Daughter of Marxism

Sitting atop a hill in Orvieto the child could see nothing but 
ten wild goats, herding their young. There were woods to hide 
in but he preferred his own jokes, still new to them, still sticky
on the tongue as he found his language inside it. Sitting atop 
a hill in lent an old man remembered only the first time he 
had learnt the trick of looking up schoolteacher’s skirts. Now 
he takes to the shops, headfirst brandishing a ruler, the length 
of a stomach, such games the child finds endearing. Sitting 
atop a hill, hard to climb, outside the hospital, newly built with 
petroleum negatives, the ageless woman gasps the hyaline air,
crosses herself with the frenzied motions of a man rocking 
himself under a tundra of cloud, orange as Ophelia, feeling
hope fall. Sitting atop a hill in Marseille the woman dreamt 
of panisses and oranges, and antibodies in small black hats, 
and wounds that laugh gutturally, cooked them herself, did 
the work of a sore aureole and took the child back to the crib. 

Where may it be spring?
Here not        
but somewhere? It was an uncertain spring.

Spring,         
she said come again.

States of Bewilderment


States of emergency are states of the spoken 
body speaking bodily is not yet to have spoken 
paralysis is not a body that can be airlifted into 
speech. In the insane light of morning anxiety
flings through the window. The inside let’s itself
out. A breath, a sight, a whimper curdles in the 
edge of rain around the window’s exhalation. The 
graphable chokes out the rainbow, we eat data for 
breakfast. Data vomits a synchronised spectrum 
of dominance, turns white to red. Pain is regular, 
justifiable, flesh-wrapped, monetary. We, are all 
in this together, the roaring clap sounds as night 
falls, we, explodes in the past memory. 

States of working the pink tongue-typed hour. The 
end is close but who could be closer than this, you, 
hey stranger! holed up, the shrapnel of injury shoves
the spring panic into the serviceable branches of the
imagination. Babes would be born, babies would not 
be borne. Still nationalism, still forms, still buildings, 
still landlords, still deposits kept, still bastards stilling 
time. Time’s up. Time for breakfast, have radishes with 
your apocalypse, keep speaking of the not gardens at 
the heart of the city where the real green is. Partial 
inventory of morning says time’s up time and time’s 
up can it still be true, for how long can it still be true.

The best states are not of the mind but of the mind 
dreaming. Entry level planning, entry level planting. 
Even then, armed not with resources. Disability plants 
itself inside the memorandum money is no object. The 
collective body speaks the words of a Russian scientist 
with a feel for life after death, whilst other states choose
certain death. Loved ones never your loved ones. There is
not a we to hold but we are in neither of these places. The
streets are unoccupied, the streets will be occupied, listen
to the sounds that plant themselves, bring back the stall, a 
state of mind communal, have you not listened to it out the 
window.

Out the window an in breath punctures your chest. Everybody 
is your body now, your body is everyone’s, alright Whitman ! 
Hard to believe there are this many holds inside, buildings to 
occupy, downloading hope in the isolation station. Laughter 
shakes us into focus, inducing labour pains. The family cannot 
hold up, held up, for this we offer prayers. One rose for another 
rose, a dream of an empty street with flames at your back and 
crowds with no faces, pumpkins beached. We are all beached 
whales in the aftermath of a golden libertarian coalition. The 
starry vespers are cute, play cutely, the minister said, letting 
go of the frame, the body sings, the body slings a shot out the 
window. The colonel said he would write the poem himself.
Failed states speak with cotton in their mouths. It is not a 
brief history, it is an ongoing history of nothing that is not 
inviolable nothing that is not inalienable nothing that is not 
not addressable. All things wash up at low tide, as long as the
satrapies are in order. The present madness is singular: crisis
and power qualified to the nth power. This is not theory. This 
is not Marx and Hegel though they knew. This is not your boy
friend in the pub telling you he is a philosopher, drinking on 
someone else’ expense. That is all. Workers in Iowa withhold 
their labour in exchange for the certainty that we will commit 
ourselves to building safety. Here is a model you say, we say, 
with working lungs.

States scatter ashes the wind blows back onto its 
greener soil. There is a history of feeling of weather testing, 
weathering is the work of mourning in climates where grief 
is ordinary, everyday, we could be saved by a rubber boat,
a comet, of the imagination, the alternatives are your guess
gage, gauge, gall, foreclosed feeling, tot up the past, fabric a 
feel of possession. Flow, break the flow, it is not operational,  
it is not optional. The only relief is relief in grief, grief that is 
taken hold of, grief that leaps to frenzy. Such states produce 
octaves of rage that have not yet been discovered. The time to
discover them is time up, growing inside, inside balloons 
outwards, the future, a fracked heaven floats over red sand.

VITTORIA

Outside it all grows stronger the liquor lacking
up the pan shot into the still of your cap-cropped
dress across which we hear the unspent foliage of 
women hammering into walls into the next room 

And so you appeal to too much stock to the blaze
and furnace of our autumn hearts spent in black-
and-white throes where fury is a kind of mutual 
investment on bulking shores

And so we take leave of the trees while they still 
stand where the untoppled balloons soar over roads 
that lead into a sandpiper of a moon under which 
the children still play and a man goes on reading a
paper of news and where someone is about to cut 
our last patch of green

Jess Cotton is a writer living in London. She mostly writes about poetry.