For "I love you" say fuck the police.

This is the line of Sean Bonney's I have seen most often as his friends and the wider circle to which we all belong learned of his death this week.

A death which in itself is unfair and too soon and a robbery. But for now -- poetry.

The first reason that it is natural to pick up this line now is because what people want to say is "I love you". People close to Sean saying this to Sean. People in the wider community to each other, and to the poet as a public figure.

It's the perfect line in this moment too because it ropes the community together: it's a quick way to establish insider-outsider status, I think one of the quickest available to the left. ACAB as absolute truth - a quick way to draw a boundary.

Everyone who can say fuck the police for "I love you" needs to be told, fuck the police, here and now.

It's a line of poetry born to be spray-painted on walls and born of the spraypaint on walls. It's a slogan. But it isn't kitsch.

The first time I ever read that line it was with a weird euphoria: total recognition of what was being done in that line and what poetry is capable of. Of scaffolding a new way thinking and being that you knew, believed, or suspected was possible -

But being ~ r e a l l y ~ leftwing. It's frightening and it's often a truth that doesn't get spoken. We hide in capitalisn and whisper to one another and if you are not careful, soon you do become kitsch, sold out, or fake. This line breaks the window and lets you out of that.

I know of one other line of poetry that I have ever read that does what Sean Bonney does here:

The magic words are: "up against the wall motherfuckers this is a stick up"

- Amiri Baraka, I meant to put the name next to the line.

These words are magic words because they were written about riots and looting in a community thatbwas rioting and looting for its continued existence, by a poet who was part of that. "Up against the wall motherfuckers this is a stickup":

Taking the line out of the context of the necessary violence of survival and resistance and holding it up to the culture: the Newark context becomes a promise to liberate beyond the county boundaries - a promise to "Black People" (the poem's title) and also a methodology.

In the spaces of resistance that carry the same feeling of possibility and euphoria as this line of poetry, is a glimpse of possibility for freedom.

I don't let the idea of actual freedom into my thinking at the moment because I don't believe that it is anywhere near any of us.

but when you can say up against the wall motherfuckers... in a context where the people who always lose get to win, and also understand the action as political / revolutionary / fundamentally changing the status quo --- the words become magic, the poem the "spell",

by which I just mean the mimetic document that helps to prepare us to see and seize moments of possibility when we are in them again, to occupy use and enjoy them.

I see "for 'I love you' say fuck the police" as having a comparable magic in the following ways:

as identified earlier, it calls up a coterie/ gang/ community/ army. It does this by having a special place in our memories. We have shouted "no justice! no peace! fuck the police!" in large groups, in all the scenarios you know, if you do know.

If you have been beaten up by the police
If you have been targeted by the police for walking
If someone you love has been murdered by the police
If you were one of the protesting crowd present that day in London when the police killed a guy

If you pressed against the police as they grouped to protect a guy whose Nazi insignia you could see plainly on show at the fascist gathering

so, the line triggers a memory in you of a feeling - of anger in action, anger directed, anger fully worked out in its sense of something unquestionable: two unquestionable things, I love you/ fuck the police. And it is a memory that is fundamentally collective.

in a crowd or to a single friend, sister, comrade, you say "fuck the police" because it means "I understand and I am with you", it is a slogan that expressed empathy first and foremost.

And then the second reason - sorry I should have drafted this before tweeting - it is empathy, formulated ~ a g a i n s t ~ . And this is revolutionary emotion.

"Up against the wall motherfuckers" means we are the downtrodden, buy we've got you now.

"for 'I love you' say fuck the police" means there are many of us and we can see another way, we're rejecting this one and we are fighting.

La colère et la pitié, I guess.

Emapthy-Against.

"Solidarity", but acting though real memory, to become a rehearsal of possibility not a rehearsal of theory/ posture.

So thinking the line helps you to rehearse that scenario of empathy-against and to recognise it when it comes and to be reminded to go looking for it.

That is it's euphoria and magic.

Sean Bonney fuck the police.

All my grieving friends fuck the police.

All the poets fuck the police.

Poetry fuck the police.

All of us against Westminster and nationalism and fascism and this country and this hegemony and now.

No justice.

No peace.

I love you.