Dan Taylor

 

THE ASSUMERS

 

Hello to all that
The right to state
With the politest knowingness
The absolutely bleeding unobvious.

 

Undereaters and overachievers
At war against the heavens
The assumers attempted to write the world
Using only a keyboard.

 

Ha! Out of optimism they shaped
A political sexuality of new naivety.
No thought might be used
Lest it refer to Foucault or Deleuze.

 

My friends, all of them
So young they claimed to know the world
Used books for all our darkest problems
Only on their strictest terms.

 

Spilt ink on maps
Recycled dead philosopher into some new cool
Blinking earnestly like christmas photos
Dancing on cattle-fences while the city smoulders.

 

The assumers’ lives are like monuments
Build under the tyranny of ideas
But it’s not who you are, but what you do.
We were always thinking, weren’t we.

 

A million different ways to ponder now
Nights quicken and we soon tire.
Bitter drinks make you cry out into the night
Your secrets, your strategies, your dizzy ideas.

 

Swimming out into a midnight ocean
Happily lost. Everyone misunderstands.
Missing, or disappeared?
It was for love, and thank you.

 

 

 

– – – – –

 

The above words were written en route to hand in my MA dissertation under the heady title “Negative Capitalism: Kafka’s Castle and the Control Societies Reconsidered”. Will be discussing this on here in a few weeks. A love song for the assumers. Above that, a film made by assumers including myself, a daft and fearless work, its flaws part of its charms I think. Who knows what happens next…