Damnatio Memoriae
“In dreams begin responsibility.” — W. B. Yeats
In oxblood Docs and zippered hoods they came,
Keffiyeh-wrapped and purple smoke-bomb plumed,
A crowd of masks and spiky middle fingers
And punk-rock placards like a swirling cloud
Of pinions fallen from the bright blank sky.
In spatter-scraps of red and black they came
To settle up their grievance with the dead.
In the cool autumn air,
In the center of our town,
They marched into the square
And pulled the statue down.
They whipped out the latest i-devices,
A thousand cool-blue lights upon the hill
Vouchsafed from hi-tech clean white zen-boutiques.
They selfied justice, vid-clipped victory
And raised a roaring chant that stifled out
The muted sobs of famished dark-skinned children
Beat down into the holes of artisanal mines
To choke and snap their bones in dark collapses,
Or live to come up blinking, sputtering
With desperate handful chunks of energy
To power us, broad continents away.
O they beat their drums and blew their whistles
Above the twang of suicide nets, above
The snap of the world-wide lash, because
Indigenous supply chains don’t produce
Such items of convenience as can capture
The hi-rez quality of our perfection.
So they gazed down at their screens, down at themselves
And saw their self-made images were good.
In the cool autumn air,
In the center of our town,
They marched into the square
And pulled the statue down.
They pissed on the bushes, piled their slogans
In heaps for some poor system-bitch to deal with,
Screamed at the ranks of their paunchy oppressors,
Tagged up some port-a-johns and maybe smashed
A little corporate glass along the way.
Next they piled into the very steel machines
They swore would scorch the world into a cinder,
Cranking up their jagged three-chord anthems
Of love and rage against all the tangled systems
Of power and plunder, all the wicked privileges
That stupid unlearned hicks refuse to cede.
And off they sped, puff-puffing into the night
Their little cumuli of death, as if a dash
Of magic rainbow bumpersticker bullshit
Would somehow make the very seas recede,
Restore the soil, the swamps, the slick black sediment,
Somehow absolve them of the dreaded weight
Of choice, of labor, of responsibility.
Sacrifice is hard, and after all,
Where is the righteousness in missing out?
In barricades unmanned, in glass unbroken?
The party only knows you if you show.
In the cool autumn air,
In the center of our town,
They marched into the square
And pulled the statue down.
That night they made their long dark way back home—
Some to flats in rediscovered precincts,
Some to cluttered squats in burnt-out quarters,
And some to basement rooms in glorious mansions.
They all kicked off their boots beside their beds
And bowed their haloed heads in nightly ritual,
Their faces slack and humble, reverent in
The glowing nimbus of each small bright screen.
And then these spiky soldiers of dialectic,
Of history’s long war of liberation,
Logged in, assenting, and reported back.
Uploading all the best of their brave new selves,
They shared, upvoted, liked, linked, tagged,
Snapped, clicked, followed, posted, poked,
So that this great and most insidious power
Would know exactly where they were
And exactly what they were doing
And exactly what they were thinking.
And so did those who went to war with ghosts
Rattle their chains and call themselves free.
Then they laid their bright angelic heads
In the cool dark comfort of their open cells,
Submissive in the gaze, having at last
Surrendered the very content of their dreams.
In the cool autumn air,
In the center of our town,
They marched into the square
And pulled the statue down.