A Junkie Army on the march, all scabs and skank and corroded teeth,
slopped along from Letten Station, from Needle Park, pausing to dance and piss across the Rathaus marble, then on, caving in windows so the dejected masterpieces of asset art could be taken out and set on fire.
In the Malatesta Bar, a blissful intellectual life passed as usual, the barricade of languages so lightly amused and adrift in the disarming nicotine weather.
The bartender flipped a glass ashtray into the middle of the floor and made a joke.
Brief, unexpected, incomprehensible
Zurich rising,
Zurich falling asleep.
N.B. – The Malatesta Bar is now long gone but was a pleasant place to drink and eat in the mid-1990s, popular with people working in film and theatre. On the day of the riot, it might have escaped damage due to being named after Errico Malatesta, the Italian anarchist who had been expelled from many countries, including Switzerland. Heathcote Williams wrote a film script about him, which was also the first film he acted in. In the film, Malatesta is organising an anarchist group in London and opposes the use of violence in their actions.
The poem is from Silenian Odes a chapbook collection published by Cold Turkey Press, April 2023.
Jay Jones
Nuance rolls through these poem worlds where words carry many meanings
Comment by Tom Ruffles on 13 May, 2023 at 2:04 pmbringing something dangerous in out of the night
into the bar
often the bar
a detail sifts through
the last sunlight and
the words
shimmer with meaning
then the meaning changes
as you read through it again
then another meaning loses meaning
and the word world reels
since the meaning is rough
in the hands of cast-offs
casting off
on a binge at the other end of things
where some sense of carelessness
loss leans into meaning
and something vague sifts through
something that was not there the first time