“… the holy apostolic see in the time of Pope Adrian of blessed memory conceded the land to the illustrious king of the English…”
1 ALBION (contd)
a thousand years’ English rapine of Ireland
counts for nothing in intellectual circles today
“ah but you are white…”
the English rapine of Celtic neighbours
needs excuses to continue, the strangest
being that one word
“whiteness”
Catalans come into their kingdom-as-republic
breaking from monarchist Spain
to perfidious talk of “43%”
(not the proof
of British whiskey)
the apron’s imperium sinks or swims
as a fruit-voice on Radio 4 insists
“Europe doesn’t understand Anglo-Saxons”
2 CONSERVATISM (contd)
the news the numbers
voxes of the quantifying debate
are plummified and correctly measured – by rulers –
but when blackout lifts and vox populi is mic’d
the cry of the pauperised is really too much to bear
then you feel in your hand the diamanté heart
of Tory England, cut and pristine, proffering zero,
but neurotic, so neurotic, prisms of rainbow guilt
filtering into the public tones and vocabulary
e.g.
“we have sold our humanity but are yet human beings.
help us! we have everything and/or nothing.
help us! we’re cocooned in bourgeois materialism
following the neoliberal way, not the way of Christendom
as once we sought.
thus glutted and battened – sealed off –
the whine of a poor man or woman on tv or radio
makes us inwardly laugh
(this ventriloquised confession is not easy)
which is why we work even harder at self-presentation.
our consciences are … what is the opposite of clear?
our consciences are … unclear.
help us
escape the Momentum noose!”
*
(thus
the rich whine too)
3 ISRAEL (contd)
the state land // the no-gos // the seam // the buffer // the annex //
the WALL // the FENCE // the BARRIER // the WALL // the FENCE //
the BARRIER // the slabs // the barbs // the mounds // the trenches //
the patrols // the towers // the minefields // the lenses// the checkpoints //
the settlements // the sections // the satellites// the segments // the strips //
the routes // the bypasses // the tunnels // the bridges // the highways //
white plates // green plates //yellow plates // red plates //black plates //
the levels // the nodes // the clusters // the zones // the enclaves //
the WALL // the FENCE // the BARRIER // the WALL // the FENCE //
the BARRIER // the voltage // the radars // the imaging // the sensors //
the ops // the transfers // the writ // the bulldozers // the flags //
the tanks //the uzis // the UAVs // the quads // the skunk-spray//
a clover map //of CENTRES // of BASES // of PRISONS //
the outposts // the crossings // the roadblocks // the grids // the airspace
4 FASCISM (contd)
the human body is purple yellow silver
before the mind is
and after
nation-states plant human bodies
humans form
a forest
they walk with torches in xtian hands
calling from human tonsils
rawly
continents are under spells
giant footprints stamping plates
lumbering backward
fascism rebooted
the human body
is not a safe space
*
the human forms avow
infanthood’s morals
but outgrow
them as fashions
snow and fire
are at war
the shamans of bodhranbodhranland
drum
to 2017’s
twitted ideologies
news is white
supreme
Niall McDevitt is the author of three collections of poetry, b/w (Waterloo Press, 2010), Porterloo (International Times, 2013) and Firing Slits, Jerusalem Colportage (New River Press, 2016). He is also known for his poetopographical walks such as The William Blake Walk, An Arthur Rimbaud Drift, A Chaucer London Pilgrimage, The Kensington Modernists, and many others. As art-activist he has campaigned to save the Rimbaud-Verlaine house in Mornington Crescent, and against development of sites near Blake’s burial ground in Bunhill Fields. In 2012 he read at Yoko Ono’s Meltdown at the Future Exiles: Poetry, Activism and the Future event. In 2016, he performed his poetry in Iraq at the Babylon Festival. His latest book BABYLON (a neoliberal theodicy) is forthcoming from New River Press. He blogs at https://poetopography.wordpress.com/
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