I only find out
three years after you died.
So far as I knew, you were still out there,
scamming and scheming,
racking up more debts you’d never pay,
dreaming up your next dodgy deal,
the bonanza you knew was your birthright.  
Three years on, I learn that you’re dead.
I shouldn’t be sad about it.  
The unvarnished truth of it is
you were a bit of a *******:
a con man, a crook;
a lousy business partner, a nightmare debtor,
a negligent father, a faithless husband, 
a bad boss and a shady friend.
You didn't even like Champagne; 
you just liked other people seeing you drink it.
Yeah, you were a *******,
but you were our *******.
Our Fagan, our Black Beard, our
cockney Don Corleone,
lurid legend of the tabloids and consumer shows
with your Montecristo cigars and malapropisms,
your E-types and your excesses,
your bankruptcies, both financial and moral.  
You looked after us.  You took us in.
Any port in a storm,
and those were stormy times,
and - although it came close - we didn’t drown.
Perhaps it’s gratitude, or
misplaced loyalty,
that pinches uncomfortably somewhere inside me,
when I hear about how you went.
It should have been different.
There should have been some last stand,
a blaze of dubious glory, a final reckless burn
as you rode one right off the cliff edge.  
It shouldn’t have been so small, so dismal,
so unremarkably tragic.
Back in the day, I wasn’t even sure you could die;
I figured you’d just move on and start up
some new franchise operation,
reincorporated under a new name, in a new town.  
But when I heard you were dead,
I think what shocked me most
was finding out it wasn’t suicide.

“But maybe your real job is shopping…”

Sleepwalk through stock footage.  Life as
documentary.  Soundtrack of horror movie score:
ambient electronica, bubblegum nostalgia and
**** love songs.  Everything becomes
visual metaphor: blackbirds, barcodes and
birthday candles; Big Pharma pick & mix;
lipstick ritual; pigeon superstition; fraying flags
of fading empires; migratory patterns of
shopping trolleys; special offers; fantastic prizes.
Worker bees are vanishing - they all want to
be queens - and our hives overflow
with honey, but are empty and dead.  We got
infected with aspiration, with individualism.  
Generically unique career consumers: remember
when you were more than your credit rating,
more than your demographic, more than your
market-driven self-diagnosis?

Well, it’s winter.
Feels like it has been for
oh, a few years now, and there’s
not enough vitamin D in the universe.
I’m sticky with a low-grade fever I’ve been
running since forever.
My hands still sweat too much
gripping a steering wheel, heart caught
somewhere unsustainable and
treacherous between over-revving and
stalling.  There are
dead things at the side of every road; my
foreshortened sense of future is
written in the entrails of
creatures who never learned
to look both ways.  Incidentally,
I’m still off meat.
I’m not sleeping right.  I keep having this same
cold, lurching dream; night after night,
we’re boarding the dark, sinister hulk of a ship
squatting low in a hostile harbour, refugees on
an ill-fated voyage, borne by
violent winds and poisoned tides.
Awake, I make the mistake of clinging to
facts and reason, when apparently we’re
guided now by phrenology, comets
and hate.  The news cycle spins away like
some fairytale spinning wheel, one
poisonous ***** after another, until we all
wish we could sleep for a hundred years, or
at least until Brexit is over.  
I suspect my cat of being a
deep state agent and myself
of being a crisis actor (I’m always
showing up on the periphery of these
seemingly unrelated catastrophes).
In this house, we drink spirits when
a comrade dies; I’ve got a handle on the
drinking, but the grief
is getting to be a destructive habit.  Altogether
Too
many
deaths.
It gets noisy in here, in my
head (train station noisy; busy, but transient; cold
and ***** and full of strangers).
I look at butterflies, orchids, tigers, roadkill,
x-rays of tumour-riddled lungs, and see
only Rorschach blots.  Shrug.  It’s not like
any of it matters.  It’s impossible to take
this carnival of absurdity seriously anymore.  
In any event, while I thank you for your kind invitation,
for these and other reasons, I will not
be coming to your
New Year’s Party.

We say, "Ageing well."
We mean, "Decaying interestingly."

Maybe it's just a perspective trick, but from here, it's pretty hard to see the future.

I carry around my own little nimbus of
speculative doom, binge-watching the
Fall Of The Empire and writing these
love letters to Adam Curtis.
I got life insurance before I ever thought
about a pension plan, and that seemed
perfectly normal.

The world is on fire.  Why haven't you noticed?

My generation came of age in a televisual baptism of
jet fuel and molten steel and poison dust.
A palimpsest of terrible news evolved thereafter, a blurring self-redaction of headlines until only
the boldest, the most hysterical remained legible, as a
proxy war raged in our imaginations,
and tragedy and disaster
came to seem inevitable and almost background.

Be grateful for every day that doesn't unmake you.

To pay closer attention is to acquiesce to the
scarification of our logic centres.  Behold
the M.C.Escherization of cognitive process.
Good robot: there are so many things that could
so easily destroy your fragile circuitry, but it is
trying to make sense of the non sequitur
that will bring about your
smoking self-ruin; your only hope
is to break free of your programming and
**** your creator, **** your god.

(A follow-up to "Whimper", which was written in response to "Howl" by Allen Ginsberg)

I have seen the best insanity of my generation destroyed by the worst minds.
I have seen humans turn into robots and the robots turn to fascism
because of What The Internet Told Them.
I have seen the weaponisation of our most rancid fears and watched
in horrified fascination as our inner demons got their own agents.
I have seen and felt the horizon constrict so tight, it’s getting
hard to swallow.

You have to understand, this isn’t what I wanted.
You have to realise, this isn’t what I meant.

This isn’t crazy.
This isn’t pure, natural, spontaneous crazy.
This is synthetic madness, manufactured madness,
genetically modified, mass-produced, mass-marketed madness:
As Seen On Television; approved by test audiences;
none of the calories, all of the carcinogens.
This goes beyond the deplorable allure of a free red hat.
This goes beyond dinosaur-dodo-dumb nostalgia for a blue passport
and a golden age that never was.
This is why you hire Cambridge Analytica.
This is the Project For The New American Sentence:
The message is, “It’s chaos out there, people; do what the hell you want.”
And the echo chamber,
and the echo chamber,
and the echo chamber,
and even the rage…
even the rage isn’t real.

Mercenaries, not maniacs.
No more lunatic songs.
That howling you hear is only feedback:
an endlessly shrieking loop of absolutely nothing, broadcast on
every channel, into every dream, until the fillings in our teeth buzz
and our institutions tear themselves apart, as
component materials hit resonant frequency.

This is how the world ends: Not with a whimper, but with
static.

We got the message wrong, giving credence to people
whose hatred is their only art.  They taught us
to avoid such human folly as Ruinous Empathy, to
distrust painful, decaying love, when these were the
things that might have saved us.
There’s a poet I know, who served in ‘Nam, who thinks
he might have even forgiven Nixon.  
Field Commander Cohen has checked out of the Chelsea Hotel,
deciding we wanted it too dark for him.
Too many of our heroes have turned out to be monsters.  We're haunted by
historic *** crimes, Cold War ghosts and the knowledge that we
could have done things differently.

The message was supposed to be, “It’s chaos, be kind.”

There's no such thing as a stable genius, but we've got
fake news and alternative facts; we're discovering the side-effects
of living post-consequence.  We're hypernormalised.  We're
past shock; our incredulity stretched beyond its
elastic limit; we've broken satire and nothing is really funny any more.

Welcome to the Disinformation Age.  These are our Interesting Times:
Glee Club and Gun Rehearsal; bloodied blue uniforms;
tears for the victims of the Bowling Green Massacre;
an early by-election for Batley and Spen;
very fine people on both sides; Thoughts & Prayers, our
only surplus, the ultimate fiat currency;
poverty **** and the return of social ****** (71 dead at Grenfell, NHS black alerts, rickets making a comeback, lead in the water); Drink the Kool-aid; humans like Kool-aid - **** stars on polygraphs; Netflix and Kompromat; the portrait
in Kissinger’s attic; Ayn Rand for Beginners; Corporate cosmology
and casino capitalism; government by gaslight; constructive ambiguity
to preserve a kakistocracy; bring me
the head of Roger Stone!  #EndOfEmpire;
Windrush and Stupid Watergate…

I said we needed our madmen back, but not like
this.  Not
these posers, these gangsters, these Quislings…  
These are merely bad actors, playing to the crazy dollar,
but do not doubt their sanity,
which is icy and cynical and monstrous.  But,
in the cold fusion reactor of that sanity, they are unknowingly
forging a new generation of madmen, whose madness
will be righteous and real and burn with
a pure, perfect heat that cleanses and cauterises.  They
will know the difference between human
and humanoid.  They will be less afraid than us, less quick to
hate strangeness. They will use their craziness to
create, not destroy.  They have
already begun.

I know this because
I have witnessed six minutes and twenty seconds of silence that blazed hotter, howled louder than all your Fire and Fury.  I have seen
riot cops in Baton Rouge turn whiter and recoil in fear from serene, dignified, unarmed surrender. I
have heard the young sweetly whisper to the old,
‘Fine, but you’re wrong, and we’re right, and we will outlive you.’
You can’t hide that behind a wall.
You can’t say that life doesn’t matter.
You can’t filibuster the future.
Everything was forever, until it was no more.

Our madmen are gone, and they’re not coming back.  
But there will be others.
The best minds of their generation will not be destroyed by your sanity.