#title Sirventès of the Beast
#author Anne Archet
#LISTtitle Sirventès of the Beast
#date 2014/06/27
#lang en
#pubdate 2024-05-14T23:59:22.282Z
#authors Anne Archet
#topics poetry, civilization, Return Fire, animality, humanism, anti-humanism, anti-civ, love, insurrection
#notes Printed in Return Fire vol.6 chap.6 (spring 2024). <br> PDFs of Return Fire and related publications can be read, downloaded and printed by visiting returnfire.noblogs.org or emailing returnfire@riseup.net


<verse>
I am no citizen

I am no consumer

I am no tax-payer

I am no employee

I am no convict

I am no beneficiary

I am no person of color

I am no lesbian

I am no mother

I am no wife

I am no erotic writer

I am no poetess

I am no anarchist

I am no woman

I am surely no Human

That vile and ethereal being

Which has never been spotted elsewhere

But in universal declarations


I don't want to stay seated and raise my hand

I don't want to wait for the teacher to tell me to speak

I don't want to wait for a break to take a piss

I don't want to press 0 to speak to one of your representatives

I don't want to open a box or tear away plastic wrapping to feed myself

I don't want to drink from a bottle or tap

I don't want to go to the second counter to collect my order

I don't want to smile because the customer is always right

I don't want to sign my performance review

I don't want to sell my time my limbs my voice my orifices

I don't want to lose five kilos and find love

I don't want to prevent the signs of ageing

I don't want to smell like spring

I don't want to fill in the right form

I don't want to use the reserved lane at 5pm

I don't want to be the guardian of household and decency

I don't want to be a factor of production

I don't want to be an extension of a tool

I don't want to be a target audience

I don't want to act in my own interests as defined by the relevant authorities

I don't want to wipe my arse with the three-layer version of boreal forest

I don't want to produce and consume

I don't want to be produced and consumed

I don't want my survival to be a pretext for destroying everything around me


I want to hold you in my arms

I want to be able to love you without fear, without reserve, without pretentions

I want to draw my nourishment directly from the earth

I want my actions to be without bounds

I want to live and laugh and cry and love

I want to enjoy to the point of losing my mind to the point of losing track of myself

I want to do it the way we've been able to do it for millions of years


I want to do it with you

I want you to be with me

I want us to stop our race to devastation


I love you

I desire you

I want your skin against mine

We don't need all this shit

This filth that we produce in tears

That we consume without pleasure

That we throw away with a guilty conscience

We don't need this cardboard life

Of these stuporous vigils

Of these dreamless slumbers

Of these indistinguishable days and nights


Smothered in concrete, street lighting and plastic

Muzzled by alcohol, stimulants, sedatives, antidepressants

Distracted by screens, fashion, social networks, glamour

Restrained by sexual roles, politeness and conformist originality

Double-locked in this universal jail called Civilisation

Beneath this thin armoured varnish

lies a wild beast


Despite thousands of years of domestication

I remain a savage

Full of passion and fury

So are you

And it's this beast that I love

I'm flesh, bone and blood

I am a body, an animal

I am a wave of intense desire

I am desire incarnate, uncontrollable, and thunderous

I am your mad lover

I am sphincters, fluids, tendons

I am a goddess

I am your partner in crime

If you want to stop surviving

If you want to live

If you want to unite with me


If you don't, I'll be, happily and without regrets,

the enemy to be put down
</verse>


[ed. – Sirventès were a genre of Old Occitan lyric poetry (usually parodies, borrowing the melody, metrical structure and often even the rhymes of a well-known piece to address a controversial subject, often a current event.)]