Statement adapted from the letters of A. Scott Buch:

How is one to meaningfully define an underground? For it not to be simply an alternative establishment, it needs to have aims, philosophies, and systems, which are in structural opposition to the status quo. One feature of our status quo from my critical perspective, is that it postures as if fame and fortune were legitimate possibilities; when in reality to achieve a mere baseline economic status is tantamount to a pipe dream. In truth, these are likely two sides of the same coin. This is what the underground should stand to correct. It should attempt to reverse the fictitious ideology into a material reality where baseline economic status was possible. However this comes with a project of needing to call out the ideology of fame and fortune as the establishment’s carrot on a stick—one that later asserts a force on the artist which effectively makes one 'sell out.' Really, the model of fame and fortune is what robs everybody who could be a great poet, or artist, from being able to make a living. So the practical goal of an underground should be to challenge the norm that, but an elite lucky few can make a living from poetry. It should be to set out to squash and demystify, the carrot on a stick of wealth and fame which obfuscates the fact that it won’t even give us mere food and rent. The twofold position to emphasize here at the end is: That writing is work worth being compensated. AND can we not glimpse a different picture of work beyond the vulgar ideological notion it’s only as valuable as its mirror image in a token of money? For a radical poet, no? the underground should mean a mutual aid of artists in the form of a community. And where that human relating is more valuable than—although, for a time, not entirely a viable alternative—to being paid?



“Light Through The Cracks”

In my solitude,
I pen the names Julian and Stella,
And think of the sadness from son to father,
The warm noble face of John Shipton,
And imagining that an Empire of lies will fall
As a family is reunited.
I have been alone in my worries
As long as you were captured and imprisoned for publishing truth,
As long as the apathy of a nation has been amnesiac
Of the crimes of their government,
For as long as waking up to truth, in the imperial core,
Is as the construction of a solitary jail cell.
Rather than the deterioration of your person,
May these structures collapse in all their evil glory,
Around the sky and the star.



“I Cannot Eat From My Writing, Nor Is Assange Free, Though One May Not See A Connection”

No, the platform should not be owned.
No I shall not let the grave power of a name,
Become the object of burden like the depressed weight of neglect.
I won’t abide by these dotted-line borders like pissing-corners,
I won’t assume all social interaction can be narrowed
Like backalleys of the destitute
Into following, and quantities of who has followed.
The cowards in towers built on pretensions to authority
Leaves the drive to freedom homeless.
Then if we are left without an image,
If we are left without a picturesque of nature,
Without a joy in the vacuity of text;
Judge us for our lack of aesthetics,
Ignore us as the arbitrariness of power is free to do;
Give us not visibility in our humanness for our bread.
Take on your marquees, where you select, and produce value,
Like a god out of a severed penis.
No how ‘bout I go out demystified,
Say in a hail of bullets of being looked over for all time;
That a real person one day might be my validation
Like that of a true friend.
Let the walls of value not be drawn in the immoral scarcity
Applied to human living in economics,
Where all is an ossifying competition
In a world ruled by compulsion.
Where though one has never been to Belmarsh
They are subject to suffering
From the walls of unmovable power;
Granting the arrogance of oppression never to budge,
Despite the truth of its injustice being as naked as the huddled and abused
Who trembles from the years confined and solitary.
It becomes a constant scenery flipping indifferently past;
Like walking for miles on miles
Surrounded to the horizon
By countless crucified individuals.
In a slave rebellion we are never able to full win