personal facts: these poems came from the scourge of the same beast, what a woman (the first is like a wire model of a sculpture i wanted to create though the inspiration dwindles, the second is almost retribution and sort of the contrary of the first. i dislike the second though enjoy knowing the other side. both remain unfinished.)

blunderer poet, what lies without rest inside your chest?
dare I enter the dreamland of the heart
for became a dark weather which has stolen its art
traveling this confine of a mind, lost have I bound, so down and down
swimming hypnoticly the erosive airs, leaving my thought and feeling bare

to ford these untamed rivers that over-flood from the illusion’s storm of love
this wallowing weather conspiring in the emptiness in fire
battling down a ravaging vortex in spiral

offset the background draped the ploys take
against loves lark my wrangler barked
the tension spored, her flouter bored the mortal war
the indigence of in ire that tires which is burning the rotten killing my fire

the battery of belief horded together under wanton grief
the danger in the conspiracies of wagers
gauged in this depths cage raged
a path staged, the mind collapsed, a maze

—————————-

rotten this runs

love i run
shrinking from that which
into I lunge your cradle to plunge
habituating this I loom
the putrid of your womb
though this semblance
of what my manhood blooms
is greater in its direful gloom
is my hollowed rotten ruins
laden the craven combatant has so cursed
to bring to us two the worst that can be made do
weak and weak I so far stink/sink so deeply the distrust sinks/wreaks
leading me to drinking poison for a death is better
than ought the dishonor fettered
all lips of hers rosily swollen by his glory worming holey
woe a prison for me though the malefactors live freely 
chartered these waters already delusional falters  
to impart this task’n art for him i will depart
too many wiles does he cart wild
willingly laughing as this jackal attacking
her devotion to me a spell broken and left dead to the sea

“The proletariat’s assault on the citadels of capital only has a chance of success on condition that the proletarian revolutionary movement finishes with democracy once and for all. Democracy is the last refuge of all disavowals and betrayals, because it is the first hope of those who believe in purifying and re-invigorating the current movement which is rotten to its core.”
-Jacques Camatte ‘The Democratic Mystification’

I.
In Wisconsin, public sector workers, students, and others more generally occupied the Capitol building to stop it from functioning. They prevented the legislative process, the transition from paper, to voting quorum, to the laws taking effect, and thus manifested a force against democracy. That this was done in the name of democracy illuminates a crisis of subjectivity within the democratic citizen. Acting as a negative force, they could not merely supersede democracy but also make their own power possible. However, something resembling a politics, a position for itself, can only come about through reappropriating violence, acting against an imposed consensus.

II.
Angry and confused bodies filled the empty spaces of the Capitol. They trampled its lawns; they plastered its walls with tape, banners and posters. They banged on whatever they could, screamed and chanted until few other sounds could be heard. Police were called in to regulate the bodies. At first the police did little than fill the space themselves in bewilderment of those who were already present. However, this was never a victory for “workers solidarity.” Physical discipline was superfluous—the bodies regulated themselves. The intensive self-policing, the non-violence trainings which took place, the reality that literally anyone could perform the role of police or marshal, good worker, and good citizen, preempted the question of violence. The collective response, only illustrates the obvious necessity of an intensification of conflict and its elaboration through violence.

III.
Any rupture or large-scale manifestation of people reacting to crisis, and thereby being the crisis, will manifest at first as a movement for the return to normality—within a normality that is no longer possible. We will be trapped within the apparatuses and discourses that contain us, but also necessarily exceed these limits through an activity in conflict with these conditions. In Wisconsin, we witnessed a struggle for unions, a struggle for work, and a struggle for democracy, and yet the only path possible besides defeat would be against all the struggle explicitly affirmed–—all that reproduces the relation of capital, all that reproduces the conditions of work and the subjectivity of the worker.

IV.
Within spectacular democracy, one can possess any subjectivity, any opinion. One is encouraged to aestheticize and to creatively decorate the void that one inhabits. One can, so long as one contests nothing fundamental to being within the world as capital, so long as one functions to maintain, reproduce and progressively develop the conditions of the commodity. To be mobilized by and drift with the flows of capital is without a doubt inescapably political, but it is incapable of elaborating a politics, which is only possible through the contemporariness of an active critical gaze. Democracy diverts this gaze into the game of achieving consensus with one’s objective enemies, thereby neutralizing enmity, and preventing the extreme material consequences of the truth at the core of any politics. Not even a general strike or burning Capitol could be enough to satiate such truth driven to its most extreme consequences.

V.
Illdefined and yet far too defined, confused and angry, this force in Wisconsin prompted politicians of the left to act on their behalf or else risk total representative obsolescence. They retreated, stalling the process that would bring the legislation into effect through quorum, both in order to hide from this mob and appeal to it concurrently. It was this stalling that protracted the situation that had appeared to thousands as being on the verge of a general strike, allowing the frustrated desires of those who witnessed the non-existence of the strike to be absorbed into recall campaigns, back into the democratic process, back into the diffusion of routine and work–—that waited to vote and waited to act. Those previously so filled with the necessity to act were absorbed back into an identification with a unitary and empty consensus among irreconcilable and hostile forces, more than their own power.

VI.
Though we still work, the workers movement has been dead for quite a long time. It no longer fixes our gaze toward work any more than survival within capitalism does. Reacting to an intensification of exploitation through austerity measures, the tradition of past generations weighed like a nightmare upon those workers without a movement or history. A fleeting and collapsing dream nonetheless still attempted to be pieced together. A response was envisioned that was a mere rehearsal and parade of the form and content of the old workers movement with little acknowledgment of the changing form and content of the current conditions of capital. Forced to remember how to have power amidst the confusion of our present, the civil rights movement, which was neutralized by its very inclusion, became part of this struggle’s nightmare. Through this, the struggle became primarily concerned with the inclusion of an always-expanding list of identities and corresponding oppressions via rights within the representational process and juridical apparatuses of democracy. The constellation made up of those who have been more than frustrated by the inadequacy of these events must come to recognize that a study of the past demonstrates that we are not infinitely confined to an eternal present, against a particular mode of being or a particular us. We are directed by the past toward a negative and inessential nature, and the glaring impossibility of such an inclusion – toward our irreducibility. And we must remember, most of all, that our act of remembering is made possible through the process of annihilating this world.

I was completely exhausted by the deadness of my shift this morning. The breakfast crowd at Janice’s Diner has been thinning out over the years as Janice and most of her clientele seem to be approaching the end of their lives. Relief was all I felt as Darcy relieved me of my post and my obligation to scrub the formidable tower of dishes piled up in the moldy dishwasher. I thanked Darcy for coming when she did and apologized for handing off at least an hour of rinsing. She was quite alright with the whole situation. I suppose that minimum wage can’t get any worse.

As I stepped out the diner’s back door I lit a cigarette as is customary amongst Janice’s employees. A few steps past the threshold I heard Chauncey holler after me.

“I need a favor, kid!”

“My name’s Edgar, man. This must be the third time I’ve had to remind you this week.”

“Whatever kid, I need you to get me some fresh vegetables.”

“That’s not in my job description,” I retorted, “get them yourself.”

“Janice says there’s a raise in it for you.”

“What do you need?”

“Cucumbers. Lots of ‘em.”

“Why?”

“Why the fuck do you care?”

“Fair enough.”

So I strapped on my neon roller blades and made my way to the local grocery store. Now, the place where I get my foodstuffs is little more than a glorified convenience store, so there’s no guarantee of them having anything in stock other than beer and off-brand frozen pizzas. Not that those particular foodstuffs had proven to be anything other than staples in my diet, but now I was on a quest for a large quantity of something that doesn’t substantially increase the risk of kidney failure.

My local grocer was, as you might guess, a bust.

Most react to the snow as if a profound indescribable emptiness has occurred - an injustice, because, everything they’ve known, their world has been reduced to “friends” and co-worker conversations, tasks, costumers, and the use and value associated with the alien activity of work. Like a chicken that runs with its head cut off, work was displaced into the collective delirium that cleared the streets - that brought them back to the world of work. Within this exception, which is not exceptional, we reveal ourselves to be chickens that have never known our heads to not be cut off, for us to never stop running, to never not be working.

Q: “Are there any events that surprised your or changed your analysis? Were there opportunities the resistors did not actualize, are there other opportunities to further develop the revolt which have subsequently emerged?”

A: Amidst a endless series of non-events, those that deviate even slightly from an easily assumable trajectory are shocking. And they are contained, captured, cordoned off, etc, creating a wall inside from which only those within this space can be shocked.

Based more on experience than analysis, I have thought that class struggle (not the struggle of class against class, but the struggle against class itself) was something that takes place everywhere, which is necessarily without center. Within the current conditions of capital, it is most interesting when it takes place outside the factory, unions, the left, etc - not only because these places have over the course of the last hundred years been fully accounted for, but because the means with which capital reproduces itself have developed greatly since these initial forms to combat it were constituted. The factory is within and outside the factory.

A movement initially took shape forcefully exceeding these mechanisms of containment, necessarily not without contradiction. These events provide a critique of the totalness of such containment, which is not exclusive among the apparatuses discussed previously but encompasses nearly the entirety of life within capitalism. Because if class struggle can appear unruly again where it is most expected it can appear even more so where it is least expected, and it does.

Nearly nothing was actualized in terms of a more fundamental resistance to our conditions. The opportunities for revolt to develop change and correspond to the context and development of whatever might act as a barrier. As some have said, revolt is a spring of perversity which does not run dry. It offers no solutions. It simply is.

Perhaps our greatest tactical challenge is to halt the retreat back into isolation, back into already established dead ends, of all those who have been frustrated by how events have transpired (the lack of the event within the event) and for us to collectively take seriously the call that there is “no return to normal,” if only because living with ourselves as we do so is less and less possible.

Q: “How has the situation in Wisconsin changed, if at all, in the weeks since you initially conducted the interview?”

A: It’s certainly devious in how imperceptible that change is and was, both for when there was a “change” and after. You had to seek it out or you have to have been effected, forced to pay attention. Most areas of life were on the surface in no way effected by “the events in Madison.” They were too easy to ignore. And this imperceptibility demonstrates the immense power of the apparatus that keeps everything the same and also the weakness of a struggle that either must change everything or will return to normal.

I’m tempted to compare the situation of seeming powerlessness, the general strike that was threatened and existed in many minds as a slumbering yet awakening beast of a bygone age, and which remains present in many minds specifically as a lack, to a phantom limb. We feel, and are witness to the presence of our absence of power.

What I can share are frustrations, and a kind of shock that corresponds with any subservient march back to work, and that forgets the most important fact of these events, which is that it was not the unions or politicians which made us something to be feared. It was the constitution as a force, however briefly and however foolish, that shocked many, especially those who participated, with fear. Where else did the constant calls for non-violence come from? A million tiny failures repulse us with the horror of our powerlessness, specifically after we glimpsed or dared think otherwise. Not only time will tell how well we will retain this dream, because within a world that has every interest in our forgetting, it would sooner have never happened. Either we will feel the shame of taking part in our own forgetting or we will have to fight and through conflict remember more and more what is at stake in the present.

So yes, a lot has changed, but if one weren’t part of it then it’s as if nothing has and never did. It’s a news story. It’s a protest to be ignored. Life goes on. Now instead of a general strike, or strikes, or sick outs, or walk outs, what remains overwhelmingly are recall campaigns, and talk of electoral politics, which channel and subdue these events into processes that manage them, contain them, count them, and include them in the calculus of the democratic party. One must wait for their turn to put a piece of paper in a box and then go back to work, go back home, go to the mall - all places which we’ve been produced to fit perfectly within. Our presence within them contests nothing, and where contestation is ignored politics hides - the beast slumbers.

We reached a block which paralyzed us with its image. From our position, tilted slightly upward, we could see for several blocks in succession, blocks and bodies united in their shoveling, rotating back and forth, alternating together as a machine much more perfect than the plow.

if you are reading this i sawed myself in half,
disappeared into a top hat, or the wax mask
cast from my face has been pasted over
a turing machine, but does not quite
capture the equanimity with which i met my death.
as the body could be spoken of as a brute
mechanism, wet mess brilliance. behind the logic
of the display case, did you not expect to see me
clothed, covered in glitter, my hands folded
in my lap? when i am found, why not in
a meek house, pink, low to the ground,
boarded up and reeking of meth?
is it wednesday that i am undisclosed, friday,
maybe when the rent comes due?
or i lodged an ice pick in my aorta, perhaps,
stuck my head in the oven or jumped off
washington avenue bridge, downed a jug
of clorox or anti-freeze, strapped myself to
an electric chair and dimmed the neighborhood.
enough to let the kids enjoy, for once,
the fireflies. maybe i have encoded my last
words in a cypher.  i will have soiled myself
in exiting the flesh, won’t you clean me, be so
kind? prop me up, a sack of rice. i have laid
a white wet cloth there, on the register.
won’t you drag the corpse out as you would
trash. have you tried the stairs much? have you
tried the elevator? perhaps you should try
the stairs. if you can read this in english, translate
it into spanish, so my friends of pamplona
may laugh at me, whet their manly courage.
if you read this in blue ink, everything
is true. if you read this in red ink everything
is false. if you read this in blue ink, perhaps
i am still alive, hiding in thessaly, wearing
thick black glasses and a moustache,
playing pinball at the back of the bar.
in thessaly! where everyone is young and
beautiful and my only complaint is there is no
red ink. or  i’ve unscrewed my hands from
my wrists before doing myself in, and they
have not finished transcribing what i meant
truly to say. please do not skip to the end yet,
you will unsettle their work, send
the letters flickering into the rain.

Crisis entails the vague contradictory realization, through activity, of existing in a world in which the normal is no longer possible. That force which strives for the normal, if successful in its materialization as a force, pushes the possibility of the normal further into oblivion.