columns of flesh and bone

under the sheets
live connective tissues
voltaic ribbons of somatic rind
suffused with ducts, veins, veils and glands
from which nectars emerge
as from saturate beds of swollen moss
under the weight of a body
in the heat of the moment
as the oil seal breaks
and lachrymation
spills onto the cheek.

here, cell junctions hold tight
while dilated pores breath
deep
in a keratinised forest
of brittle beard and bush.

a handful of digits
dig in resistant skin
un-perforated by UV photon bombardment
unionised by the regional, small-waved violence
of the electromagnetic spectrum.

lenses lunge
at the thrill of extremities
tracing their own imaginary meridians
in a landscape of tufts and dimples
looking for love
looking for a cry
looking for the second tongue between your
legs.

stalactite columns of flesh and bone
the gluteus maximus, the femur, we,
held together by sweat and tendon
looking for fertility
looking for water
looking for the second stomach between your
hips.

navel, as equidistant scar
as mammalian epicentre
a tiny rim
a retracted umbilical stump
a star
into which salts collect
and crystallise.

spy the two fair lashings
that tie our faces together
the flashing globular organs
that sit below a bony crown
from whose peak a nervous breath may slide
across a tepid, glandular piste
to land
face-first
into buoyant breasts
that smell of the tide
and of home sweet home.

the power of nightmares

never underestimate the power of sitting around a dinner table with your family, at Christmas say, and having people ask you what you're doing with your life¹. the fear and feelings of inadequacy that this sort of treatment generates is the kind of shit that makes people marry the first person who'll tolerate them (actually sometimes the bar is lower) and hastily squeeze out a child: to make all of that dinner table talk just fuck off once and for all. i mean, to me, marriage and children aren't particularly interesting or great, they're just things people do out of hormonal obligation or to fill the void, but i'm also not the one passive aggressively making people feel inadequate for not having a job or working their lives out slowly. of course this dinner table degradation ritual is happening all over the place - not just domestically, but screaming at you from every evangelical billboard and pixelated pulpit - so it's hardly any wonder that people everywhere are working themselves to the bone, walking around living miserable, in-authentic lives. after all, this is capitalism and patriarchy conspiring together. this is the kyriarchy² at work.

¹ subversive answers you may want to try:

"yeah, i'm really enjoying it, thanks"

"i don't do, i just am"

"i've just signed up to fight the ongoing war against the global kyriarchy"

² i may use this term from time to time, but also, a bit like the word intersectional, i find it somewhat redundant in light of what i see as its being predated by anarchist analysis of power many decades/centuries prior. maybe it's a rebranding; an attempt to academify anarchist thought and make it more palatable, rather than going all out communist/anarcha-feminist on students with all the culty sub-cultural symbols and the flag-waving. maybe it's simply part of a formalisation, to provide some hard topology to loose concepts of privilege and power. i understand it to replace longer phrases like "systems of domination" or "oppressive hegemony of power" (although more colloquial terms such as "society", "the system" or "the man" work just as well). rather than a new revelatory innovation, the term seems kind of obvious to me as this was sort of my starting point into reading about anarchist and liberal thought in the first place, "all power corrupts" and all that. in any case, a bit of redundancy is ok with me. so is language.

sometimes the only thing i really care about
is not being viewed as a total failure.

as a kid i was told a different story,
like i was gna be something:
an astronaut,
an inventor,
a goddamn hero.
and for a time i was satisfied
with the blind hope of callow unconsciousness;
the chaste syrup of juvenile dreams.

but then it set in:
the neuromarketing,
the cultivation theory,
the learnt helplessness,
the power of nightmares.
now i'm just terrified i might not keep up.

it's collateral damage,
it's occupational hazard,
it's external diseconomy,
it's none of my business,
it's bad apples,
it's old wives tales,
it's the rising tide,
it's the drop of a coin,
    they say,
as my friend tallies up their hours
on the weekly time-sheet.

100hrs on
minimum
wage.
this is what we're fed.

it's hard not to puke,
with so many lies in the world;
so many viruses and untied shoes.
it's hard not to puke.

prayer

worship
on all fours
worship
in a pool of your own piss
praying to anyone who will listen
asking for help
asking for mercy
please don't take me now
worship
in a bucket of your own nervous vomit
worship
as they pull the lever
as you sit in the chair
as you rock back and forth
like a suffocating pendulum

we worship what we perceive to provide
things like the ocean or the sun
things like convection currents and nuclear fussion
things like seeds and ancestors
things like uteri and the hand that feeds
the things from which new hope arises

but when push comes to shove
an imaginary man in the sky will do

Mad Max (film review)

...can't say i found Mad Max: Fury Road all that feminist, as some seem to claim*. it still seemed like a case of damsels in distress to me. the "wives" were pathetic 1 dimensional creatures (did any of them actually have a personality?), consistently portrayed as unable to fend for themselves, looked like they came straight off the cat walk and serve mostly as eye candy throughout the film, except for when they're giving birth or falling in love with the repentant boy (wtf was that about?). Furiosa is the only female in the film that's really badass or gets to compare with most of the male "warriors" and even then she has to take Max's lead 'coz her own plan failed and then get saved by him with a blood transfusion towards the film's end (wouldn't it have been so much cooler if it had been her calmly saving him with her awesome first aid skills?). they could have done something with the whole horrors of macho dystopia thing with everyone drinking breast milk and trying to kill each other; that was kind of cool; as was the post-apocalyptic petrol fetishism motif. however, women borrowing the gun for a bit isn't a feminist narrative and neither is a cartoon harem of wives running away from a cartoon patriarch. there's an element of "wow, an action movie that doesn't totally shit all over women"**, which is defo more welcome than your average action piece of shit, but the main appeal, on a gendered level, seems to be simply that it includes more offensive tropes about masculinity than it does about femininity. big whoop. Mulan will have more of a lasting feminist impact***.

*the origins of this speculation appear to be enraged MRAs. fucking boo-hoo.
**so it passes the bechdel test - so what? so do around 50+% of blockbusters.
***that said, Mulan achieves respect only by emulating a masculine stereotype. ...and then there's the racist and frequently incorrect Chinese stereotypes. however, she does also single-handedly save china, completely off her own steam, which is pretty sick.

skull and bones

a thought ricochets through skull and bone
a wall of chicken and bookies in my mind
a wall of poultry and dead end fallacy in the street
this is for the 50 billion dead fucking chickens
this is for the 50 billion quid down the drain
year on year
in the church of southern fried limbs
in the temple of stolen money
i take off my shoes

i think neon still has its gravity
a sordid charm
manifesting insects
i take off my hat
here's to guessing at the future
and hoping fate will take pity
here's to the guillotine
here's to the plughole

here's to the anthropomorphised clucking animals
of the fluorescent facade
with the sexualised facial features
and the downplaying of grim reality
the rippling pectorals
and the devout, bulging, pre-pubescent eyes
i undo my belt

it's sick
all the diseased lottery dreams
terminally rigged ribbons of hope
clogging up city arteries
i untuck my shirt
thinking, soon
soon we'll all be rich

Cycle

a tongue-in-buttock ode to a two-wheeled hunk-of-junk

    pi makes for a perfect circle, it's true;
    a perimeter for maximum area.

i gawp at the proportions and ratios;
the broad shoulders of your welded frame,
the gliding sprockets, your oiled teeth,
and the parallel lines of a determined shaft,
around which gears shift,
in a dizzying transmission of tireless torque.

our hearts race
as we fly in 2-dimensions.
our angular momentum,
a stabilising gyroscopic effect,
as we make hard turns,
trying to keep up with the winding speed
of each other's reckless love.

across borders of country and continent,
we tread a ringing path of peddles
   walking on air,
   on a balloon of contained wind
on a rolling stallion of liberating chains.

and when we have to drop the gears;
   because of a case of dangerous friction,
   the burning rubber,
   the slamming brakes;
i pull out my wrench.
because everything broken can be fixed.

baby, let me be your spokesperson,
let me wax your leather saddle.
let me slip through the human slalom,
and spin the threads of our matching cylinders,
lubricated with grease and fastidious toil.
let me pump your inner tubing,
so fast the air burns hot.

with blackened hands, with grazed legs,
i kneel at your spokes
to observe an exquisite revolution.

    every nut can be turned,
    every coil unwound,
    every ball bearing cleaned,
    and all that's lost can be found.

in the margins

for more on the decay of paper or the effects of heat on keratin conformation, follow the links!

    we break
with every stroke of our fingers
    upon the cornified ply
    of our dead exterior
skin layers separate
like peeling vellum
as we rub our face and apply cosmetics
    fall
snowflakes of a shedding façade

    we fray
as we dry our hair in the searing vibration
of a coiled and electrified filament
    forced out the end of a tube
    and accelerated towards us
    by a rotating blade of plastic
we burn our disulphide bridges
in the keratinous tangle of our scalp protrusions

    observe the dissipation of free energy
    the heat and the pressure and volume

do you know the queen?

all those great american writers had hollywood on their side; televangelising the globe with enchanting lies; marking the world with all that geography. the mississippi, the grand canyon, the great lakes, golden gate, empire state, 34th street and route 66, rushmore, niagara, miami, chicago, seattle. cleveland (ohio), washington (D.C.), nashville (tennessee), they all come tumbling off the tongue. new york, new orleans, san fran, san diego, memphis, milwaukee, detroit. oklahoma, kansas, kentucky, texas and louisiana. a city of angels in sunny california and las vegas out in the dripping nevada desert. dallas, denver, boston, austin. ...and i'm not even from London. The rest of England doesn't even exist, Scotland just attaches directly onto the north side of the M25, somewhat like an unruly attic full of archaic curiosities and mythical beasts. Oh, and the Beatles live just outside of London in a pool of livers (or something).

    "where you from, kid?"
    "uk"
    "oh right! neat accent you got there"
    "right"
    "so what's it like living in London?"
    "i didn't say i lived in London"
    "ohh..."
    "i'm from Birmingham"
    "oh, like Alabama?"
    "......no, not really".

in America people have genuinely asked me whether i know the queen, as if i wake up, roll out of bed and poke my head into buckingham fucking palace to ask Liz if she wants a biscuit to dunk in her mid-morning cuppa.

Childhood Memory 1

Kids rebel from the beginning. We're born fighting and squirming and vying for survival, falling from one small trauma to the next. As elders we try to allow children space to learn from their failures, although their boundaries fluctuate and collapse so erratically that it's impossible to avoid stepping over them at every turn. We push on with these unintended violations for the benefits of the otherwise overwhelming nurturing that comes with caring parenting, and the children push on in all directions, developing their little egos and working out how to get attention, how to command their environment, how to assert themselves in this world of power and authority.

i couldn't stay and face it,

i needed to flee

and she let me run.

i broke up the stairs in despair,

light pushing through a veil of tears.

i must have been 6 or 7

and i still remember the searing bitterness of it.

Into my room i fell

with a face full of diffracted light,

objects coming into focus for moments at a time.

Adrenaline fingers rolled

over the soft spines of my paperback books

and the minute, acrylic architecture of my room.

With a cluttered oesophagus,

i heaved the hot-sour air

into my tiny little lungs.

i grasped wildly

for objects i could claim to own

and found

an elaborate Lego structure

i had arranged earlier.

Somehow it represented

the summation of my cognitive abilities

– the pinnacle

of my blocky engineering achievements. 

i crushed it in my hands,

letting out a wail as i did,

feeling it crumble beneath my grip

as i wrung out the hours of concentration i had invested

in making it whole.

It broke my heart but i had to do it.

i was angry and frustrated.

My body was alive

with the hormones of fight or flight.

i threw myself into bed;

into the spongy mattress of textiles

that would absorb so much energy

over the years to come.

i recognise this now

as some kind of nascent self-harm:

as a desperate way of leaving my mark

in a world i found so difficult to assert myself in.

i also remember the reflection;

a second wave of sadness;

having got the hot slug out of my belly.

i could feel the burn,

from where it had left,

and i lay there for an hour or so

as the hormones drained away

and my sympathetic neurons stopped firing.

i lay and contemplated the chaos

of my tiny universe,

struggling to make sense of it all
struggling to understand why
i had just done what i had

It's in these moments

that personalities are formed,

as emotions and thoughts

churn milk

into butter.

The Story of Sealand

 
Located six miles off the eastern shores of Britain, Sealand is one of four Maunsell Naval Sea Forts deployed by Britain during World War 2. It was originally called Roughs Tower, and was used to monitor and report German minelaying in the waters off England. During the war, it was home to 150-300 personnel, radar equipment, two 6-inch guns, and two 40mm anti-aircraft autocannons, but was abandoned by the Royal Navy in 1956.

The structure Sealand is built upon is technically a very large sunken ship, due to the way it was deployed. It was built in 1942 on a pontoon barge at Red Lion Wharf as a superstructure of two hollow concrete towers topped with a deck, upon which other structures could be added. The twin towers were divided into seven floors each, which provided dining and sleeping accommodations, and storage areas for generators and munitions. When it was completed, three tugboats towed it out of to the Rough Sands sandbar six miles off the coast, where it’s pontoon base was deliberately flooded to allow the structure to settle onto the sea floor.

Once Roughs Tower’s wartime duties were done, and the Royal Navy had cleaned it out, it sat unoccupied for a number of years. It's first new tenants appeared sometime in 1967, when a group of pirate radio broadcasters – operating out of nearby anchored ships – wanted a place to land their resupply helicopters. But in September of that year, a competing broadcaster, and former Major of the British Army gone fisherman/pirate, named Roy Bates, physically evicted Roughs Tower’s illegal tenants, and became a squatter himself.

Roy Bates had previously operated a low-power station called Radio Essex from another sea barge, but it had been within the 3-mile area of British legal control, and he had been caught and fined. So he and his 15-year-old son Michael gathered up the equipment, hauled it out to the Roughs Tower, and after a prolonged fight, took over control. But the tower never did become home to pirate radio, as English laws changed soon thereafter to make seaborne pirate transmissions illegal even outside of the 3-mile radius.

Nonetheless, Roy Bates maintained his control of Roughs Tower, and declared it the Principality of Sealand; a sovereign, independent state. This was after consulting with an attorney who found a loophole allowing Roy to claim the fort due to fact that it had been built illegaly in international waters, and that it was up for grabs due to “dereliction of sovereignty.” Since it was outside of England’s legally controlled area there was nothing the Royal Navy could do about this, but they did demolish another fort that stood beyond the 3-mile boundary, to prevent a similar takeover there.

In 1967, when the Ministry of Defence tried to evict Sealand, sending out navy helicopters and the Royal Maritime auxiliary vessel Golden Eye for what Prince Roy liked to call the Battle of Roughs Tower. Gunshots and molotov cocktails were fired back - as a "warning". Prince Roy was hauled to court, but a judge ruled that the platform was outside the three-mile limit of territorial waters, making the prince immune from his order.

The legitimacy of this self-declared state would be put to the test when Michael Bates fired a warning shot at a British Trinity House vessel which approached the tower. This led to Roy Bates’ arrest when he next arrived on the mainland. The case against Roy and Michael Bates was brought to court, where the judge ruled that Sealand was outside of British jurisdiction, therefore no ruling could be made against the Bates boys for their actions. The authorities decided not to appeal this ruling, as it may have led to an undesirable precedent.

Things were relatively calm for a time after that. Roy was approached by a few shady groups seeking to use his platform for their own ends, including smugglers, but he turned them all away, insisting that he would do nothing to harm the UK. Sealand proclaimed the Constitution of the Principality in 1975, and developed a flag, a national anthem, postage stamps, currency, and passports in the following years. The national seal was designed to incorporate Sealand’s national motto of “E Mare Libertas,” meaning, “From the Sea, Freedom.”

In August of 1978, about ten years after independence was declared, Roy was approached by a consortium of German and Dutch diamond merchants who wanted him to fly to Austria to entertain a business proposition. Upon their arrival, he and his wife Joan were met by five men who arranged for a meeting later that day, but the meeting time came and went without any word from the men. Concerned, Roy and his wife tried to make contact with their son Michael at Sealand, but since there was no phone or radio on the artificial island, they had to call local fishermen and the coast guard. “I saw a big helicopter hovering over Sealand,” one of them reported. Things were beginning to look very suspicious.

Their worries were confirmed when they finally heard from Michael, many days later. Jet skis and a helicopter had arrived at Sealand, claiming to have a Telex from Roy warranting the handover of Sealand. Upon landing, however, they had taken the platform by force. The invaders locked Michael in a cell for three days without food or water, then put him aboard a Dutch vessel which dropped him off in Holland with no money and no passport. Determined to reclaim the tiny artificial island, the Bates family enlisted armed assistance, including a helicopter pilot who had done some work on James Bond movies. They headed back to Sealand to storm the fortress and take back their country. When they arrived, Michael slid down the rope onto the deck armed with a shotgun, firing shots into the air, and the intruders quickly surrendered.

A man named Alexander G. Achenbach, a Sealand citizen who had in fact drafted Sealand's 1975 constitution, was behind the coup d’état, having enlisted a team of "mercenaries" to carry out the attack. Several of the men involved in the coup admitted they had "done wrong" and were released. However, Gernot Pütz, Achenbach’s lawyer who was also involved, held a Sealand passport, leading Roy to consider executing him for treason. Ultimately it was decided he was to be held as a prisoners of war unless he paid DM 75,000 (more than £23,000). In the face of Pütz’s imprisonment, the German government petitioned the British government for his release but the United Kingdom disavowed his it, citing the 1968 court decision. A German diplomat was sent from its London embassy to Sealand to negotiate for Pütz’s release and after several weeks of negotiations Roy Bates relented, subsequently claiming that the diplomat's visit constituted de facto recognition of Sealand by Germany.

Following the former's repatriation, Achenbach and Gernot Pütz established a government in exile, sometimes known as the Sealand Rebel Government or Sealandic Rebel Government, in Germany. Achenbach's appointed successor, Johannes Seiger, continues to claim via his website that he is Sealand's legitimate ruling authority.

Not much exciting has happened there since the miniature war of ’78. Roy was approached by a group of Argentinians during the Falklands War, wanting to buy Sealand and set up camp “right on Britain’s doorstep”, and in 1997 law officers in Slovenia found that forged diplomatic papers from the Principality of Sealand were used to open bank accounts through which the proceeds of illegal pyramid investment schemes in eastern Europe were channelled. Examining further evidence, police found that 4,000 forged Sealand passports had been sold, for around £1000 each, to Hong Kong citizens before the handover to China in July of the same year. This, and other similar money laundering operations, led the Bates family to revoke all Sealand passports that had been issued over the previous twenty-two years (estimated at around 150,000 in number).

After a fire broke out on the top platform in June of 2006, a Royal Air Force helicopter had to be called in to transfer one person to Ipswich hospital, however no one was seriously injured and all damage was repaired by November. Most recently, The Pirate Bay attempted to purchase Sealand in 2007 after harsher copyright measures in Sweden forced them to look for a base of operations elsewhere in order to store its server and continue allowing people to download music for free. Shortly after Sealand was offered for sale through the Spanish estate company InmoNaranja with and asking price of no less than €750 million.

On 9 October 2012, Roy Bates, self-declared Prince of Sealand, died after suffering Alzheimer's disease for several years. He has been succeeded by his son Michael.

The best version of the story - with all the fascinating details of the bureaucratic battle with the British government and its post office, the full story behind Professor Achenbach and his attempted coup, as well as a many entertaining sub-plots - is to be found in its 80 page entirety, here:

http://illinoislawreview.org/wp-content/ilr-content/articles/2012/2/Grimmelmann.pdf

milk and honey

smell the way that cookie crumbles
as clingy expectations collect under the skin
like subcutaneous veils of mucus.

 
our sweet brains, spun from the sneeze
of a miserable and careless architect,
melt in the sticky rays of an inflamed sun.

drown, modern fortune!
in a tide of milk and honey,
in a tide lactose and sucrose;
those isolated molecules,
that refined crystal,
of a manufactured cupcake revolution,
fought by robots
and plantation owners.

diabetes is a most modern of curses;
a novel take on torture, on scaphism.
forgive
the melting plastic
surgery hand
that directs a wobbling incision
that directs, like a morbid magician,
the amputated foot to fall through the air,
weightless, for a moment; a lone chunk.

      witness a knife entering a puff of pastry
      glare at a king's wealthy rictus
      rhyme the screaming rift of quaking birds
      and sense the nausea of incoming insect wings