The World Must Stand Against Cop City
I mention, a CCTV camera to the nape of my neck and a boot flying by overhead, ready to stamp me out. The world must, I declare, before every city is cop city, before every cop from Managua to Tel Aviv to Lagos to Manchester has been on their sacred pilgrimage to the decimation of Atlanta Forest. What unholy carpenter turns ancient wood into tear gas, ballistics and truncheons? They’re preparing for the worst, I said, a taser poised at the small of my back like a lover, poised to kiss (and a microphone at my collarbone, ready to tell). They’re preparing for the next Standing Rock, for the next Stonewall, for border crossings, assassinations. They’re preparing for the next pandemic, for food shortages. They’re responding to broken supply chains with chains of command. You can’t eat chains of command, I moan, when I should be saying “no comment”, when I should be whispering. 

The World Must Stand Against Cop City
they cry out, kettled, surrounded, mourning Tortuguita, little turtle on the back of turtle island, swimming against a foray of bloodless, braindead clobberers and marauders, gutless swines spitting bile onto soil, whose steps rot the foliage underfoot. They weep with English occupiers in the forests bought from the courts by HS2, yell with the Indian Chipko women in defiance of decimation, execute sabotage with Ende Gelände in the Hambach Forest, staring across the edge of an open cast coal mine. As they storm construction sites with pyrotechnics and mob tactics, defiling the defilers, we must have their backs, they say, as their backs crawl with the bitter, brutal, insidious technologies of the police state. 

The World Must Stand Against Cop City
for if we are not standing we will be on our knees, brutalities and disparities made acute and refined, sharpened on the Atlanta Public Safety Training Centre, a honing steel that sticks like a knife out of dead fauna, habitats and homes. This City, where they will learn evermore efficient ways to beat us, must perish. We, with those arrested, detained, murdered must act with and in solidarity. In solidarity with protestors, with forestry and wildlife, with those who have the firearms of police brutality nested in their temples like vultures. 

The World Must Stand Against Cop City  A cop’s boot lingers atop the heads of many; what will you do when it’s on top of you?