Lizzy's Face
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Listen to a reading of "Lizzy's Face":
Lizzy's face on the papers blowing in the wind
Lizzy's face on the screens
Lizzy's face on the street billboard
with a homeless man leaning against it.
Lizzy's face on the Jumbotron
Lizzy's face on the defense industry tweets
Lizzy's face on the arrest warrants
for the criminals who said "Not my king."
Lizzy's face on our money
Lizzy's face in my face
Lizzy's face on an artillery shell
funded by the British taxpayer
and fired by a man wearing neo-Nazi insignia.
Lizzy's face on the telly before it cuts out
because there's no power
because it was either electricity or groceries.
Lizzy's face on the food banks
Lizzy's face on the price hikes
Lizzy's face on the blankets shivering bodies cling to
when they can't afford to heat their homes.
Lizzy's face in their mind's eye
Lizzy's face in their prayers
Lizzy's face in their nightmares
as they huddle close together for warmth.
Lizzy's face on the news man's face
on the politician's face
on the banker's face
on the billionaire's face
on the warmaker's face
on the empire's face.
Lizzy's face on the nuclear missiles
Lizzy's face on the drums of war
Lizzy's face on the melting permafrost
and the gasping oceans and the plastic in our blood.
Lizzy's face in my chest like a nauseating lump
rising up through my throat and out into the toilet
spraying out my mouth and all over the bathroom
and all over the universe get that dead bitch the fuck out of us.
Puke Lizzy's face out of our animal bodies
so we can run free like wildebeests hatching hearts and songbird throats
no longer frozen by the bank boys and bastards
and the grayness of the false world they painted in our minds.
Let our animal bodies remember our animal ways
and forget any context wherein Lizzy's face everywhere made sense.
There are lovers who need loving
and a world that needs saving
and a whole lot of signs
that are in sore need of vandals.
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Lizzy's Face
"Vulgar" seemed to always be a favorite adjective of the British nobility. It was vulgar to associate with the working classes or even with the bourgeoisie, unless they were your barristers or physicians. Cockney accents were assuredly vulgar as were tweed workmen's caps, folks with darker skins, and other images offensive to that upper crust, which ultimately had those "standards" reflected in the economic elites of other western societies, including the US. But the blatant vulgarity of colonialism, of the theft of resources and impoverishment of indigenous peoples never seemed to enter their vocabulary of vulgarity. To continue, in this century, to sustain any level of adulation of this group of manufactured gods seems extremely vulgar to me, in the sense that pursuing delusions of noblesse oblige in the face of all evidence to the contrary represents the ultimate vulgarity of serfdom.
I don't really understand the Anglophone fascination with the British royal family. Certainly the British state has acted about as badly as the others, but after George III went irretrievably bonkers, it doesn't seem to me that they had much influence on Great Britain or the world. It is true a lot of them were Nazi sympathizers, but so were a lot of people back in the day, which later was carefully covered up. The actual rulers of Britain sidelined them. Subsequently they became the staples of the American supermarket press along with other vacuous celebrities and rich people, largely harmless prolefeed. Let them go.