by Ali J Prince

If it comes, we’ll hear it just as clearly as a ringing bell

It will come in old crackling TV footage or in Dore’s dreadful din of hissing hell

In critically acclaimed documentaries detailing how lessons were at long last learned
By academics who ensured that legislation would have to be kindly concerned
With taking up the task of gouging out our eyes before we let that unthinkable savagery

happen ever again

It comes in memories of an old newspaper headline, sodden in the cold oppressive night-train

rain

It’s from the faded days before reality was enhanced and augmented

Before primary colours and pop music and public spleen was allowed to be publicly vented
Before surround sound and the Velvet Underground and peaceful alliances were peaceably

cemented

Tyranny lives in peeling paint and hard history

They ate tyranny for breakfast, dinner and their fortnightly tea (too weak)
And women cried under tables for the sake of sweet sanity
And starving magicians in Waterloo basements performed chaotic alchemy
Cluster bombs were dropped from dusk ‘till post-traumatic dawn

Horse thieves and pirates were hung quartered and drawn (in that order)

And you, well you don’t know you’re born

Tyranny doesn’t come in an App
We’ve seen it before

It’s got a moustache and a harsh pair of trousers
It’s old and cold and suffers in silence
All forbidding and grey and indiscriminate violence
It knocks on your door, at four, with a document

And smells of telephone wires and corridors, tobacco and damp pavement

It was in a film with the award-winning actor, he lost a stone to emote in a prison shirt
It was critically acclaimed so they put his hollow bones in a sepia toned aftershave advert

Tyranny doesn’t look like a gurning, groomed comedian

Who has emojis in his bio
And the gait of a hyperactive child

Whose family indulged every delightful shoe kick and enigmatic eyelid flick and paid

twenty-five doctors to arrive at a fashionable diagnosis

Whose mother delights – with baby boomer flicking of expensive hair, and Home Counties
nonchalance about being the wife of a marketing millionaire – in her son’s showcasing of her

endearing, if derivative, motherly neurosis

His sister works for Radio Four and this gig, this guilty pleasure blog, this vein stagnating

listless fog, this passive languor, this insipid chattering death march,
Is going to be turned into a weekly, family-based podcast
He’s forty-five and still latched on to the sickly-sweet lactation

They bought a disused railway carriage just so they could call it ‘Ideas Above Our Station’

They remind us all the while, if nothing else, we are at least safe in the banality box
We are wholesome pyjama people, acknowledging human frailties with a “that’s me, guilty!”

post-ironic paradox

We joke about the modern malaise with a dull accepting reverie
Self-referring to benign accidie with dead-eyed, spectral stagnancy

Reading a ten-part series about children and the misery and illness and brain-warping cruelty

of constant, endless, skull-drilling screentime

The daily assessment of the symptoms is how you know that a valve has been opened and the

sickness seen. And if it’s seen, it’s been and if it’s been it’s gone
If you think it’s here, you’re every filthy kind of every rotten wrong

The self-examination purifies itself in the flame, it lets out the eye scratching, ear biting truth

That’s proof,

Isn’t it? Tyranny can’t discuss itself by definition
It’s its own homegrown prohibition

Tyranny doesn’t come in a 24-hour newscast
We’d see it coming and stop that cheeky rascal, fast!

Tyranny isn’t in an App; Apps are friendly and want to help
They have funny cartoon faces to delicately probe
They probe their helpfulness right into your full-frontal lobe

Who are you to want to obstruct the highly viable digital viaduct

Some kind of Kaczynski freak? we’re solving the problem here; the problem of too much
flesh, untidy lifespans and weeds and covid and climate, and insects that are immune to
pesticides; are you some kind of weapons piling underground suicide bride? – we’re solving
problems here – the problems of injustice and tomato plants that die too soon and your
grandmother’s failing eyes, and limited shopping options and keep your sticky eyes on the
floor, on the culture war, on the floor and off the throne, look down and we will throw you

another lowriding rage-farming bone

You’re obstructing the queue in the bank; we’re solving the problem of you with a data
mapping think tank. And we’re curing covid and climate and loneliness and 3am compulsive
urges and 4pm despair and 9pm attempts to spring the God behind the God behind the God
out of God jail. You’ll like it, you’ll be more on a plateau. We’re solving it with an enhanced
configuration tracker and it doesn’t die too soon, like you do, and it’s got cute cartoon
synchronicity that generates tech-target intent-driven conversational data centric efficiency

Tyranny is in an Oscar-winning film

That all the critics called life-affirming and exquisitely filmed alienation and thought-

provoking nourishment for the soul

A British actor visited a victim to immerse himself in the role

Which his grinning Harley Street veneers found physically and emotionally demanding
He said being part of the project really helped him to develop a deeper understanding
He laughs in dark blue teenage trousers and blinks his eyes on the Friday night chat show

with coy English effect

When the American comedian hysterically claims he cannot understand his Northern dialect
Regaining camera composure long enough to remember he’s had his mind blown; by the
dignity and stoic strength in adversity of the silkily milkable silent unknown

Those dusty people whose fingernails tear
At the shoddily sewn seams of existential despair

Whose scorched suffering and scarred eyeballs mark the screaming staples of time

Tyranny isn’t interested in what it can data mine

We’re still waiting to be smothered with the the final Munchausen’s dressing gown
We’re still waiting for the Microsoft assistant’s whip to come down
Waiting for the smart fridge and the smart grid and the smart town
A circuit board still hasn’t been stitched into my wrist
A neuro cufflink, it’s funny, funny to find it funny, don’t you think?

To think that kind of thinking belongs in a thread on a 1998 conspiracy site
It’s been turned into a pop culture reference so, it’s all, it’s all alright

I saw it in a community funded cinema, it was in an indie film, with indie actors, muttering

about moon landings and Agenda 21

Funny and fun to live in a time when tyranny has discussed itself so often it has lost its trail
It’s the alpha and the omega, the Samsung snake eating its own quantum sensory tail
Only a vestigial root, forever, sucking itself down in a dusty tomb. If it were here, we’d see it

very soon

It can’t be chattered about from sides of disease-free mouths with supermarket baskets on

corners of sunflower streets from night ‘till noon
They’d be dragged off and shot

Or fed LSD and shown Disney films until they forgot

I read about it in a pamphlet, on Tuesdays your uncle prints them out for free at the

community centre

He says Lucifer is back and madder than ever and he’s a slick-jawed prime-time television

presenter

Tyranny lives in historical guilt

Over milk that was spilt or it sits in a cobweb pub corner lamenting the character that

catastrophe built

It’s not inside your non-flammable gaming chair
Or your environmentally sustainable underwear

Or in the uploaded readable format
Of your gamified love of dandelions and eye contact
And sunsets and wheatfields and holistic communication

Your dad eating the apple offering the reflection of the detective he could have been
He’s a freeman of the land and films the police through a broken-in-anger screen
He approached the council chairman with a lengthy hand-written charter
When social services call around, he’s all frequencies and astrological tattoos and the Magna

Carta

And he’s at state sanctioned liberty to post his revelations about maritime law

You see, there is not really any tyranny anymore

Tyranny doesn’t look like a million brightly coloured ways to showcase your unique

personality with user-insight chatbot dialogues

With memes and smoothies and green powder and gut health and mental health and nice
comedians in cardigans who all have neurodiverse works-in-progress

We know how to test the air for something a little too over-zealous
The lay of the land is lying fallow because if it wasn’t, someone would quickly tell us

About the marching boots and sudden rules

Measuring heads in laboratories and messing around in test tubes

It comes in uniforms and the olden days
We’ve seen it before; we know it’s wicked, wretched ways

Curled up with your chia seeds and your animal slippers and your online self-care-through-

creativity course

Tyranny is very easy to point to; it’s a comical, tapdancing pantomime horse
You’ll see it, it’s in ribs and rags and CGI scenes of extermination
Rebels in balaclavas will quickly respond and take over regional television
It looks like a film with the character with the wife with brown hair and toxic contamination
They fought tyranny together and the music was by that 80s singer with the historic sexual

predator allegation

It isn’t a blue light, a constant creeping sight hammering its connectivity into your no longer

resisting radioactive skull

Making you dull and insane and tired and sad and stupid and weakened and frightened and

useless and even more stupid

It isn’t a busy mum with a side hustle and a TikTok and a profile about her boss-babe

influencer school

Whose hi definition brows and blessings and best life utilise an algorithmic paraphrasing tool

Tyranny is an old man in grey with a moustache and he’s frowning and very stern
The reality show M.P has a little rucksack and exchanges emojis with his gym-body-buddy

intern

And the relatable world leader admits to binging on podcasts and Netflix
Opinions became rants in around Two-Thousand-and-Six
Wriggling is futile when it comes to those soapy lack-of-confidence tricks
The sleight of hand wrapped around the slightest of dicks

Tyranny isn’t involved in a charity bike ride’s livestream
Sharing a blockchain button with the local council’s wellness scheme

Tyranny is in the memory of an old man’s cap
Tyranny doesn’t come in an App

Even if it were near, you headed it off at the pass long ago

You gave all you details to the movement and they’re sending you updates with a jigsaw

piece logo

You’re moving on and up and doing your bit for the box that should be ticked

No need for any seaside sandcastles to be kicked

The community counsellor from her loft with a wicker heart and hypnotherapy certificate

recommends you manage your anger with an adult colouring book

There’s no reason to look mad, unless you’re a dead celebrity trapped under glass, whose
eccentricity is being shared at long last, free to express their righteous human rage on a ‘Hail

the Safely Dead!’ interesting personalities page

You’re a revolutionary from the wrist flick in your very own curated day’s event
You’re railing in your own way, against the blue and white toothpaste of corporate

derangement

Tyranny can’t catch you, and if it does, you’ll log in and state your feelings about the

impending doom

State them with a fiction, a forced intimacy, on the morning spreadsheet of salutary feedback

gloom

Nurse Ratchet with a Horus-eyed sacred doctrine and a big birthday balloon

It doesn’t come in the medicated regulation of your mood
The surveillance of your injected face, or green-space neighbourhood
The geo-location of the thoughts inside your neuro-optimised head
The marketing essay with a picture of your grandma in her photogenic death bed

Tyranny is buried safely in a dusty old tomb

If it were coming, we’d see it coming, we’d abort it in our collective wise and worldly womb

We’d see it soon.

Alisha J. Prince’s previous feature poem for us was “Heaven Bound.”

Find out more about her work at @alijprince | Linktree.