i
today they broke open the prison walls of the future
which is never so hidden so as not to be for us who
are its hostages while we lived it awaited us the dead
attest to this their faces winged with light black and
luminous what hell pursues us they’d get us in awhile
but fuck it we ran anyhow from the world from which
all good things were taken but the ancient whispers
of pickpockets and bomb-makers and poets seethe
sometimes of a slim chance in the prehistory of death
to secure someone’s encounter with loneliness after
the prisoners had crawled out of the endless labyrinth
the unending escape of the forgetfulness of struggle
the night’s tender descent to touch you with tear gas
the architecture of our undoing the police controlled
the city the prison guards the sky we are trying we are
to outrun them we had to run for our lives and even so
some of us might not get away such are we struggling
to emerge from the unendless maze of the end of the ––
world would it be the police or other prisoners like us ?
forgive me if i don’t make bail if i don’t get out of here
when you have forgotten that you are missing stars
were invisible in the new world the first partisan a tank
aflame a hole in the wall in the dawn of the life of the
any moment now –– do not die until you have become
a worthy adversary
ii
nothing in this world will disarm the bones of the resistance fighter
and nothing is capable of creating new illusions about the “world”
& its readiness to save anything
a year after the most pivotal explosion in the history of this world
our opinions and positions are no longer valuable
as long as they do not involve carrying weapons
or shedding blood
or sabotage
such do we stretch out our memories to reach something of vast importance
about to slip from our grasp
a rustling of wings
the undone dream of a dying fedayeen
let all shadows be
incarnate
let a thousand hands reach out next to pick up the gun
from all the fighters who have ever fallen
the same dream rose toward the sky
the same breathlessly unraveling need to
remember
this glimpse beyond the world’s end & return
with its nurtured depths to the tunnels to the caves to the camps
to plead with the dead to spare the living to share the secret of resistance
for one day each would have to renew earth’s beauty for the others
for one day others will have to become unbounded & each rising
from the corpses’ bones point their rifles to the sky above
the life-takers & the world ended
& earth is shedding tears
& hiding the dream behind our mask our pain
we will awake with others on some moonless night
will see what vanishes in the vicinity of life in whose light is death or
forced escape the source of seeds and dreams can grow unhindered
an annunciation of the inevitable
we raise our empty hands to heaven
i recognize the one i’m seeking
the prisons burned they will kill like angels
iii
to correct hope to hope again after disappointment that is our mission…
voici les temps des assassins
here is the destroyed world & its black landscapes
you are a scavenger soaring over the mass graves
you are lost in an opaque dream an infinite number
of the dead surround you those are the horrors into
which you were born how can you have forgotten ?
your wandering & silence if you could call a life what
lives among the dead suffocating silence surviving
still a little longer in the midst of the dead death is
not expiated by living as the poet wrote in another
riot why can’t you remember that memory forbids
compromise ? yes it’s either loyalty to improbable
tomorrows or betrayal to the world that awaits you
we both were born into the same horrors we are
comrades in disaster though we are stranded in
history we will enlist the dead ! we will transform
blood into weapons or a choir of martyred angels
into a combat unit of the dawn & freedom army
guerrillas & ghosts scattered among the stars in
the flames in the bomb craters in the rubble ! my
death i offer to whoever is willing to share it who
will make the revolution if ever it is to be made if
not for them
the future is crying out from the past
there is no safe haven anywhere in this ruined world
your heart overflowing with love go light up the moon
iv
“and we, the drowned, fear not the drowning”
imagine your martyrdom –– a dead man carries the remnants of your breath & says
in a voice only those who could never have got away can hear : if you found nothing
but dust would you fight them with it to the only & ever end ? a dead man breathes
through our hope –– to the heavens that are as vast as the heavens & this death &
this miracle of this death descending to wrap its arms around you & to smile with
unendless sympathy at the unrecognizable labyrinth of the life for which we should
being died –– would death look through the daydream & emerge within your eyes
as an encounter with what ? loneliness ? something akin to amnesia ? a long night
filled with secret dreams ? a police car burning in the tear gas fog ? riots erupting
everywhere & when in the world –– get up dead man & run for your life there’s still
what is to be done & survival is no longer close enough to pass for living & death
has remembered for you what you are missing –– it may still be true that struggle
is only choosing the path that has been chosen for you –– it may still be possible
to find our way back to life stealing as we go in the burning city in the martyred dawn
v
for v
no other intention than a holy hatred:
namely, an incurable love for hope
in plain words there are barricades burning in the sky
we are sharpening our tears into an unearthly clarity
here where there is nothing but dust in the final stage
of its fading in truth our actions carry us beyond death
drenched abnegation something so simple as a voice
remaining witness to the tears across our cheeks the
suspended indeterminacy of love amidst the riots our
love will burn the world do not be disappeared in the
tear gas fog we are part of the great undoing of twilight
we are awakening however helpless i stumbled across
you dreamlike pulsating in the kisses and tears hanging
in the air of terror my eyes filled with the luster of a heart
______yours
it didn’t worry me that i could be arrested i was in enemy
territory in a war if i was discovered they would only find
my love for our wandering past this world my love for you
NOTE: the author asked for financial compensation to go towards anarchist / anti-imperialist political prisoner Casey Goonan’s books & encourages others to contribute here: Free Casey! Free Them All!
