The Afterlives of the Anarchists

Those staples in their foursquare silver strips
 Stacked upwards like some brutalist
  Manhattan office block
 Were teased apart by fingertips
And, jammed down in the stapler at half-cock,
  Sent shockwaves up my wrist
   Then pushed back in
   They pierced the skin,
  Refusing to align
With folded A4’s creased and crooked spine.

Another bead of blood. Another botch.
 Another pamphlet not quite straight
  To join the dodgy pile,
 Another squat for Special Branch to watch.
In those days no emoticons would smile,
 No app would re-collate
   The authors’ rage
   At each slipped page
  As blood and bits of skin
Smeared Proudhon, Stirner, Goldman, Bakunin.

Still edgy and implacable they’ve gone
 With smudges, thumbprints, films of dust,
  Blurred ghosts that, hand-cranked, roll
 From cyclostyle to silicon
Through purple aniline and methanol,
 As digital exhaust
   Shows they survive
   In some hard drive
  And, scanned, downloaded, binned,
Shrug off the world their staples underpinned.