It is illogical to preserve a social order when that social order is a false dilemma of death. Does the necro-social order work for you? Are you a future mourner or a future murderer or a future corpse?
The people we love are not safe in the world and those people we love who are not safe in the world are the people we all are, mostly, and aren’t all those people the people who are the world, mostly, who make almost everything good in the world, too?
Who are these others that are these almost no ones who think they own everything? I’ve seen what they put in their museums: boring squares and cold marbles of Perseus holding the head of Medusa and so many women stripped of their clothes and video screens of young white male faces reciting the poetry of Harry Potter subjectivity on unceasing loop like its own patriarchal white supremacist psy-ops. In their books, too, and philosophies, we either never find ourselves in their indexes or worse, have to read what happens when we do.
These almost no one’s of the world, narrow and conniving, work to convince us that the world that almost all of us make is theirs, that we can’t move through it, that we can’t eat its fruits, that we must beg for scraps or have sex for them or fight for them (scraps of what we ourselves have made). And when they can’t convince us in the quieter ways, the ways of fear and depression and desperation and attendant ideologies, then they also try to convince us with fists and badges and LRADS and newschannels and guns.
There are those who make the vast world’s vast music and there are those who shoot the narrow world’s teargas, flash grenades, water cannons, rubber bullets, regular guns.*
Is your body, are your hours, are your efforts, your own? Or does the narrow world say that the only thing left for you is your pain? Does it tell you that your pain is the only thing that is yours alone?
It is easy to feel like your time belongs to your employers and your body to men or the family or the state, and it is easy to feel that only your pain is yours entirely, that your struggle is a field you cultivate yourself, a thorny one of your-own-damn-fault. This is their other weapon: to make the opposite of what is true seem true. But what is actually true is that in the world as it is now pain is the one thing we can be certain of we are never in alone.
The narrow world would have women and other people make people and care for them just to donate them as brutal, sensate, pained material of the world in this arrangement. It would ask us to gestate food for its nightmare. It would ask us to reproduce, with our love, fodder with a pain scale, then surplus, fodder, too, and only what can feel the pain exacted upon it. But when we feed & grow & tend each other it is not to feed & grow & tend the machinery of expansionist death. There are reasonable things we can do to refuse this. That is another kind of poem.
prguitarman
stormborns
origamiaround
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
theartofmadeline
amandla
gummygunk
dailybridgerton
