Like painting the world with an invisible colour.
Like calling the dead back to choke on their names
and the names of things they might have seen.

Tree – an ash with a phallic sucker – but not
the willow Minaev saw. Hazel, as was
in this grove – an enclosed place since before
Portus came – pre–dating Rome. A closed order
of brothers walking the boundary. My, how
you have grown and these traditions repeat.
The hard challenge, not to be led, to make
your own self out of art, music, these
blind words, even when under Governor's Orders
or an indifferent God. Never to give in.
Never to attempt the fence, which is in your head?
A subliminal message, tagged whilst asleep.

Like speaking an architecture that is no longer
vernacular – a vocalisation of the route you guessed
that took you past the cenotaph, along the backs
of offices, into a park – a pastoral excess – dead end.
Oddly, I went there today, for the first time.
Leather straps and table tennis nets etc. missing
after escape attempt. Planned escape attempt.
Escapee – called D for the purposes of this text –
had a dislocated shoulder, a shattered arm. 
Extensive cuts to arms and face, upper body.
Was he observed or have we imagined him there?
Elbow is pinned and arm is set. He cried. She said,
'he sat in his cell and cried for several days.'

She seemed remotely upset, behind the most 
powerful of non–verbals. Her uniform perhaps 
chokes her self sometimes? Service 
has a cost to all who know that glamour.

Bob – not his real name – moved to Rochester
to go crazy there, to try out innocence
in a new context, to prove the setting
as you might prove a wall by banging 
your head on it. An artist. From Moscow. 
Properly trained and expressive. Gave me a photo 
of a girl – my wife if I'd put up money for his bail. 
Joking I think. Took the picture back.
Loud. The iron door closes. Clichés can wear 
sensibilities into your skin like a blister; 
to create in there is to hurt. All the words
we speak seem new or without history.

In the shopping precinct – which we call 'Canteen' –
(it's a hatch in the wall that passes for a shop)
everyone is discussing election fever, or its absence. 

We need to be clear, voting doesn't change a thing, 
but it's important to participate. The electorate are apathetic.

Ideology gets everywhere, and voting is divisive, 
but it needn't involve politics. Open and frank discussion 
of the issues never solved anything. Necessity dictates. 

Politics is a novel in which all of the characters 
have been assassinated – but we don't need to know
who's who, and the whodunit is an obsolete form. 

We judge, not who, but when? And we no longer need 
to know who we are. You forget. You cannot remember.

So, therefore, the weight of our state is never applied 
against any individual, for our state is weightless 
and individuals were abolished after the revolution.

They were always asking us who we were. 

(In how I speak you will notice that the individual
hides between the letters of the alphabet. Something 
sneaks out – a glance, an ironic sound or gesture.)

It's a regular event. Candidates in ribbons, a carnival 
in the courtyard, an old superstition we can laugh at now. 

There will be an election broadcast. The Officers
will dance and the authentic Druids will perform
a ritual at our ancient Henge and/or Parliament.

The men of the Dorms made votive offerings, something
of their selves, their fictional selves, was sacrificed.
(Their invisible children, their mute brides.)

It was fun, our day of democracy. One day we may
hold another election, wheel out the Hobby Horse,
make predictions, rub the sleep from our eyes.

And so my friend waits in the prison of his skin, marvelling
at democracy; at what it protects, and from who.

In the folklore, peasants worked in the fields. Simple folk
in touch with essential things – the circuits of the moon,
the seasons – they were unconscious of complexity
except in how it related to the astrology of seeds.
They built no temples, though they knew of them as 'wonders'.
In amongst the peasants were princes, men with sensibilities,
who had taken the first step into the 'gothic' revival of
late 18th century England. It was a seed, culture
taking root in an idea. It proved a language. It helped us out.
These princes were disguised as shepherds, they loved
simple country girls who they could use, confuse, idealise.
'She had a clear complexion' meant she was virtuous
and thus desirable, free of disease. Her breath was sweet.
In our new revised edition, based on the earliest texts, a Messiah 
was concealed beneath the uniform of a prison officer.
At weekends, when his wife was away, he would go out
and pretend to be a fireman. Women like firemen.
From that we can assume women do not like prison officers?
This was not spelled out, but it is still observed today.
Women call them pigs, keeping up the rustic connection.
Even female officers are unlucky in love, or so they believe,
even if they are attractive. It's important to the plot:
characters must suffer and learn in order to construct
a new world from hard won philosophies. Humanity
benighted, the stories and the people no-one wants to know.
In this they are similar to asylum seekers, the immigrants
they despise and lock up; it is an engine of the plot
that prison officers bring it on themselves. Now complete the story.
Bit-part characters, they walk on and off. Our scenery 
is cardboard – our hills are painted on a wall. It is
a mural. An officer in disguise has a temporary self;
a Trumpton fireman. Silly arse. He is so much like
the asylum seeker he loathes, the man with a false passport.
One is noble and brave and the other is scum. Guess which is which:
this might be the task of the reader. Who, here, in this field
of pain, is the true bearer of civilisation – the prince 
from the city, or the peasant he deceives? The prisoner
or the officer? A novel and disposable art, the narrative;
it is the most common skill, you cannot wake up
without inventing a story. In this world, nothing is real.
There is romance in the pain. Each man is a hero
in that he is alone; his theme is redemption –
not of himself, but of his jailer – and endless work,
the labour involved in the manufacture of meaning.
In folklore peasants worked the fields. They sang.
And the song carried them away as they worked
until song became their work and they were called poets.
They could not be admitted then, for they would change
character, plot – even the outcome and meaning of history – 
so they were banished from the republic. So, once more
they arrive at the gate in disguise, as an officer or prisoner.
Something has taken them. They are changed, trapped 
by the plot, forced into philosophies. It never ends.