poetryforventing

[poetryforventing]

poem (November 14th 2024)

we are walking face first into fascism doing nothing but posting and complaining this is the fucking end of the world and we're acting like it's another day what the fuck is wrong with us maybe it was always going to be this way maybe human nature was too flawed from the start to ever try and fix us. I feel like art doesnt matter any more fuck it fuck this fuck everything I've had a knot in my chest for over a week straight I feel like I'm gonna burst like the whole fucking world has gone crazy! people are reporting on this like its nothing more than a worrying downturn when this is the levee breaking when this is the tsunami maybe the usa never stood for freedom and democracy but it at least for a time believed it did and that was something what the hell is this? tell me. if nothing changes drastically then the united states could become another russia what do you think will happen to people of colour to women to queer people to those of the wrong religion or no religion at all to the poor who are ever ground further into the dirt by the boot of capital? do you think our art will still be free? do you think you won't be fined jailed killed for writing saying thinking the wrong thing? is anyone going to do anything about it or are we going to ride out this slow death spiral with crossed legs and placid smiles plasted across our faces? I can't face it. I'm freaking out. a century of social progress turning to dust in our mouths. write to your representatives now. tell them the felon needs to be convicted before he take office. tell them he can't make up departments and give them to billionaires. tell them he can't make an unqualified pedophile attorney general. we are not powerless even if we are almost powerless. it only takes one spark in the right place at the right time to start a raging fire. it may not be much hope but it is hope. submitting to this like the worst has already happened will only assist in ushering in worse. resist with your every breath even if only by living speaking being yourself waking up for one more day for one more sunrise sunset rainfall snowfall birdcall twitching whisker bark at the door hug kiss fuck walk on the beach meal at your favorite restaurant new game new movie new book new poem squirrel staring at you from treetops drive to your moms house call with your best friend communion with yourself with the earth with everything everyone who has ever been is or will be.

[poetryforventing]

November 6th 2024

And so

the great experiment of democracy has failed

when votes are bought first hand by partisan billionaires

ever more brazen every four years

until your leader tells you to your face he's fascist

and you vote for him anyway

because all you've ever known is FOX,

is Rogan, is word passed down by capital,

is the grift, is suffering.

It is your fault, but it is not your fault.

All the systems in place that built this day

were built by our own hands, our own half-hearts,

our own avoidant consceinces.

It's never our responsibiliy, nor our problem

until it is

and now it is.

[poetryforventing]

November 6th 2024

And so

the great experiment of democracy has failed

when votes are bought first hand by partisan billionaires

ever more brazen every four years

until your leader tells you to your face he's fascist

and you vote for him anyway

because all you've ever known is FOX,

is Rogan, is word passed down by capital,

is the grift, is suffering.

It is your fault, but it is not your fault.

All the systems in place that built this day

were built by our own hands, our own half-hearts,

our own avoidant consciences.

It's never our responsibiliy, nor our problem

until it is

and now it is.

[poetryforventing]

The Language

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. It’s a front well practiced, one hammered and honed in the flames of a mind that has burned up and on and on and out so many times that it has forged an entire armory of defences.

But you ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine and you think me plain, dull, awkward, unkind. Alright. But I don’t know that I have a better answer. The world is dying, and I have no hope left. I don’t believe that there is good in all of us. As we speak we’re spilling blood: foreign blood, poor blood, queer blood, girl blood, black blood, native blood in a genocidal fervour that has persisted millenia. And our violence leaves a gouging slash across our collective chest, staining the human consciousness with ever more eternal, immovable shame. I don’t believe everything will work out just fine in the end. I don’t believe we will all be okay.

I’m uncommunicative. It’s true, I’m sorry. But I don’t care about your sex life. I don’t care about your opinions on influencers. I don’t care about your shitty inherited politics. I don’t care what they said on Insta, or Reddit, or X, or Facebook, or TikTok. I don’t care what the hot topic is. Fuck your hot takes. There is blood flowing in the streets, native bones buried beneath the buildings of white settlers, there are generational stains on our souls and yet we work only to sear more grief into the essence of our very beings. Good god, colonialism really taught us nothing. We are killing every last ‘other’ until we are all that’s left, just so that when we kill our world too and go down with it we can claim that it was ours. In the ash of all that is left, perhaps, finally, earth will be as white as we wanted it to be.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. You think me cold but I am an inferno inside. I have carved my life into a shell to surround these lashing flames of thought. I don't act how I feel–my whole existence is an energy shield–but, god, I feel hate like you won’t believe. I dream of ripping out throats with my teeth. Capital rules the world and has us kiss its feet, but even that is a lie. The mechanics of power subjugate us in entirety. Capital is just the tool of choice, the selected construct. It is nothing more than a rotten, violent euphemism that cradles us in its maw, waiting for the order to bite.

You wish I would speak more but I have so little to say if we’re not planning the deaths of the bourgeoisie, the policy-makers, the bigots and the land-lords the world over. Every throat I want to taste. Every drop of blood I want to spill in the sort of ritualistic vengeance we absolutely don’t need. Just, please, let me at them. When I'm done I will jump into the sea and it will all be over. Finally.

I can barely even bring myself to get worked up over our changing climate–though I know it’s another active tragedy and, in the moments I stop to think, it makes me sick–when apocalyptic radioactive annihilation is one bad day away, when women’s rights are those of livestock and POC are institutionalised into modern slaves, when we’re living in a world where autonomy and identity are dangerous things. It’s too much grief to contain in one life. It’s too much pain to even attempt to bear. I hope you are starting to see: it’s not any one of these things, it’s everything.

There’s nowhere even to run away. I flew to North America where Pride is sponsored by Target and they build Wendy’s on sacred native land. I returned to England where we practice monarchy and xenophobia as a matter of course, pine for the British empire and laugh openly at the murder of trans girls. Next I go East, where I am ignorant, but things are every bit as twisted, I just won’t put their particularities in my white words, I refuse to appropriate any more into my British Museum of atrocity. In the end I go to bed, where sadness makes sense.

If you’re not angry, you should be. If you’re like me, I’m sorry.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But really I don’t have the words. Even all of this despair and rage is nothing but the bubbling skin of the witch’s brew. The essence of the thing is a wicked magic, not communicable in words, it is violent and immediate and spanning and intrinsic and awful and consuming.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But the truth is I don’t have the language.

[poetryforventing]

The Language

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. It’s a front well practiced, one hammered and honed in the flames of a mind that has burned up and on and on and out so many times that it has forged an entire armory of defences.

But you ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine and you think me plain, dull, awkward, unkind. Alright. But I don’t know that I have a better answer. The world is dying, and I have no hope left. I don’t believe that there is good in all of us. As we speak we’re spilling blood: foreign blood, poor blood, queer blood, girl blood, black blood, native blood in a genocidal fervour that has persisted millenia. And our violence leaves a gouging slash across our collective chest, staining the human consciousness with ever more eternal, immovable shame. I don’t believe everything will work out just fine in the end. I don’t believe we will all be okay.

I’m uncommunicative. It’s true, I’m sorry. But I don’t care about your sex life. I don’t care about your opinions on influencers. I don’t care about your shitty inherited politics. I don’t care what they said on Insta, or Reddit, or X, or Facebook, or TikTok. I don’t care what the hot topic is. Fuck your hot takes. There is blood flowing in the streets, native bones buried beneath the buildings of white settlers, there are generational stains on our souls and yet we work only to sear more grief into the essence of our very beings. Good god, colonialism really taught us nothing. We are killing every last ‘other’ until we are all that’s left, just so that when we kill our world too and go down with it we can claim that it was ours. In the ash of all that is left, perhaps, finally, earth will be as white as we wanted it to be.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. You think me cold but I am an inferno inside. I have carved my life into a shell to surround these lashing flames of thought. I don't act how I feel–my whole existence is an energy shield–but, god, I feel hate like you won’t believe. I dream of ripping out throats with my teeth. Capital rules the world and has us kiss its feet, but even that is a lie. The mechanics of power subjugate us in entirety. Capital is just the tool of choice, the selected construct. It is nothing more than a rotten, violent euphemism that cradles us in its maw, waiting for the order to bite.

You wish I would speak more but I have so little to say if we’re not planning the deaths of the bourgeoisie, the policy-makers, the bigots and the land-lords the world over. Every throat I want to taste. Every drop of blood I want to spill in the sort of ritualistic vengeance we absolutely don’t need. Just, please, let me at them. When I'm done I will jump into the sea and it will all be over. Finally.

I can barely even bring myself to get worked up over our changing climate–though I know it’s another active tragedy and, in the moments I stop to think, it makes me sick–when apocalyptic radioactive annihilation is one bad day away, when women’s rights are those of livestock and POC are institutionalised into modern slaves, when we’re living in a world where autonomy and identity are dangerous things. It’s too much grief to contain in one life. It’s too much pain to even attempt to bear. I hope you are starting to see: it’s not any one of these things, it’s everything.

There’s nowhere even to run away. I flew to North America where Pride is sponsored by Target and they build Wendy’s on sacred native land. I returned to England where we practice monarchy and xenophobia as a matter of course, pine for the British empire and laugh openly at the murder of trans girls. Next I go East, where I am ignorant, but things are every bit as twisted, I just won’t put their particularities in my white words, I refuse to appropriate any more into my British Museum of atrocity. In the end I go to bed, where sadness makes sense.

If you’re not angry, you should be. If you’re like me, I’m sorry.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But really I don’t have the words. Even all of this despair and rage is nothing but the bubbling skin of the witch’s brew. The essence of the thing is a wicked magic, not communicable in words, it is violent and immediate and spanning and intrinsic and awful and consuming.

You ask me how I am and I tell you I’m fine. But the truth is I don’t have the language.

[poetryforventing]

I want to write happy poetry

I found love and feel good mostly

I don't look after myself well enough and that scares me

But, yeah, I feel good mostly

And I want to write happy poetry

But there's genocide on the news

And our leaders approve

And a friend says 'both sides are just as bad'

Like, hon

Shut up

It's fucking genocide

Did we learn nothing from history

From imperialism

From fucking concentration camps?

It's sickening

And I feel so powerless

Poor and unheard

A jumped up insect in the dirt

If only my white guilt could bring back all those beautiful brown bodies from the earth

If I shed a tear for every life lost will I become a white savior or a dried up husk?

I've never earned much more than minimum wage

But at least I don't expect an early grave under the rubble of my home or a hospital

At least I'm not a body in the background of a soldier's TikTok

I wish I had an answer to all of this

I wish I had the power to save all those lives

But I've spent 28 years and counting trying to save my own

And I'm one of the lucky ones, I've made it this far

So all I can do is speak my mind:

Ceasefire, now.

Then free Palestine.

[poetryforventing]

I want to write happy poetry

I found love and feel good mostly

I don't look after myself well enough and that scares me

But, yeah, I feel good mostly

And I want to write happy poetry

But there's genocide on the news

And our leaders approve

And a friend says 'both sides are just as bad'

Like, hon

Shut up

It's fucking genocide

Did we learn nothing from history

From imperialism

From fucking concentration camps?

It's sickening

And I feel so powerless

Poor and unheard

A jumped up insect in the dirt

If only my white guilt could bring back all those beautiful brown bodies from the earth

If I shed a tear for every life lost will I become a white savior or a dried up husk?

I've never earned much more than minimum wage

But at least I don't expect an early grave under the rubble of my home or a hospital

At least I'm not a body in the background of a soldier's TikTok

I wish I had an answer to all of this

I wish I had the power to save all those lives

But I've spent 28 years and counting trying to save my own

And I'm one of the lucky ones, I've made it this far

So all I can do is speak my mind:

Ceasefire, now.

Then free Palestine.

[poetryforventing]

their blood is your blood

is my blood too and it spills

now from our own chest

[poetryforventing]

do you see those crying kids

those lifeless infants

the phosphorous

or are you not looking at all

I guess genocide isn't cool

so just wait it out

until it's over

until everyone in Gaza is dead

and pretend

afterwards

that you fucking cared

[poetryforventing]

do you see those crying kids

those lifeless infants

the phosphorous

or are you not looking at all

I guess genocide isn't cool

so just wait it out

until it's over

until everyone in Gaza is dead

and pretend

afterwards

that you fucking cared

[poetryforventing]

a simple way of saying hey of saying hi of saying how are you today

i send a message every day and everywhere and every way i know how

i'm reaching out i'm reaching up i'm reaching for god in the rain

anything that gives me hope against hope that maybe you are okay

it's been a week it's been a month it's been a year since i heard

a single word from your mouth and although fucking it hurts

i hope you hate me and my guts and that it's nothing worse

cause the last time we talked your words were black as a hearse

[poetryforventing]

you love me but I

love you more and it’s not cute

it’s fucking tragic

[poetryforventing]

everything unravelling over again

destabilization and entropy

my mind is a mess and my heart is the same

the only way out was the only way in

[poetryforventing]

you recoil when I get close

it’s exactly what I didn’t want

you say it’s fine but I know it’s not

either you’re lying to yourself

or you’re not who I thought

[poetryforventing]

back again

thinking about the things I’ll never have again

thinking about the ways I’ll never feel again

thinking about the ones that got away again

thinking about all that wasted time I spent

and all that wasted time I’ll spend

chasing another one of the ones that get away

in search of feeling all the same old ways

grasping for them like an answer to my pain

 until inevitably they fade away

[poetryforventing]

there is no refuge from this storm

and when it comes it comes at once

cut and bruised and beaten up

is not and never will be enough

[poetryforventing]

a whole year of convincing myself that you felt a spark

and in an instant you tore my theory apart 

for you: a passing bad taste at the back of your throat

for me: bile black with blood as I regurgitate my heart