Tag: anticapitalism

Steal time. A letter to my fellow creatives

To my fellow artists, writers, and creatives, I implore you:

that this is what we must do, so as not to die while our hearts are still pulsing and our breath still escapes our mouths in laboured gasps disguised as whispers,

this is what we must do:

steal time.

Yes, this is a particular type of thievery, but in this world, what other choice do we have?

Steal time from whomever demands your lifeforce at minimum wage, from whomever leaves you feeling more machine than organism, from whomever leaves you trudging rather than dancing.

Steal time because the moment we are born into adulthood, time is stolen from us,

and you can always earn money, shag someone on Tinder, binge-watch that Netflix series. There will always be more groceries to bag, or data to input or reports to write.

Time is the most precious natural commodity there is and if they could, they’d float in on the stock exchange like water, or power or other things that should never be

monetised.

I implore you, this is not merely a moral imperative, it is an act of resistance, to…

steal time from your employer, who won’t give you sick pay, won’t give you time off with a dying loved one, who won’t pay you what you’re worth

because it offends their sensibilities, their new religion, their worship of the bottom line.

And this is how you steal time, call it what you like, quiet quitting or just retrieving your humanity from a machine that assigns you a number that’s not a unique datapoint:

write stories in your lunchbreak, compose symphonies in endless meetings, imagine landscapes during the back-to-back shifts you’ve been asked to work,

write on the backs of report templates, on the backs of invoices, on the front of student exam papers, reclaim what it is that makes you human,

resist because the world needs your light,

 more than it needs company men and women, marketing gurus and hedge-fund managers, more than it needs people who only see living beings

as resources to exploit.

lifenoise

so these are the sounds we archive:
two fences and three houses away
a border collie howls for its pack
and you feel the keening the cruelty 
dogs are not built for solitary life and 
an average of three per career your union mate says,
train drivers see three jumpers
on average and you knew a woman once
at university she had three kids and threw
herself in front of a train metal crunching steel
momentum arrested in the air
desperation archived into ears

and we stand in the darkness screaming
arched backs and tilted skulls 
howling at dead stars or space junk or sulphur
all rhythm begins in the belly an exhausted rumble
because children/work/partners/capitalism
because a woman only has two arms
but labours as though she has eight
and the night running men
(yes, men because only men feel safe without light)
ignore the lifenoise, the life screeching-
it is no surprise that a woman can scream forever.