Alternative to Riots
       but All Citizens Must Play

To myself everywhere:

Cry out, “Break!” Break

all our securities, and break out!

Explore only the ranges

beyond our mastering. Take on

the inexorable demands made by

a norm of unpremeditated excellence!

Forget the elegant speeches,

the unbreakable delicacy

or cello resonance of

“art”. Forget

faceless, imperial (world-wide)

governance and its shimmery

statistical sheen. Why,

even the memory-traces of

classical Greece’s music are

long forgotten. (The Empire then was Rome’s.)

Our own skills and

achievements are imprisoned by

managed relationships

no-one can manage, quite.

Money we used to see,

in metal baubles, jig along the wires.*

Money is no longer

visible. Now

it vapourizes and disperses somehow

and settles over all of us.

We turn into a monstrous

sameness, a jumble

within one skin,

a skin pulled taut

until it hurts

the whole ungeographical

world of us.

Break out! Break from all safe

comprehensive arrangements

never completely comprehended by

controllers or controlled.

Once there were landscapes, features,

rugged outcroppings, signatures

bespeaking persons. Now they all melt into

categories, till conglomeration

begins to make categories

a fiction, although still

a soothing one.

Security shackles us in shame and helplessness; the

insecure are bony; they

shuffle past, lean

anywhere, drained clean of

expecting, or of anything

beyond the courage to go on

dully surviving.

Beware of any notion of

safety from having clustered under

some forced, or chosen,

minority. All of them are

self-centred, all a

security that blinds and deafens

exposing flank, and heart

to poisons from within as well.

Where can anyone find

sanctuary, now that

lethal puffs drift

out of a fair sky,

drift down?

Gunshot crackles in the

streets after our sheltering

walls have crumpled.

And still the illustrious ones, the

conference diplomats, the key

negotiators — a unique

minority — are

emperors on parade,

unaware of being not even

clad let alone cloaked.

Some count on the majority

out there, bland in its

openness, our security in

the social swim. But like so many sure

foundations, latterly, this one

seems unsettlingly wobbly.

The animus keeps fading into

passivity. Many that were

supports, happily tolerating

anything — almost — now

lean, to imbalance, straggling off.

Stop them! Disrupt these

vanilla visions, spongy with

yearnings, for prophesied

pre-dawn light, this very day.

Nightfall is near.

Break in! Break up

all our so solid structures for the

glory of

nothing to hold onto

but untried air currents,

the crack and ricochet

of impact. Risk

survival! into

some indestructible

transmuted loss. There will begin,

perhaps, a slow

secret, gradual, germinating

in the darkness.

 * Back when the new technology
was electricity,
the first department stores were
festooned with maypole-radiating wires.
The dancers’ ends came down to
clerks parcelling purchases.
The money offered and the invoices
were stuffed in metal baubles and sent off
jigging up the wires
to the store’s one
change-maker, stamper of receipts,
set apart up on a
mezzanine level, caged
but always in plain view.