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When the Pilrig Church Clock Strikes 13
by Mike Cowley

As Pete Shelley sang, Boredom 
is counter-revolutionary. 
Run, Leithers! The old world is behind you!

Expel the policeman from your head.
All power to the Imagination!
The landlords are homeless.
The bankers’ laments are derivative 
of songs whose time has run out.
The corporate lawyers plead guilty 
on behalf of their clients.
We are realists. We only demand the Impossible!
We will organise sit-ins in your souls, occupations 
in the margins of your ledgers.

When the last neoliberal is strangled with the last copy of the Daily Mail
When the Granton campus dreamers twin with Gaza’s colonised streets
When the last establishment entryist is exposed
When the spectacle’s final reel unspools in nude ignominy 
the noonday underground will emerge from its slumbers.

In a time of monsters, borders and classes will dissolve
The last Tory MP will be arrested applying for asylum 
off the shores of rogue estates
Piers Morgan will hail a taxi to Hades
The first Uber Soviet will announce itself from a Depot rehearsal room
Our shaken dew will refract previously unmapped colours
National flags will be repurposed as the cleaning rags of the 1% 
redeployed scouring flatlining money systems for signs of life
All that is solid will recompose

And History will begin.

Pete Shelley (1955-2018) was lead singer of the punk-rock band, The Buzzcocks.
Mike Cowley is a Scottish Labour Party activist and lecturer at Edinburgh College Granton campus. His discovery of Mod as a teenager opened a door which made music, literature, cinema and politics indivisible.

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