(after Andreas Malm)

At dawn, I imagine the journey to Antarctica, the deep blue and sparkling ocean slapping at the steel of the ship that churns, petrol smell lingering as the air turns crisper, cleaner, like cold glass, salt spray on my lips, petrels gliding alongside on invisible currents, the odd fin breaching the surface then vanishing, and as the boat pushes further south, the sky gradually edits itself—growing wider, more crystalline, as if someone has turned up the contrast—swells rise like breathing hills, long and patient, and days later the sea lightens to slate and I hear it before I see it—the faint tinkling of ice brushing the hull, the harsh cracks of distant floes colliding, the thunder of glaciers calving, sending shockwaves across the water—while in calmer hours, there’s an eeriness augmented by the siren-calls of orcas on the hunt, and then the ice really appears, drifting past like broken porcelain, time begins to stretch, scale to warp, as icebergs the size of Frozen castles loom—blue at their hearts, sculpted into arches and spires; greenish where cloven—and the ocean’s voice expands—waves booming, ice clattering—and when Antarctica finally reveals itself, it’s stark—dark-bright mountains punch through ice sheets, the cold seeps into gloves, wind stings, my cheeks burning as they go numb, the boat shuddering as it nudges through slush, snow falling dry and weightless on deck, a sharpness in my lungs as I spot penguins in clusters on ice shelves, waddling with absurd dignity, dive-bombing like commas, seals sprawling on floes in their fishy feculence, heads lifting briefly to acknowledge my presence—the immediacy of being here in this blinding white land brimming with life yet my detachedness (like one of these glaciers spilling forward while remaining stuck in time)—everything immense, stripped, and ancient—

                                                       and I’m imagining this journey because I’ll never be able to afford to go to Antarctica to see the stored water that will kill our future children; and I’m imagining this journey without the assistance of some great, corporate-owned, polycule hive mind I’ve not consented to gift my thoughts and words to, because thinking and remembering, and living and dying, is not what LLMs do—they’re like ships trawling the sea for more fish than we could ever consume, but on a vaster and more conceptual scale—and, as my brain isn’t yet fully washed (the way the institutions I live and work under have been) by this utter waste of water, this apotheosis of capitalist indoctrination, I still like to think that all tomorrow’s dawns have not been sold off—

                and I’m imagining this journey to all the stored water so that I might imagine a wind so cold it might slap us awake from this android dream; that I might imagine a collective, burning iciness of mind to counter the snowballing wildfires; that I might imagine no malevolent celestial power, no clouds of smoke the size of Australia, no cyclone the shape of a colossal saw blade; a world without black gold, the liquidation of fossil capital, its historical defeat;

                                                                            that I might imagine climate fatalism as a performative paradox, that the less people tell us that a radical revisioning is ‘scarcely imaginable’, the more imaginable an end to the decades of institutionalised logorrhoea will be, that a tipping point to our urgency will come, that reservoirs of gloom so engorged around the globe will find their outlets; that I might imagine a million children on bikes riding to government houses to unleash a dissonant fury; a billion workers downing tools to dress up as trees, flowers and animals; barrios of interlinked treehouses protecting every forest, barricades taking back each city; occupations spreading across nations, horizons, a plague upon private property, palaces, parliaments; blockades to all open-pit mines, the shutdown of motorways and railway tracks chauffeuring coal to the furnaces—let a million camps bloom, let a billion banners fly;

                                                                                              that I might imagine these tsunamis of mobilisation crashing against CBDs; rallies intensifying like storms at condensing intervals in the calendar; that I might imagine statues and statutes crumbling in a landslide of votes and vetoes, each grain of sand vibrating; technofields spoiled with salt water, rare metals returned to the ground, drones repurposed to bomb data centres;

                                that I might also imagine a counter to the upscaling of fascists who’ll defend the species-wide death-drive of the status quo—radical flanks to all non-violent action (as was necessary for the suffragettes and slave revolts)—so that any non-violent action that articulates the antagonisms running through this polycrisis will blow business-as-usual to the clouds;

                                                                           that I might imagine stacks of demands as tall as a skyline; incendiary devices carried over walls by kites and condoms, as Palestinians once did, to paralyse the killing machines; that I might imagine excavators swept away; fleets of SUVs capsized, their tyres all slashed—a symbolic castration of men in monster cars; the blitzing of megayachts to smithereens, the extinction of gold-encrusted jets, pipelines punctured so many times we call them flutes;

                             that I might also imagine the kind of sabotage that is done gingerly—selective forays accompanied by song, slogans and dance—a form of action immersed in praxis and process, poetry and improvisation; that I might imagine plants replaced by plants, sea levels receding, tempests reversing; a resurrection of the extinct, an intifada of non-human animals against all the oily predators, eating the rich who eat the earth; that I might imagine a revolutionary politics revived, a true positive feedback mechanism thawing the permafrost of policy, distending hierarchy, curbing spiralling curves, shrinking to zero the richest one percent’s footprint;

                        that  I might imagine the stranding of assets as possible, that the desecration of the property destroying the planet will be recognised as logical, justifiable; that I might imagine that the mass promotion of the reckless consumption of resources as the meaning of modern life will be seen as a crime; that I might imagine all future megastorms named after billionaires (Cyclone Musk, Hurricane Bezos) and all future megafires named after corporations (The Fire of Shell, The Flames of ExxonMobil, the Ashes of Trump Org, Meta et al.);

               that I might imagine a future in which fatalism and strategic pacificism, couched behind the concrete of empire, cease holding the Molotov cocktails, rocks, double hammer sigils and ponytailed girls of the past in contempt; ‘Put up a FUCKING fight for what you LOVE’;

                                                                          that I might re-imagine hypervigilance; how the rank dominion of the enemy and seeming powerlessness to derange the established sense of order cannot eradicate hope; that I might imagine becoming ungovernable, like a fist to a Nazi, like an eclipse, like an orca biting the fibre-optic cables at the bottom of the ocean, and in doing so re-imagine my molecular, particulate role in the microbes setting to work on decomposing the ruling classes;

that I might imagine a poetry that does not need to be so cold, so direct, for then I wouldn’t have to imagine the ice floes melting, nor our children’s children’s children suffering beneath a fever dream of automated auroras, at some point sooner than we think, before the final dawn.

Note: “Imaginary poem” distils some ideas and imagery from Andreas Malm’s How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2020).

Image: Giuseppe Argenziano