Living in the Heart of the Beast - Henry Cow

There I burn in my own lights fuelled with flags torn out

Of books, and histories of marching together…

United with heroes, we were the rage, the fire

But I was given a different destiny — knotted in closer despair

Calling to heroes do you have to speak that way all the time?

Tales told by idiots in paperbacks;

a play of forms

To spite my fabulous need to fight and live

We exchange words, coins, movements — paralysed in loops

Of care that we hoped could knot a world still

Sere words, toothless, ruined now, bulldozed into brimming pits

— who has used them how?

Grammar book that lies wasted:

Conflux of voices rising to meet, and fall

Empty, divided, other…

Clutching at sleeves the wordless man exposes his failure:

Smiling, he hurls a wine glass, describing his sadness twisted

Into mere form: shattered in a glass, he’s changed…

Now dare he seize the life before him and discompound it in

Sulphurous confusion and give it to the air?

He’s rushing to find where there’s a word of liquid syntax

— signs let slip in a flash: «clothes of chaos are my rage !»

He shrieks in tatters, hunting the eye of his own storm

We were born to serve you all our bloody lives

Labouring tongues we give rise to soft lies:

Disguised metaphors that keep us in a vast inverted stillness

Twice edged with fear

Twilight signs decompose us

High in offices we stared into the turning wheel of cities

Dense and ravelled close yet separate: planned to kill all encounter

Intricate we saw your state at work its shapes

Abstracted from all human intent.

With our history’s fire

We shall harrow your signs

Now is the time to begin to go forward — advance from despair

The darkness of solitary men — who are chained in a market they

Cannot control — in the name of a freedom that hangs like a pall

On our cities.

And their towers of silence we shall destroy

Now is the time to begin to determine directions, refuse to admit

The existence of destiny’s rule.

We shall seize from all heroes and

Merchants our labour, our lives, and our practice of history: this

Our choice, defines the truth of all that we do

Seize on the words that oppose us with alien force;

they’re enslaved

By the power of capital’s kings who reduce them to coinage and

Hollow exchange in the struggle to hold us, they’re bitterly

Outlasting… Time to sweep them down from power

— deeds renew words

Dare to take sides in the fight for freedom that is common cause

Let us all be as strong and as resolute.

We’re in the midst of

A universe turning in turmoil;

of classes and armies of thought

Making war — their contradictions clash and echo through time