At home in the wasted bohemia
of Hotel Bogota, Berlin; Petra
reveals the protocol of ‘Camover’ –
the CCTV-smashing game:
“Gather your gang, call it
after a political ‘trouble maker’;
tool-up with baseball bat or
axe then shatter the cameras,
careful to keep faces covered,
for the law’s programmed to
truncheon you to judge and jury”.
In Munich, the pilsner at the Schiller
ices my spine; yet I thaw in time
to see Neuschwanstein where
King Ludwig sailed his dinghy
adrift of sanity to a labyrinth free
from government conspirators.
Spectres weep histories of leprosy
and plague in Munster, where
John of Leiden’s ‘New Jerusalem’
ended rotten in a cage. I try
to pen a poem in Hamburg not
on prostitution in the Reeperbahn. I fail.
Note:
Participants of ‘Camover’ post videos of their trail of CCTV
destruction on the game’s website. Yet keeping track of
the homepage can be difficult, as it is usually shut down by
the authorities. Last seen at: https://camover.noblogs.org.
Michael Wyndham is a regular performer on the London poetry circuit, and has been most recently published by International Times, Blue of Noon, The Recusant and South Bank Poetry.
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