Comrade Love and Comrade Spell

Whoever pride in the face I went for a ride with my friend
on the shore of our news where all the objects were
and there was no waste to love or be an end
for politics in the fantasy of released fantasy. Blur
system straight performance, Comrade Love
was what my name was, electric life disengaged
closed shaved razor, whoever I wanted to party, age
screaming from within me one fast time above
another time, war time and civilian time
while my heart beat others to death. Where the doubt
begins, that is where we go to on the cake stunt wheels /
crisis is critically out and about
steal for forever market downturn crash bank heals
and you can be immortal without mortality
accumulating time, experiences and people
so no one can have them and you will not die.
But we drove past that monument to the
better space where the stars were, and we clung
to the satellites and to the junk we sung
for and to / to get our supper / while we ate through
the tubes, holding off from us the longing for the new
and while we hung on and we kept the law
that potentially poured our pores inside out
with the force of the void that seems to scream for more
my friend’s face burned away in the too cold
vacuum of reality where the objects extolled
themselves and refused to vanish and Space whispered to us:
your bonus is one that could be won, here, you listen
again you listen your bonus is one that could be won
by another, you listen, if you don’t competitively
fuck the workers but if you don’t listen
you get on with your job, fuck the workers and accumulate.
Such life may not be taxing on decisions
but it does provide tax breaks to impulses
the more expensive they are for others.
“Do not repeat that because it is only possible
if the objects have vanished,” said my
friend, Comrade Spell, wearing the latest
in astronaut tech and I loved him like
I love life. We had wandered out our way
in the black to these satellites and bits of trash
to which we both now clung to keep us
both from drifting into the void, having
chewed through our safety tubes for fun. I said
to Comrade Spell, as he pointed out the Earth
and Sun beneath us that this was a perfect figure for
the reification of our lives as we held to trash to hold
us to life and became one with it, satellites
of the real Earth and its life giving light
which we forgot and suppressed with all its
copious suffering and joy, save as an occasional glimpse
of the picturesque social relations we simp
er for in the suits that protect us from the lack of
atmosphere. Life is separated from itself back of
by the commodity and life becomes a commodity
and life clings to life through commodities: Fuck / Off /
You / Comrade Spell snarled fucking insipid knocked out knack of
for… “Dialectic is intransigence to reification
but your fucking philosophy hides pain’s nations
of humanity born to live / swallow me up core…”
Comrade Spell I loved, but he was an asshole from the mirror
who had been convinced too early of
his separation from other humans, while fearful of
intensely that deep emptiness inside his soul
while he loved that emptiness and wanted more of it to feel whole
with and emptiness justified stupidity and the harm
he did to others. “These are our lives we have”
he said, “not abstract concepts by which we charm
ourselves away from fate, and what we do
right now is the whole of our lives, not a symbol
of submission or resistance to totality, which is
a fucking boring way to be being, in wish bowl
fulfilment, liar, go on. We hold the thing we want
to the thing that we don’t, and we are held by fear
and are not ourselves. Unloose your earthly tether
and become wind in the void
and choose your freedom to leave your enemies destroyed
by the organization and power you build, direct and run,
and no bruise or damage on love, only connection
without possession.” “Cheap jokes are less near
to effectiveness than costlier ones.” “I am
not fucking kidding. Let go of these objects,
rise into the vacuum and enter the void, next
to freedom in true social activity as you move
people around you.”
At the rim of
trash bag chaos shone the Sun, light rising
into continuation and we let go and entered
the void. The desperation of Comrade Spell’s
soul leapt from his missing face
into the glass of his helmet, where it tore
at the glass with its teeth and bored
with and without its eyes to not be alone
for which it panicked, terrified of usurpation, bone,
on phone, the void / objective spit / on you / labelled
what the fuck / skeleton far out cry spelt
I WANT YOU FOREVER burning shout while I lit
up and glowed with the glory of the commons in space
and flew through the void unloosed from social anxiety
and all that had held me back from
joining my mind and my body.
Note: who are you in the trap fever of life?
What are you staying at home again for what
is the origin of mendacity in what home device
you return you home for what / and you do this if you do not,
what flying through space, trinken und trinken, wrong here
I became one with the vacuum and perfected my inner ear.
My faceless friend who looks only at himself
spoke fire to me with a domestic lighter, your COMPANY NAME here,
that let him glide gently into me as a vocal deceiving elf
toy, your PRODUCT PACKAGING here, and TAHRIR
wasn’t mentioned by him or by me or really by anyone that we really were
the right kind of wealth to impersonate and the wealth
of his words inside me said to me and to the silent non-sky
that had us as a captive audience without power
“I knew one like us both, particularly like you R
and particularly like me, who in the vacuum misery
ran to repeatedly cathected, an impeccable angel Y
of dispirit, meant for meaning / what means what and what mea
ning you have when you are what you mean / beyond misery
and forgiveness. Call him Subject Phone. And what we
mean is him: and in the end we mean: we have what you have
always had and mean: we go to him at last by the exit,
by not taking the way the stars lay out and mean: find
ing a path through the screaming cold that binds
the megabit to economy and mean: think but this and all is shit
what is real to the touch and it is flooded with brilliancy.
I look through my contacts, I am Comrade Love, and I
find the right contact and I call him in the middle
of the night and mean: it is not night, what
what do we mean? We mean him in the void, note this:
when everything is what you want for an epigram of bliss
to contain access to mean. If you listen to the clean floor
of the vacuum, you cannot distinguish
what is low and what is high
but you can distinguish social relations
and what in them can distinguish a melody
that is the oozy staircase: what we mean is this: what meaning in being
can creepily climb forever together: now mean this what, eating
is the meaning and what we mean is meaning / we do it to our faces.
Subject Phone, are you there, on the edge,
what do you mean, I am faceless Comrade Spell embraces
you forever brilliant searching through our contacts on
our lives to call him again and again we mean: call him, and his ring tone
starts and stops and he answers and he shops for his words
until he drops them and we find him near a dying star,
pouring his hands in to find his phone and / what we are.
All wrong as we arrive as humans not as skeletons but dreams,
flying through the void. Subject Phone was singing
and Comrade Love and Comrade Spell and I and both of us
listened to him in love and Comrade Spell said to me and to himself
“His melody is interrupted and only love can cure him.”
We heard him sing this song: “Heard melodies return beauty revivifies im
mune With a carrot This is the story On the shelf
The little boat to bear this load what power delights
to make me love the phone I am, the business executive, rights
to being a business, the combine washer drier HERE YOU
will fight now I with all my wasted heart to be you too
if want want what With a carrot What To torture us I know
The commodity history BLOCKED OFF That to myself and so to you as well I owe
being more than being others the rapid shadow of the phone,
the commodity, that by a loan alone does make my life my own
What Beyond forgiveness and Beyond forget
What his desperation that is mine want inside regret
What Love’s lack in other chain is me inside a lack
What want the phone that mocked and phone that fed / Itself back
into itself the phone What”

So many parts that he does not forgive but so
What tries to forget What his desperation Yes and no
What because he cannot reconcile his fear of what
What no one will love him Means What with his repeated denial of what
What experience of love from others means, silent on the phone for what

“But I am not like everybody else” said Comrade Spell
as we stared and listened to the scene of Subject Phone.
He smiled grimly with the face that he had and projected
a vision of permanence beyond the gaps, through the wreckage of power.
“And yet I was born to be like him” said Comrade Spell
as we listened we stared at scene of Subject Phone
and face his flickered in the stars so brief relentless.
“I grew up a caretaker in an unnamed household of suicidal
thoughts–and I wanted to be cared for myself
as care seemed to me the only way to get love
that had permanence. And thus I run ragged at the touch
of fantasy because I grew up in this unnamed household
without it, except for the fantasy of being cared for.
I was in love with sickness when I became sick
and found care bound in paralysis
spells that infected me without medical basis
fantasized stillness beyond all action’s equal badness
or as I thought bees With a desire to be an idiot
With / Alone by the toilet throwing up and cumming on the
mirror of vomit where I lose my face only to find it.
And there was still a hole within me that I asked others
to put their fingers in
and make me feel my absence
and they would do it and want to be part of me
Call it a principle with an urge for truth
and could I return to the hot and cold taps of my youth
I would not trace the halting depths and my rage
for purifying my life, burning it in the tided wage
of a moment, but bid the water flow, until it goes
into the numberless oceans freed from woes
of separation but not from cathexis or desire or discipline.
But those rages still burn in me and I try to direct them
toward my face and burn it up rather than love.
For love is but a vision and a dream
we have for ourselves and others of what is life to me.
But I want my face, though I still lose it over.
Out from my coma I handled my With Means over
and in the shining discs of others I learned that other love
was possible, which was not the pleasure of reification.
There is not only the flattened stance of either submission or critical resistance
ironized passively in the trap, for there are other forms of
domination than the commodity in our society
that bind us on location to unfreedom not forgotten
and in humane charms are
the strengths of stocks maintained.
I saw beauty in the void as the means
to build domination and raw power in the face
by affective relations. Fantasy loomed in the vacuum
without a loss of attachment and I wept in ecstasy
to have it, desperate for its permanence within and without me
and not reliant on the frozen attention of another person as permanence.
The vacuum saved me from my former friend,
Subject Phone, who could not love me or in the end
himself. Or in the end. Or love herself in. In the end / Or / itself love
the end Or what what was in the end Or love itself was what in the end
was what the end I don’t remember what or. Love me then and I dreamed it
and in the extremes of the vacuum I still do lose my face
to the ancient cold.
Subjects still flock to Subject Phone,
a fixed beacon by the sea of stars that he denies own
the power to break us, and he sings only into the cellphone
and dreams of satellites receiving screams from fixity,
all in the shape of the one single shining commodity.
And they are all alone, though they make their anxious home
on the border of Space, regurgitating it without commitment.”
Subject Phone spluttered before us, emitting fire and electricity
from his phone-shaped mouth, his eyes now clearly sympathetic flames
that sought to burn like fireworks inside the souls that
would approach. I had not seen them before, but as the void
swelled around me, I saw them clear. I saw them swarm like atoms
and he priced them in bathetic lists as they drew near,
burning themselves against his savage welding life.
And I saw them return to his blind vision again and again
and again. And I saw him laugh in fire. And I saw them
die as broken mirrors that both would and would not
reduce the significance of love, self-images devoured
and regurgitated by the flame-emitting tool, haunted
by purity and guilty wrongness. And what I saw was
in me too and I felt my face flickering but I kept
hold of it and though it faded in and out it did not melt
away. I reached out to the dying star and found that
while Subject Phone could control fire, I suddenly
knew that the magma-like substance of the star was
something I could control. And I bent lava around
Subject Phone and I sealed the lava in a sphere, cooling it to rock,
to protect Subject Phone and the subjects from him
until love could save him. And then we flew into the void.

Joshua Stanley

Joshua Stanley is a poet, union organizer, and PhD candidate at Yale University. He grew up in the south of England and has lived in New Haven, Connecticut, since 2010.