Sean Bonney

Antimatter

DEUTSCH                          МАКЕДОНСКИ

Part 1. and 2. available in the Festival Anthology :: SlovoKult :: literARTour

When you were scratching your name into the mirror another few hundred people died. I guess they exist outside the borderline of what you call ‘kindness’. Kindness which in your mouth has the consistency of raw sewage. When you laugh it sounds like boiling lice.

2.

Antonin Artaud was buried alive and while he was rotting he knew what he was doing. Large worms ate into his body. Then came the small worms. Then that species of aroma that has no scent, no history or country or body. Those souls that fascists call refugees or deportees if they give them a name at all.

But wait, we are no longer allowed to use that word fascist.
It is impolite, we are told, to call them that.
And so the silence that used to get called a city gets filled with noises. Larval screeches that sound like they are alive.

number 9 said to number 4
we”re not living now and we weren’t before

3.

Sophie Scholl never died
Not in 1944 not 2014
not in the years too old or new to be named

She paces the major cities
Hands out dry white roses

Take one. They are good luck.
Take one. She is lonely.

Just don’t ask about the hole in the back of her head.

Only idiots would do that.
Idiots and laughing fascists.

When she died she was in great pain.

5.

It is ice cold in this room
Where the fascists are breathing

No-one has told them
They have been dead
Since the birth of all planets

That Saturn ate his children

for tranquil and safe are the arms of the cruel
and tranquil and safe is the mind of the fool
those minds that hate and those minds that sleep
and those minds that kill and those that weep

6.

be kind

but do not be kind to me

be clean
but do not be clean near me

call it cleanliness call it kindness

do not call it kindness to me

your nobility your spirit
keep it far from me

7.
!In this place there are no cities or noises

Once a year there is a parade.
It is compulsory for the dead to attend.

In this place we call living
Long past the end of our life

for we’ve been dead before and we’ll be dead again

we were dead just now but we ain’t no more

And then there are those who cannot move without shitting bone, standing in the freezing back rooms, breathing inside other people’s deaths.

You can see them in old photographs, as if birds had scratched them, and those scratches are what fascists call history and hammered nails and human hunger and other words they use to express pleasure. The night of the earthquake. The 300 houses destroyed. The mouths scratched to pieces.

and so says the master and so says the slave
who is cooking your dinner and digging your grave

Collage:: Sean Bonney