify that they were only doing business, the libertarian financiers creep back into the shadows, and Trump stands alone in the White House, lost in thought, his Nuremburg Rally a table of hamburgers. 

I don’t mean that we can breathe a deep sigh of relief. Obviously that would be fucking unconscionable. But I do think that to start making work that was obsessed exclusively with an imminent fascist state-takeover would be a political and aesthetic error. Massive racist ‘movements’ are a part of Western liberal societies today, not opposed to them. Cultural impulses that expressed themselves in opposition to the state were injected into the bloodstream of liberal commodity culture decades ago, as action films and structural adjustment programmes and daytime TV, and as the War on Drugs and Terror and Welfare Cheats and Economic Migrants and then as revenge pornography and Twitter mobs and shooter survival and little Maddie and all of the other corporate-sponsored hypertensives that have been working their way through the body politic for years, to give Rupert Murdoch his long drawn-out symbolic erection. This stuff just didn’t exist in the same way a century ago. What does it mean to want to ‘politicise aesthetics’ in circumstances like ours? Surely the answer can’t be the same as it was in 1936. It can’t be ‘Brecht’. 

This just as a brief attempt to set out where I’m coming from. I should also add, since a lot of what I’m going to argue might seem to be dismissive of the idea of an anti-fascist art ‘as such’, that I don’t think that the rejection of an explicitly anti-fascist poetry means that there’s no need for anti-fascist politics. I am just saying that the way in which ‘fascism’ is configured today means that the culture of fascism is not made predominantly by fascists. The obvious corollary of that statement is that a powerful anti-fascist art won’t have much to say about fascist ‘ideology’ either. 

So that will do by way of introduction.

¯\_(ヅ)_/¯

All of this stuff has become tied up recently in my head with the famous Walter Benjamin quotation about fascism aestheticizing politics.1 I had thought that I understood what Benjamin meant by that statement without needing to re-read what he wrote. I had begun to use it as a kind of shorthand for something that it seemed to me to be important to describe. But then I went back to his essay and realised that he was talking about something else; and now I feel like my misunderstanding has to do at least in part with the way in which fascist culture has changed in the period since his death. I’ll try to explain the misunderstanding as clearly as I can.  

This is a straightforward way of presenting it: The impulse to make politics beautiful is distinct from the belief that beauty is a property of political ideas. Benjamin was writing about fascism as a tendency that would beautify politics, by conflating it with heroic, technically advanced warfare. In my own mind his phrase had come to refer to people for whom violent ideas were beautiful, who took pleasure in the solecisms and crudeness and brutality of racist, authoritarian political speech, and who experienced in its language a kind of counterfeit aesthetic enjoyment. The first case of the ‘aestheticisation of politics’ applies most straightforwardly to people who experience their lives with the greatest fullness and intensity in situations of violent militarised conflict; the second to people who experience them with the greatest fullness and intensity on Twitter. The account of fascist aesthetics in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ continues to be relevant to the political proceedings of certain balkanised strips of Northern Syria and to the suburbs of outer Moscow; but the account that I had wrongly attributed to it provides a better description of the relationship between art and politics for the ultra-nationalist homeowners of Swindon, Battersea, and Worthington, Ohio.

I might seem to be tying myself up in a contradiction. On the one hand I am arguing that a fascistic culture reproduces itself without the intercession of actual fascists. On the other hand I am describing a kind of metamorphosis in the aestheticization of politics that Benjamin said was fascism’s defining cultural characteristic. Which is it? Does fascism disappear into the structure of consumer personhood under the liberal capitalist state, or does it revive itself in the face of a violent capitalist culture as the aestheticization of aggressive political language?   

For me, the point of overlap between a fascistic culture within liberal capitalism and explicit fascist conviction is the increasing technical potential to use language as a means to satisfy violent urges. To the extent that the desire for violent collective purification can be satisfied within the domain of individual consumption under the stewardship of the constitutional state, the appeal of outright fascism will tend to decline. To the extent that the beauty of this violence is experienced in language, its appeal will tend to increase. The same technical advances that incorporate into liberal capitalism those tendencies to aestheticised violence that were originally the distinguishing cultural characteristic of fascism, drive people to make their own sadistic pleasure in language and at the same time vastly increase their ability to use it in order to inflict harm on total strangers. Fascist ‘ideology’, shorn of its militarist culture, then becomes a culture unto itself: fascist language is the pre-eminent form of violent language, even if fascist art, fascist militias, and fascist state theory have all long since been superseded. Fascism is in this sense neither the inevitable outcome of capitalist development, nor something that it can mechanically overcome, but instead a dialectical operation of historically constituted techniques on socially constituted urges. 

For the rest of this essay I’ll try to say a little more about a body of work whose ‘anti-fascism’ can be understood in these terms. 

¯\_(ヅ)_/¯

Here is a comment on the aestheticization of politics circa. June 2018:

The promise of the internet and neoliberalism is that everyone gets to be a cop. Everyone gets to be the drone pilot of something. You can’t control your life and you’re trapped in an infinite self-replicating hellscape of concrete with no kinship and no culture and the sky is on fire and the sea is choking on plastic and everything’s shit but by god you can team up on some poor homeless bitch who no one will miss and gangbang that butterfly on a wheel. You can molest the girl with a dick at your university, you can forcefeed your autistic kid bleach, you can do anything but change a thing that matters2 

This is a passage concerned with some of our own technological possibilities. In some respects its line of argument seems quite similar to Benjamin’s. For Benjamin’s ‘[Fascism] sees its salvation in granting expression to the masses – but on no account granting them rights’, read ‘Everyone gets to be the drone pilot of something’. In both cases the language describes the aesthetics of violent acting out. Whereas for Benjamin, the price of identity with the superhuman (Marinetti’s technophiliac dream of ‘gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction’) is passionate absorption in the fantasy of bodily annihilation, for the author of the passage quoted above, the price of individual emancipation is collusion in the bodily degradation of feminised others. In both cases ‘aesthetics’ amounts to a sensation of activity that doesn’t ‘change a thing that matters’, with the further qualification that the sensation feels best when it is expressed either as liquidation of the feeble human body or as aggressive domination of a wounded, exposed, disgusting or defenceless other. This is the ecstatic fascist intersection of torture and what now goes by the name of self-care; the kind of beaming, sado-positive therapy for which a figurine like Milo Yiannopoulos was briefly famous. It is beautiful insofar as we are the person it is for.3   

The main difference between the passage I have just quoted and the Benjamin text is of course that the former nowhere uses the word ‘fascism’. It says ‘the internet and neoliberalism’; but it could just as well say ‘the dominant society’, or ‘social networks’, or ‘today’. It is not arguing that ‘the internet and neoliberalism’ are fascist, but that those characteristics that almost a century ago would have been associated with fascist art, are today widespread aspects of everyday culture. Could anyone today possibly deny this? For Marinetti, and for the Fascists of the 1910s more generally, war was beautiful ‘because it enriches a flowering meadow with the fiery orchids of machine-guns’. It was beautiful because it mixes ‘gunfire, barrages, cease-fires, scents, and the fragrance of putrefaction’. For the Reddit Marinettis of 2016, the internet was beautiful because it mixed rhetorical cock-waving with the literal image of domination in fucking, and the conspiratorial satisfactions of a fantasised whole with the abrupt emptiness of a loading screen. In circumstances like these, Max Horkheimer’s famous remark about fascism and capitalism has become a truism for the theoretical edification of prudes: the person who should remain silent about fascism is not the one who is unwilling to talk about capitalism, not primarily the Madeline Albrights and Timothy Snyders of this world, but the person who fails to talk openly about ego-collapse, sexual violence, or themselves. Everyone knows that capitalism invests heavily in all three.   

¯\_(ヅ)_/¯

The last block quotation is drawn from a text-based computer game by the game designer Porpentine Charity Heartscape, the shape you make when you want your bones to be closest to the surface. It was commissioned by the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and released sometime in mid-2018. It is impossible to say how ‘far’ into the game the passage comes, because the work itself is built out of a congeries of hypertext links that constantly loop back on themselves and deposit the ‘player’ at an earlier stage of its narrative movement. Like many of Porpentine’s text-games, the shape you make is preoccupied with world creation, the obliquities of self-narration in fidelity to the trauma that prohibits it, and generic cultural form, the satirical manipulation of which this author has mastered like perhaps no other writer working today. Her games are a new kind of psychic pointillism, a constantly decomposing mental breakdown in text-format, dispersed like solar dust into its merest pixelated debris. I know of no one who has done more to re-imagine the formal uses of the web browser for levering open the shut-up, wounded, online head.

the shape you make reminds me in certain ways of the trajectory of a discussion on poetry and anti-fascism that I facilitated in Manchester in November 2018.4 I had wanted to talk, at that event, about the role in our psychic lives of stereotyped images of capital-letter ‘Fascism’. My idea was to try to open a discussion about how our wider culture has become saturated with those images, of crude Teutons and equilateral Klanspeople, and I thought I would talk about how this saturation begins, at the first moment that we sit down at our desks in our state-run schools to begin dutifully to internalise our state-sanctioned syllabi. I had it in my head that we would talk about how successful this operation is, since the same process that establishes the icons of racism and authoritarianism as foreign icons and as ‘lessons from the past’ is also the one that allows us to become convinced of the essential otherness of fascism to our own lives. I wanted to say how in my own work I try to manipulate those symbols like puppets, to stick my hands into them, to make their tongues wag in disgusting, lascivious mimicry of the pallid, wagging fingers of their consumer audiences; and I wanted to say that our art could burst from their puppet-torsos like blissful alien jack-in-the-boxes, screaming the news that this was a new genetic mutation in the ‘aestheticisation of politics’ itself: a novel strain of it, metastatising in the ego-conduct of liberal people who live in liberal capitalist societies in which almost every impulse that was associated with fascists c. 1936 can now be satisfied every evening by even the most upstanding champion of democracy and human rights. (Everyone knows at least two people who prove it.)   

What we mostly talked about at the event instead was violence, about violence in left-wing poetry and in fascist culture, and about how to discriminate between the two, and we argued with one another about whether we needed to make art that was less or merely differently violent; and I was too slow-witted at the time to realise that this was in fact the conversation that I had wanted in slightly modified terms, since we were its primary subject.

¯\_(ヅ)_/¯

But assume that Benjamin is right, and that fascist aesthetics is a kind of travesty of the gap between actual human reality and technically determined human potential. How do we relate ourselves to that potential? 

One way would be to try to find some way of saying what it is: to rip out from the thin, insulting air of Google and Twitter some image of the life that they can never depict. And for many years this has been my own answer. I have wanted my poetry to be the immediate realisation of existing technical potential. I have given to that potential the name of communism, and I have burned through successive definitions of that term with the enthusiasm of Parisian street demonstrators for luxury cars. I am now faced with the sensation that this has been a fruitless exercise, and a sort of expressive masochism. What other approaches can be conceived of?  

Porpentine’s games provide another answer to the same problem. They don’t try to overcome the gap between human reality and technically determined potential, but to light a fire in it. Unfinished highways of feeling loop through her text segments in almost imperceptible outline, standing out in relief against the desktop-wallpaper greens and oranges of their in-browser backdrops – an affective stage scenery retrenched and then retrenched again to its drowsy, dogmatic degree zero. The non-existent knife that has a central role in the narrative of her 2014 game With Those We Love Alive is at once the conscious emblem of this materialism of the unrealised and the virtuosic contraction of their telescopic absences to the dimensions of a plot point.5 Who is still afraid of the dark?  

the shape you make provides this spacious quality of Porpentine’s work with a few more contour lines. Essential to its overall structure is a kind of complex of incompletions: incompletion of its (apparently) autobiographical narration of early media consumption and of its repressive association with shame; incompletion in the account of the intrusion of those early experiences into later practices of intimate care; and incompletion in the game’s biting criticism of internet ‘culture’ and its barely speculative future of fully privatised exclusion mechanisms. The prurient desire of the game-player to access more exquisite vignettes of defenceless childhood suffering is anticipated in the game itself: enough click-throughs brings you to a screen that reads

art is an obsession that buries you inside the beauty until you can’t see it anymore, you disappear, sacrificed so others can look at it from the outside and see what you were dreaming when you started. 

This is who you are: the ‘other who can look … from the outside’, and see into passages of self-description of an almost unbearably frank and compromised intimacy; and it would be very easy for the game, or for the writer of it, having painstakingly established this relation, to feel violated by its asymmetry, and to formulate its (and her) anticipation of the reader’s insulated consumption of more and yet more detail as a kind of vengeance achieved by way of intellectual mastery, through the humiliating demonstration to that person, now a kind of transfixed analysand, of just who they are, and by shoving down their throat the evidence of their own violent, insatiable greed. ‘The entire world connected by an ethereal lifestream of information and the best people can think to do with it is participate in human sacrifice’. But that doesn’t happen, here, in those words. The tone is instead suggestive, Schumannesque. The beauty. Ghost variations. A few, skeletal notations of heat death. The gameplay is not an intelligence test.  

And in this sense it is the opposite of the most basic metaphor of fascist self-understanding. Fascists imagine themselves in a very particular way. In Klaus Theweleit’s remarkable study of the writings of German Freikorpsmen, Male Fantasies, the structure is laid out again and again: 

The fascists were not projecting when they singled out Friedrich Ebert from the Left for a certain grudging admiration. They sensed that this man (whom Erhard Lucas fittingly describes as presenting a ‘brow of iron’ to all demands from the Left) would not allow a single drop of the stream to seep through; he would not rest until he had crushed all attempts to form soviets, to socialize particular areas of production, or to organize a republican army. Ebert’s first love was his organization, the Party. The party in power: large, rigid blocks; dams.6 

For the Fuehrer’s ‘wife’, in that fascist ritual, was the unconscious of the masses who were pouring into block formations. ‘And now the screams of “Heil!” erupt, becoming overwhelming, like some all-fulfilling wave that rips everything along with it. Fifty thousand voices merge into a single cry of “Heil Hitler!” Fifty thousand arms shoot out in salutes. Fifty thousand hearts beat for this man who is now striding, bareheaded, through the narrow passage formed by all those thousands’.7

Theweleit’s argument about fascists who imagine themselves as blocks with no gaps, penetrable orifices or vacuums, is a part of his explication of the relationship of male fascists to women. His argument that these fascists have ‘not yet been born’ means to suggest a quite different way of thinking about human ‘ego development’ than the one that we are familiar with from Freudian psychoanalysis. Instead of undergoing the incorporation of an internal super-ego representing the father as a resolution of the ‘Oedipus complex’, the fascist personality is formed through the constant disciplining of the body in the process of the military drill: through its bending and welding into the continuous, unbroken surface of the collective block person, the nation or military parade.

The threat of personal dissolution outside of this relationship of violent male fraternity is, predictably, warded off through explosions of frantic violence. In the sight of the quivering, lifeless flesh of battlefield enemies, in their blood and shit turned outwards and commingled and externalised, the Freikorps man discharges the anxiety he feels at the prospect of his own dispersal or fragmentation. He blacks out and is reborn. The first screen of the shape you make: ‘One of my first memories is a bowl of blood and flesh in a bedroom.’ 

Fascists imagine themselves as blocks because the idea that their personalities might contain holes or gaps is unbearable to them. They need to be impenetrable, complete, positively constipated with their own heroism. Squadrists, ex-syndicalist theorists of the total state, Nazi stormtroopers, fans of the band Skrewdriver and racist 4Chan users represent the unity-in-difference of this need not only to be whole, but to be full.8

How does this relate to the argument I made earlier, about language being the point of contact between a fascistic culture without fascists and the transformation in the fascist aestheticisation of politics? I said there that insofar as the aestheticisation of politics still occurs, it does so in language. I also said that it was here more than anywhere else that fascist cultural tendencies realised themselves in fascist politics, and that it was a real contradiction of capitalist social relationships that the same process that allows capital to interiorise fascism, in the same way that a child might grow up to interiorise her adult persecutors, also produces new, consciously revolutionary fascists through the new technical affordances of language to hurt, brutalise and cause pain. 

But why is this the case? If fascism has been deprived of its mastery over the aesthetics of sadistic disposal over wasted technical potential, what kind of language allows it to sustain its own ideology? 

The usefulness of Theweleit’s argument to my mind is this. It allows us to see what fascist language tries to achieve. Fascism becomes conscious and theoretically aware in language because theoretical language is, or it feels, block-like and gapless; and because it is block-like and gapless language more than any other kind that does duty as a bludgeoning instrument for the infliction of intellectual injury.9 While in every other domain of social life, advanced capitalist relations have interiorised the sadistic urges that previously sought expression in fascist opposition to the state,10 in the scene of communication they have given fascist theory an immense new lease of life, as the one solid, impenetrable block that individual men and women are able to call their own. This is the latest stage in the dialectic of fascist culture, its aestheticisation of politics distorted into the tendency to find the most bestialised and persecutory speech-habits at once beautiful and sexually arousing.   

We are now faced with the task of imagining what these historical transformations mean for anyone whose ambition is not to aestheticise politics, but to politicise aesthetics. Porpentine gets the main problem into focus: ‘Language is for fucking idiots. […] I don’t really know a lot about abstract concepts. I only know about the stuff I’m interested in or the tiny hyper-specific details that I focus on’. Her games are sustained elaborations on that instinct, the formal antithesis to the cutting edge of conceptual language. And that they somehow manage to be this literally and not only in some amiable metaphorical sense is so astonishing to me, and so moving. Again the first sentence of the shape you make: ‘One of my first memories is a bowl of blood and flesh in a bedroom’. Replaced at the second screen with ‘Me and my siblings weren’t born in hospitals’. How many cancelled possibilities are strung out across these two screens and 23 words? How many times do you have to read the second statement before it emerges for you as a comment on the first, before ‘hospitals’ and ‘bowl of blood and flesh’ assert their elective affinity? How often do you have to be reborn through the game’s click-through HTML loops into the scene of the first screen before you realise that this scene of your birth as the game’s player is not primarily an enigmatically evocative statement about violence and sexual desire – the stress held on ‘bedroom’ – but a description of a home birth that connotes (at least for anyone unfamiliar with ‘normal’ homebirths, which is probably the majority of the game’s players) stillbirth, or abortion?  And what does it mean for clarity to be withheld like this, and why is it that this birth that is also the cancellation of birth, measured out not in abstract space but in the lived time of my own fallible head, in the dimensions of my own distraction and insensitivity, and of my indifference to tiny details – why is it that it cuts so deeply into the heart of the central organising metaphor both of conscious fascists and of the violent, repetitive video games that have usurped so much of the social libido that they used to be able to monopolise, into the scene of ‘palingenesis’, rebirth or reawakening, where we come to life as gapless blocks, with our health bars replenished, screaming insults at the weak? 

Language is for fucking idiots. 

The fascist who thinks he is a block, a hard, integral object without gaps, internal fissures or breaks – this fascist is convenient for us, liberal and radical anti-fascists alike, because he is not like us, because he shares none of our DNA, and because the imperative that he suggests to us is simple, reassuring, and familiar. It is merely the imperative, broadcast to us by our teachers from the earliest days of our infancy, that we ensure a rigorous regime of self-hygiene! And this is a fundamental fact about contemporary capitalist societies. Just as the impulses towards obscene violence, ecstatic domination, spectacularised militarism, and the hysterical persecution of vulnerable, unclean others that were the hallmarks of the fascist movements of the 30s, are now largely internalised to the private domain of the individual liberal consumer, so too has the tendency to aestheticise politics, once the distinguishing tendency of fascist artists, become a leitmotiv of the dominant liberal political theory. As this process gathers pace, mainstream media hysteria about an impending fascist ‘takeover’ increases necessarily in proportion.   

But fascists are not towering granitic blocks with no gaps or breaks. They are tiny nuclei of ideas afloat in great cytoplasmic seas of unconceptualized frustration and directionlessness. The tendency to plump for the former conception instead of the latter is fundamental to the contemporary aestheticisation of politics, which is also the reason why any essay on ‘anti-fascism and poetry’ is also compelled to explain why there is now no such thing as fascist art.   

I cut the words ‘I think’ from the preceding paragraph. My life up to now has been a fight for conceptual clarification. I am not used to holding space open. I have not yet learned to use what doesn’t exist as a surgical (musical) instrument. 

I am not alone in this. Klaus Theweleit’s magnificent two-volume book finishes with an abrupt, mirthful ellipsis, as if this might amount to an adequate response to the history of attempts by male artists to overleap the distance between reality and technical potential.  His fundamentally non-artistic response to an almost insoluble compositional problem shows how easy it is to fail to take beauty seriously.11   

One is not ‘born’ a fascist, one is reborn, ‘palingenetically’, at the moment when one’s gaps are closed up. This is the infinite possibility of systematic thinking, a compositional procedure as flexible and as miraculously susceptible to permutation as three dots crammed together at the end of a sentence. It is how we respawn again and again into the first screen of our lives, a bowl of blood and flesh in a bedroom, exhilarated in the re-emergence of this stillbirth, shovelling worlds into a system. 

Porpentine’s games are the closest thing I know to a successful anti-fascist art in the specific sense that I am discussing, because they are among the only works that I can think of that take absolutely seriously the task of composing with what doesn’t yet exist. This is not ‘negative capability’, apophasis, or the jaded spectre of nineteenth-century Romantic irony. It is alien to the clichés of ‘atmosphere’ or ‘tone’, which are anyway hateful non-words that do for aesthetics roughly what ‘diseased migrant caravan’ does for politics. All of the above-mentioned tendencies are perfectly compatible with art made by fascists and would continue to be prominent features of fascist culture if it were not for the fact that the great majority of the candidate-artists are now in fact smiling, hygienic political liberals with the portfolio webpages to prove it. What makes Porpentine a great artist is not her ‘fragments’ or ‘uncertainties, mysteries or doubts’, but her singular ability to find ways of holding open with the steadiness of surgical forceps all of the distances that have grown up within and between us and that threaten to collapse again the moment we open our mouths. By making those distances into compositional materials, her work indicates one way out of the culture of ‘fascism’ and ‘anti-fascism’ that we circle around in an endless, distorting hall of mirrors. 

***

a

We threw the radiant brick through the ever-
changing screen, to make it black and white. Pale 
fingers on a steamed up window, again. How nice. 
We come to you as a naked bulb in a forgotten 
community centre, making the tongue in the 
window flash, like a body disappearing into the
undergrowth. The flaming toll booth wears its 
listening face, the listless millennial goes the same 
way as the 1970s. Here is the bit of mould in the 
paving slab, here type. Here is the fantastic ennui 
of the same old wood nymphs, of Jeff and Jeff and
Rice. Here is corporate immunity to the stars at 
the crushing apex of their boring shimmer. Here, 
once again, is the latest demonstration of the 
overwhelming feebleness and contingency of 
ideas. Keep your head together and call my name
out. Here is our light. We come to you so tired of 
this, never  
We come to you like a particular kind of narrow
staircase, with the irrepressible vivacity of 
ashtrays. Tiny trees grow up amid the butts like
fragile searchlights. We come to you 
from the shadows of the last century’s train 
stations, bearing on our heads the remains of a 
once brilliant email. Never go back to it. Here
once again, the wind is psychopathic. Here once 
again, our veins our bursting veins go on to be in 
the Social Show Trial, they are just hotting up 
now, the careers of our veins, and will split in 
two, each part issuing concept albums on the 
glamorous affairs of the other, of our veins, 
managed by Jeff and Jeff and Rice, like a wood 
nymph, speaking of neck heat, in spite of history’s 
largest ever rationalization 
Out of spite for our veins, who never did anything 
but love, when they were not reading 
Contemporary Strategy Analysis, for the prose. 
Now.   
We come to you, from history’s largest ever 
rationalization, our veins and shadows, our 
careers and veins and shadows, our memories of 
the unnecessary harm we have caused, of the 
struggle to make it right.  
Here is a story about a man called Rice and Rice
and Jeff, reading Manmade Disasters 2019, 
ignoring the tasteless homilies on collective 
responsibility, like wood nymphs. Try not to think 
or feel anything that will give ammunition to our 
enemies from the right, 

               the crushed shimmer of that email 

seen from the cypress trees to grow clinical, 
to flick its crumb away, its vivid throat. 

piss-stained, stabbing, arrhythmic world, 

stay in this life  

read it for the prose