A Year Unsettled (In Memoriam David Emmanuel)

A Year Unsettled (In Memoriam David Emmanuel)

I

Like Rimbaud; such illustriousness followed

By a silence, but ended now in fatality; in – at least,

If not at – the hands of officers; custodians

Without due care and attention, if – that is –

Not in on it; an unlikely opposite. Handcuffed after

The fact, the sad fact of Smiley Culture’s death.

Teacher, poet, translator; Rimbaudian importer,

Miner, of diamonds and gold, from Ghana and Liberia.

As Merlin, a nephew, said in Tottenham, of an ‘internal

Covers-up commission’, a presiding-over a robbed life,

A stoned grave, an entertainer, entertainer, lost. We had not

’Nuff personality of the original ragamuffin MC. Speaking

Quickly, translating Cockney, slanging Maggie, bridging

Discrepancies: abridged now, too early, too early. And a

Year unsettled followed in that wake – a wake among many –

Seeing cut-and-shut, riot, excess, disruption, corruption, occupation,

Unemployment, racism, Powell starkly reawoken, regression

In this recession, to a point history can’t even re-evoke,

Disenfranchised as it is, by the rubbly coverings of subsequences.

If Clegg predicted it, as YouTube’d show you, so what? A cleg to

Stand on’s what they got. And us… we’re left with a single-word oxymoron,

Right, a scandalous might of shady figures with shadier friends,

Embezzled in the networks that purport to report the truth of the world,

An empire of own ends, gratifying itself in miraculous light, as

Plain as day, light, interrogatory, light, shining in their faces, light

That still somehow can be hidden in, cold suns, hoarse gates, no

Rest, no peace. No justice. No peace. Cities, which are now known

As financial districts, and’s how now they operate, became occupied

By a percentage not seen by the BBC, peppered with tears, Maced faces,

Another discrepancy: what makes broadcast news? Two sides, at least;

Thousands of stories. Prompted by austerity, which is what? A cull.

History repeats, not through destiny, but through this discrepancy.

For David Emmanuel.

II

Lacan may have been right, in sixty-eight,

However unfortunately. In Derridean

Terms – as far as I’m able to interpret them –

An instance of ‘reinscription’. A master’s

Mastery remastered. What makes sense,

In this day and age, as they say, is

The topology of the Möebius strip:

Its inescapability.

Don’t get me wrong: revolution

Is necessary, as necessity… as impossible

As it, nevertheless, may be. We must keep

Placarding the bastion. ‘Perpetual’ means,

Precisely, ‘unrelenting’, and unrelenting

Means that we don’t leave any wo/man down;

As proletariat, we’ll tarry at no stations

Of the Big Other’s sacrificial crossings.

What we perceive is, precisely, an answer begging

Questioning. Cutting deeper into open wounds

Tends to prevent healing. Education is a right, not a

Privilege, and if education is about the spreading of

Knowledge, and not the guarding and withholding

Of it whilst pointing and laughing at those disinvested,

It would appear that a great portion of today’s ‘educated’

Have greatly miscalculated their imperative worth.

But indeed, if we should meet with courteousness

The uselessness of our souls,

In the most Žižekian way, with Jones on our

Side; and in an analytic situationing of

Fetishistic disavowals, communistically,

With conditions, etc. and etc., paying with

Attention, through the nose; this is only a

New dawn seen through the slats of a blinded door.

Diagonally striping our floor.

III

So, what is this; some Shellian thesis, antithesis and synthesis?

Perhaps. A say, interpellated in canonical disarray, as I

May have put it. But blared out, what does ‘outside of

Canons’ mean? Precisely what this corporationism breeds.

Going to London on the fifteenth of August, over to the Hale,

Where friends reside now, as well as in Peckham, and Salford,

In my two university cities of that time, and listening to Paul

Gilroy and Merlin Emmanuel, as well as a brave scared mum,

Thinking about the children, our youth mans, our youth womens,

Wanting to stand and to say, from the Westcountry, need to spread

This awareness afield, but overwhelmed; next to smoulders of debris

Still smelling in epicentric catastrophe: moved so, going straight from

Work on a train and tube, reading Kant’s groundwork on board, and

Cracking up nearly, with nervousness when a mile away, having

Never seen this country in such a reality, and yet here a community,

Knowing, knowing what that word means. Trying, uniting, fighting.

For what it can bring.