Live Below The Line (Draft)

Money and rain belong together. 

The weather itself is an index of the state of this world. 

Bliss is cloudless, knows no weather.

There also comes a cloudless realm of perfect goods, 

on which no money falls. 

Walter Benjamin 

Pope Leo XIII said 

“as many people as possible should be encouraged

to become owners”. (…) In capitalist language,

we must make everyone a shareholder in the concern called

“Great Britain Limited”

Outside Langham Place 

sans consentement  

in Corsham stone the nuptials of 

god & god the Stone beneath volutes 

Justice 4 Fathers Spidermans 

half suspended with a daughter’s guitar

‘In the Name of The Father’ by Bono, 

the Trafalgar Groves, the Victory Footprint

Link sculpture with its panoramic viewfinder

in what kind of country is this, 

class fatalised Bowellism the sick rose 

winedrunk on a broadloom Pushkin floor 

threshed my words red

held up by a friend 

there are Steinways to follow 

seraphs on Brooke street,

it's the colour 

between thawed gurgles 

that really matters

& London is the centre of wicker fence panels 

its river territory is broken  

the last firebreaks hanging

under Blackfriars Bridge 

to starry rushes chainfated

what deposit slot rolled 

my cobblestones glom faced, 

outside Automatic Hydraulic 

anti-terror bollards  

in the event of a loss of power

non-sector chaperones 

allow the ingress of cool air, 

with warm air flowing out 

through two tall vents 

form wings that mirror each other, 

public & private bokes all set to chrome 

it’s underlight schisms humming 

on Laws balustrade.Is this? 

Asset Management Limited 

shining sleeves scraped 

from every pore & cost nothing

laid upon its roof burning day 

into your eyes rising the stone of the plaza,

in every living sign public-space gurus 

lock the doors in

Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton rooms screening  

Live Below The Line, 

& what will you do Alfie Deyes 

with the cadres of flashbacks, 

reliving of the downside

of nostalgic austerity 

for 20 minutes 

teeth cleaned on tassel loafers 

readily circling each crutch

you know you have to die for a rebirth?  

Cauldron burning London's   

collared demotic plinth of post-Blairism

now this is Bang at Sportcity 

the Plateau, the Field, the Garden agenda  

a gala of dystopian domes Logan's Run

& cement blocks empty man-creditors,

of my desire for the wrecking

in multi-use pause areas

lament frozen stars! 

on the lips a Levelling Up, a song for rent 

& village’s culture the economic pie,

everywhere & for everyone, 

not re-slicing it about root & branch 

Teesworks in Redcar, & sells it 

these new clusters

will be our Fourth Industrial Revolution Foundries

vehicles in Sunderland headwinds

in the past spread fin through Freeports,

Enterprise Zones & the Super-deduction 

weaving a thread for Investment Big Bang

wreath powered this small 

& weak dreaming fields gutted  

on the background to work 

New Classical macroeconomics 

New Classical tiny glass beads

new satin finish logscales 

peerless white limestone 

of chlorine ducts or some flaming urn 

& no drinking water, a sabre of light

filigree lightness is anodyne 

& as low as possible 

over the tidal Thames

every child to thrive

these decoy vents feed you air, 

off seed cathedrals & noon-marked 

monocoques hollowed dusks 

developments sequence producing 

in the wreck of our anti-ferrules 

White paper get scratched inside 

the wet paper brain 

Werkstatt from the swilling 

‘ideas engine’ Stanhope PLC 

a field of glass, windswept 

lottery cash enhances existing settlements, 

gladdens the eye &

lifts the heart in Milton Keynes

seeing futuristic housing prototypes 

narrowing (Mission Nine) 

explore a 

National Landlord Register  

at the Construction Expo 

Five Angel Heads Comprise

the biosphere & how to die in it? 

(Mission Ten) new County Deals 

devolved administrations, 

on the White Paper

sitting on the 

laver of eclipsed arches 

all human malevolence 

is planned orange light 

porphyry stone stand on the backs 

it’s meaningless orange light 

porphyry stone & the loggia curls quiet 

out composite social bowels 

typology bonded & elevated again, 

cleaned spurriers to mercer yoke

& no passage for foot 

in the shadow of the new Cathedral

the paying metronauts 

‘I came here to swim 

in the highest pool in Europe’ 

& they’ll be back again tomorrow 

austerities plugging in the wren 

bind a blue midnight tabulation 

spitting concrete out 

the drills,

the controlled explosions,

the corporation 

Paternoster Square wedded nodes, 

O diminutions & you eat them 

in the Giant Needery

a warning amputated, 

little britain with wards tested

gladi/haemophilia + binos 

if it's the same kind 

you twist into soft barriers

underneath evenings golden 

hour draped in black velvet 

above winged griffin ramps 

monuments a ‘place-making representation’ 

a silver trowel depositing 

the highest level of devolution 

with a simplifed, long-term funding settlement

(Mission Twelve) of our anti-ferrules

the shallow end of Bullism

in your head Nomura 

& Merrill Securities metals

King Charles III, finds it pleasing

& takes my eyes out 

hangs a heavy chain over my heart  

heritage markers now shaped 

into a grab-rail to come to terms with 

the view grass pitches in England

all six capitals bereft

from a vicious circle of agglomeration

declined bread outside Selfridges 

too low to climb for rain 

so gangplank in balls of moss 

dried into uncancellable sandpits

non-negotiable asceticists

go behind white walls, 

throw my gage my name not re-slicing it

in suntrap the restless & rising & 

in those places that where lagging;

in those places that are weakest;

in those places where they 

have been lost & it went with

a Shopping Centre of 

human bird noises 

coming out the masseuse chairs 

in chloroform soaked life packets 

singing to dead thrushes 

& Moorgate rains ethanol fluid

turns the mourning out of earth

staked out for 

scatological rites of all nations 

under corporate umbrellas 

staked out for flesh of welded indices 

staked out for small pillboxes of 

faith curls in ludic circles around

shot out mouth, my head 

cracked in multiple deprivations,

like re-slicing it staked out

like a charred linnet buff

burning for burnings sake 

NCP London clay  

bellum mouth runs around 

the deregulated Square Mile 

Roman city boundaries its ‘Corporation’ 

65,000 cubic metres of soil taken 

for more Bronze long-limbed hares 

& CLC veneers 

this is worlds impenetrable edge so 

why be here, stiffing rain with bent Junkers

at the ready, the wall-unit topcoats 

swilling wine rosea mouthed 

the ghost stations in Uranium tiles 

that huckster of the dig 

gets buried under Carillon I can see it,

nightstars cloudnines

IF THERE’S A HELL, 

I’VE LIVED TO SEE IT

jack-knifed the bend of a hockey stick

elected representatives arcane

Common Councilmen,

milk-paled Aldermen, sallow sheriffs

& Lords from Medieval guilds

a jasmine flower stuck behind your ears; 

air-kissing the profoundest carrion.

Gekko Grundgesetz or Weiß Erlaubniselite (script draft for Sculptures)

 Gekko Grundgesetz or Weiß Erlaubniselite

A play for Entrepreneurial Children

DRAFT

Dear Taxidriver, 

I’m in the shallow base of this shower. I’ve been here for 45 minutes or so, I’ve likely had an epileptic fit, convulsing for a short while and hit my head. I can feel my scalded skin slowly rip away in translucent strips. We’ve had a faulty thermostat for weeks. I can see large amounts of my white gunk near a plug hole like chicken boiling from below. 

I’m dead now, I guess. I can feel I've bitten half my tongue, must have been when I smashed my head. The last I remember was my twitching hand, I could feel the weight of the shower like a concrete slab. I never told anyone about my severe epilepsy, I saw it as a weakness. So did my Papa, he said never let on. for whom life had such a bitter flavor, tasting mine, the first murky concentrate of my necessity, as I grew up tasting again and again, and busy with the aftertaste of such a strange future, you examined my sorrowful knowing. 

When I was a boy I had a fit in the garden near the cornflowers he was growing. My first grand mal in the cornflowers, you smiled so tenderly, mother. See, we do not love as the flowers do. I was put on antiepileptic drugs after, but they had made me agitated and I would intermittently take them to please Papa. Where his own little birth was already outlived. Lovingly he descended into older blood so tenderly, mother

Mixed in like vagueness in the faces of 

nichts mehr, wenn auch von der Bühne. 

O trees of life, when wintry? Another intern & one of the bank's vice presidents will find me in 2 hours. Bloomberg newswire reported that everyone already knew in all the offices from Canary Wharf to King Edward Street. It’s front page news.  

My skin would have likely scalded off my shoulders, neck, face and arms. I wonder what happens to my eyes. I just hope I can be recognisable, for Mumie & Papa. 

I’m sorry for having you waiting around. a memory,  once, everything, just one tingle. One tingle and no more. And we, too, once. Never again. But to have existed & so we press on and try to accomplish it, try to hold it in our simple hands, in our fuller glance and in our speechless heart.  

But I guess you do this often, ‘roundabout drivers’. Sitting like that…day in day out.

They were all sympathetic to the cause, mascots even.  

In the end they no longer need us, those youthfully dead, one gently outgrows the earth 

In a fog of steam Mohnfeld in Krefeld the dermis, found beneath the epidermis hair follicles, blood vessels, lymphatic vessels, sweat glands. The deeper subcutaneous tissue (hypodermis) is made of fat connective tissue, a barrier to water, invasion by microorganisms, mechanical and chemical trauma, and damage from UV light small proline-rich proteins and larger proteins like cystatin, desmoplakin, filaggrin. 

Oh and around this center the rose

Skin just tears away under this heat, it's really quite incredible if you think about it. To the other realm, oh, what can we take along?

Large strips just sliding off like slop. Drecks. As a boy I often used to ask myself if there really was a god who saw everything. And how he managed not to forget any of it, the motion of the clouds. 

But later, among the stars, what is the use in the sky, every individual’s gestures and footsteps, dreams . . . I said to myself that while it was impossible to imagine such a memory existing, it was even sadder and more desolating to think that it didn’t and that everything was forgotten.

Dead children wanted to come to you ... Oh gently, gently in the flat in Claredale House, a student dormitory 25 minutes by bus from the bank. With muscles and innocence.  

You would think I would not even need to be driven but it's part of the game. a hundred times daily 

We pay the taxi fee, it's like some kind of incentivising punishment meal. bound against the grave: sometimes during a brief rest a loving expression tries to form on your face it gets lost on your body 

you, my father, who often are anxious in my hope within me 

since I am dead. where there sparkles in the moonlight: the Spring of Joy

The dawning light breaks on the back of the taxi seat, the Modafinil, a global system that never sleeps. 

One student fell asleep half naked and locked themselves out until the warden came. 

They ever came back after that. with muscles and innocence. 

It’s one of life's real doors really closing. 

They call non-returners ‘whiters’ or they’ve done a ‘whitey’. 

Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s investment bank division, "forgetfulness of evil" like "nine to five" or "Monday to Friday" 

I had become highly competitive and ambitious from early on. Sometimes, I had a tendency to be overambitious, which resulted in severe injuries. (more about epilepsy) 

The starting salary for a first-year analyst at Merrill Lynch is £45,000 (about €54,000), plus a variable bonus, which is about £20,000 this year. In concrete terms, my primary goal consisted of the pursuit of continuous improvement and the desire to strive for excellence. much of an analyst's work at an investment bank consists in writing PowerPoint presentations, which the boss may or may not show to clients. 

The analyst, who is at the bottom of the hierarchy  of the open space office, compiles company profiles, researches numbers and gathers data on competitors. 

The starting salary for a first-year analyst at Merrill Lynch is £45,000 (about €54,000), plus a variable bonus, which is about £20,000 this year. 

My death is making its way from one BlackBerry to the next,  Slowly clogging. Like wet tissue. 

The dense grass and the foliage of a stunted elder sealed off all but a faint glow of the late afternoon sunlight, I remember when I was in Christian Democratic Union's youth organization (The Junge Union Deutschlands) the aftertaste of such a strange future, one morning the whole room was flooded, another boy had had an epileptic fit. There was CDU flyers everywhere in a layer of water, the whole flat was swimming in them. I saw him recently in his Otto Beisheim School of Management hoodie, rimless glasses, jeans and sneakers. He said: ‘We're not a homogeneous mass of people. We are all individuals here. It's always about limits. About playing out the relationship between the finite and the infinite....Not only the whole city, but the whole world shares in our decision. We are greater than just the two of us. We embody many. We occupy the square of the people and the whole square is full with persons who wish what we wish . . .Because one's bank account and one's friendships can now be managed through identical machinic operations and gestures,  who often are anxious in my hope within me since you are dead, and sacrifice your serenity, oceans of serenity such as the dead have, for my bit of destiny, am I not right? 

A lecture on capital market law at 8 a.m, 11am on FinTech, 2pm with the "Quietschies". Back at the desk at 8pm. Work never sleeps. At the counter in the Korova Bar, not far from a square called Burgplatz in Vallendar, we sat making up our rassoodocks what to do with our lives. Organising dinners with people from Credit Suisse, wearing suits & ties during internships now that's what "Quietschies" are really about. A brotherhood, a spirituality even. 

I really mean it when I say that the Quietschies was my life. We held networking dinners & events in a vaulted cellar where bankers and management consultants just talk shop.

Alcohol was served. The finest Mezcal. Supposedly that refines the taste.

It’s a blend of espadín and wild bicuixe.

Aged six months in a pile of goat shit.

Michoacan tradition. I don’t know anything about this, I’m only a young boy. 

a brief rest a loving expression  

Mumie, Mumie.

Black are the bushes.

But the heaps of dung

Stand in the pastures a yet richer black.

Each passing hour is younger than the last.

BRITISH ART SHOW REDUX VI

Though in many natural objects, whiteness refiningly enhances beauty, as if imparting some special virtue of its own, as in marbles, japonicas, and pearls; and though various nations have in some way recognised a certain royal preeminence in this hue; even the barbaric, grand old kings of Pegu placing the title “Lord of the White Elephants” above all their other magniloquent ascriptions of dominion; and the modern kings of Siam unfurling the same snow-white quadruped in the royal standard; and the Hanoverian flag bearing the one figure of a snow-white charger; and the great Austrian Empire, Caesarian, heir to overlording Rome, having for the imperial color the same imperial hue; and though this pre-eminence in it applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe; and though, besides, all this, whiteness has been even made significant of gladness, for among the Romans a white stone marked a joyful day; and though in other mortal sympathies and symbolizings, this same hue is made the emblem of many touching, noble things- the innocence of brides, the benignity of age; though among the Red Men of America the giving of the white belt of wampum was the deepest pledge of honor; though in many climes, whiteness typifies the majesty of Justice in the ermine of the Judge, and contributes to the daily state of kings and queens drawn by milk-white steeds; though even in the higher mysteries of the most august religions it has been made the symbol of the divine spotlessness and power; by the Persian fire worshippers, the white forked flame being held the holiest on the altar; and in the Greek mythologies, Great Jove himself being made incarnate in a snow-white bull; and though to the noble Iroquois, the midwinter sacrifice of the sacred White Dog was by far the holiest festival of their theology, that spotless, faithful creature being held the purest envoy they could send to the Great Spirit with the annual tidings of their own fidelity; and though directly from the Latin word for white, all Christian priests derive the name of one part of their sacred vesture, the alb or tunic, worn beneath the cassock; and though among the holy pomps of the Romish faith, white is specially employed in the celebration of the Passion of our Lord; though in the Vision of St. John, white robes are given to the redeemed, and the four-and-twenty elders stand clothed in white before the great-white throne, and the Holy One that sitteth there white like wool; yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable, and sublime, there yet lurks an elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue, which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood.