the Lecturer

Professionals talking retro, classical shit
Opaque, acrylic vocal cords
Lecturing flowers,
imparting instructions on which way to turn,
which face is the right face to face
Blinking rapidly in perpetuity
Pretending greatly
Specialized and heavy

I always just slept through most of my classes. I knew all the shit already, anyway. It’s just giving terminology to talk about stuff I was born knowing. It’s updated, like when they made it so the zombies could run, but it’s still the same shit.

Amateurs talking their shit on the internet
“A tremendous amount of order”
(Wagner-Pacifici 88).
Hate stares and sour frowns
Of Man, By Man
Bomb First, and
Never Stop Learning

These fucking guys—and it’s always guys, isn’t it? even when it’s women, it’s men—talking about they’re doing you a favor, disabusing you of fairytales. They’re just replacing them with even stupider fairytales. Like when they say that only a father can teach a boy how to be a man—like a mother isn’t capable of fucking them up, showing them how to blame and hate. Facepalm.gif.

Abandoned stadiums that haven’t been used
since the Olympics they were built for
Answers ricocheting,
boomeranging,
coming back around regularly,
getting themselves all over everyone
Vomiting digital camouflage
We say “Shoot”
when we mean “Talk”
A chorus sounding like sunrise
The shit slaps,
like an abusive husband.
It’s, something
or other.

“The truth is electric
and it spreads, spreads, spreads…”
(Cleaver 118).
Bow your heads.
Let us pray.

Nerves,
Mega.
Raw,
Forever.

Works Cited

Cleaver, Eldrige. Soul on Ice. Delta, 1968.

Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia vs. MOVE. University of Chicago Press, 1994.

people pass by
all days
pick and choose who i
want to be
like hats i want to wear

imagine everyone wearing those
Devo hats
you know, the red ones
maybe like geometric shaped
in reality they’d feed those things to their dogs
take drunken shits in them

not sure if they’re on their way out
or pushing me crowding me out of the space
mostly not engaged
anyway

listening to hardcore rap music
taking note
learning all the ways to onomatopoeically imitate
the sound of gunfire
pap-pap!;
bbbrr~r~r~r~r~r~r~r~r~rat!;
doot-doot!;
bucka-bucka-buh-bucka-bucka-
blaow!
M.O.P. is great for this—
a couple of cartoon characters, like Don Draper or Tony Soprano or Walter White
any of the critiques made into celebrations
#goals
because we have agency
we decide how we engage and
what we engage with

do i scream about this?
do i shake some sense
into everyone?
(i absolutely dream about this)
everywhere there is to turn
you run into the big, dumb border wall,
and the process of exploding the thing
blows your ass to pieces, too
should we tunnel even further down?
can we dig our way out?

driving,
and Danny Brown says the n-word:
is it strength when i shout along with him
or when i pause
to think about my choice?
is it strength that i choose to write
‘the n-word’
instead of the word itself
or is it a defeat?
should i embrace defeat,
force my ugly-crying in their faces?

bored, disinterested bullies
junior high wrestling coach’s veiny temples
overweight hollow-tip bullets
callous, grease-stained hands that jerk you off
as they hold you down
(or hold you down as they jerk you off)
or soft, pale hands that haven’t done a day of real work in their lives
but they get righteously pissed on the weekends
a dad bod

you know what?
i think those hats are called energy domes
they are an alternative
they look dumb.