I saw the worst minds of my generation celebrating murder online, according themselves an instant and meaningful grace
exalted in their hot wisdom, cut-and-paste intel from the algorithms of their affirmation news feeds, mirror-drip junkie machinery from ‘the right side of history’
demon-hearted hipsters, their dog-tongues to earth, tasting neck blood for just desserts – smartphones as perfect a way to see their world as any gun scope
professionals of the opinion ether, spitting out bullets of emotional blackness,
ululating with sarcastic joy about decolonisation, the happy death of statues, the overlap of September anniversaries and piercing things till they fall... a nation, buildings, people,
no better angels in their own descent into satisfaction, only Isray Hell TikTok horrors and GAZI furies sweeping them towards a selfie lens, 'not in my name' but Always In Their Name
while the Western scholars sat back in designer gear, enchanting themselves into animal life as would-be Panthers
sharpening their teeth on the doctrines of Frantz Fanon, Marcuse, Gramsci, Sartre,
marching the long way through the institutions, creating solutions journalists who had propaganda answers that no one wanted,
forgetting the feline karma of the copycat killers they had inspired with their doctrines of 'safe places' and 'by any means necessary',
the counter-revolutionaries who caught on to the jive talking, the fentanyl hatred of the proletariat for the clean-faced patronage and talkshow laughter they were supposedly gifted and harassed to love
– it did not matter when the news broke just one day before the anniversary of the Towers falling – with one good shot to the throat
– it did not matter how sharing the drama gave them such a warm, mob-wet feeling of rectitude
all who are dead deserve death...
inside the paradigm of activism, the vectors of saints and sinners
while in Utah the young buy their weapons without any license to hold them back, teenage suicide by gun blast the highest in all of America.
oh Utah your guns without control, is that what really did the nation's future in? children killing one another in school and then themselves,
a laboratory of madness and thrills and race payback marked with an Ibram ‘X’ on the streets of hip hop misogyny
locked and loaded intellectuals with their take on history, floating electronically above the homeless and the opiated staggering from their pavement tents and caravans
educated rulers looking down, searching for a dictatorship of the proletariat, asking themselves if this redneck poverty will infect their tenure, their grants, their new book about identity and sexuality,
distaste for the stink of factory-decay and those who have a regional vote AKA 'democracy'
those who live in the tents and caravans, forever drugged with rotted dreams and fantasies of theft, looking on at whoever crossed the border and how they are doing, the inequality storm, aching humanity, wronged deplorable people and flat-out monsters
losing their minds on trains with a knife ready to stab a young white woman just for the hell of it, another parade of insanity the only logical conclusion...
white, white, white, not black, black, black
all who are nothing seeking their skin martyrs in university essays dropped back into journalism’s evil 101
Woke Left, Woke Right, Woke Left, Woke Right, keep on stepping to your trenches and wait for the gas to come
it’s a fever, a virus, spread by digital means, cultivated in light and aimed at your eyes till the light bleeds into your mind and thoughts of killing the ‘other’ are a permanent feature,
every foreign crisis justifying the pathology of acting in a gang, vibrating with a chance to take someone down forever and save the world you know best about
here, now, one big shaping ecology of hate,
a zoological technological sickness worthy of a consciousness study, an artificial intelligence in saturated real time
this stabbed woman, this assassinated young man, this emoji of laughter with its red gushing and a bullet-struck body in an arc of collapse in the sun,
these children with a storybook writ in repulsion and discord annihilation
how happy can you be about all that?
you who threaten those who disagree with your online thrills, your righteous joy reflected in the swift shine of a blade, the sound of a single ‘pop’ and 3000 college youth running for their lives screaming
you with malice in your nostrils like the scent of French perfume
you who give a lecture on the truth about who must be absolutely wrong and dispensed with for the greater cause,
this ideal human goal you preach about to an algorithmic beat, till no one knows who they are or what to stand for,
your Friends and countrymen, vacant-eyed, obedient and ready for the-ends-that-justify-all-means, afraid of YOU
neo Stalinists meeting neu Fascism, copulating, propagating, breeding
yes 'prove me wrong', a new race is rising at your fingertips on the god-head of your smartphone glass,
first comes the civil war, then a walking dead civilisation, populated by the compliant and the fearful, just the way you like it, we become you, a million trans human
"…. with the absolute heart of the poem of life butchered out of their own bodies good to eat a thousand years".
Notes / The form and style of the poem POP MUSIC are based on Allen Ginsberg’s HOWL. It was inspired by my horror over the assassination of Charlie Kirk and some of the more disgusting and disturbing commentary so freely expressed on social media. The poem was written and the text posted here online at my Substack account ‘The Slider’ within about twelve hours of the event, before being recorded on video a day later. My final two lines referencing “the absolute heart” repeat the end of Section I of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl.
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