Spartacus Mmxii Today

Here is the text of the poem Spartacus MMXII by Simon Armitage. This poem was commissioned for the London 2012 Cultural Olympiad and originally appeared as a large-scale public artwork.

And a whisper came back, a coded message, an underground password and key: If you want to see Spartacus, come to the park, come to the park with me. spartacus mmxii

And as the sirens wailed and the choppers clattered and the police piled out of their vans, he grabbed my arm and he pulled me clear, and he melted into the crowd and disappeared. Here is the text of the poem Spartacus

So I went to the hill where the ragwort grows, the slope where the dog-rose leans, with a half-brick wrapped in a carrier bag, with a copy of Big Issue magazine. And as the sirens wailed and the choppers

So I went online to track him down, to seek him out in the cyberworld, and typed his name into the search box, the key and the password.

He said, There are slaves in the hands of the banks, slaves in the arms of the state, slaves to the wage, to the zero-hour contract, slaves to the zero-hour rate.