marlskarx

Poem With a Violent Ending, Beginning, and Middle — Holly Raymond

Tue, 14 Jan 2020 12:54:00 -0500

I don’t know how to apply eye makeup
without smearing black stuff on the surface
of the cornea

I stand up too fast and bash my face
against an open cabinet.
Killed immediately.

In 2019 my teeth came out, kicked
apart by hooligans, I guess
I’d say hooligans,
or popped in the gob
at a ritzy intersection
where the empty park
across the street smelled like
hydrangeas.

A whistling policeman
laughing outside at night
who makes me remember
that Larry Levis poem
about a switchblade opening
except it opens from the inside
of a scallop and the scallop is me
and the knife is this feeling
that I am feeling for free
in Philadelphia in the present

I still maintain that I could die
and come back a vocaloid
with a palace built up around
my heaven bones, green glass,
blue glass, triangles, etc.,
dispensing my various oaths and vows
look upon my conceptual hair,
perfect, a hologram designed
for sovereign decision making,
a sword made out of futuristic
and bright-colored plastic
reaching down from the sky for
soft beheading

_________________________

Holly Raymond is back on her beeswax for 2020

On Proletarian Poetry — KM Cascia

Thu, 09 Jan 2020 16:41:18 -0500

On Proletarian Poetry — KM Cascia

1. Fuck a Renaissance

The proletariat, as Marx frequently stressed, is not a philosophical concept or a general category. It is a social class, made up of real people. We take real action at definite historical moments. Such as now, when a few hundred us who write poetry have begun to organize ourselves.

While this is not new, it is noteworthy, given that our predecessors, the proletarian writers of the 1930s, were repressed by capital and its agent, the state. Blacklists and bans, police harassment, show trials, character assassinations, betrayal by “comrades”. They went into exile, they went to prison, died of suicide or drink. Some quietly retired and kept their head down, afraid of losing what little they’d been left.

Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie seized total control of the means of literary production. Modes of criticism were built to invalidate the proletarian, elevate the bourgeois. A system of “professionalization” by way of academia was introduced. Those who pass through it are handed off to a publishing industry controlled by corporate capital at its heights, heavily subsidized by the state and private foundations at the bottom. This was intended to make the development of future proletarian literary movements impossible. Literature was to become a mirror in which the ruling class contemplated its own beauty forever, a walled garden full of abstractly beautiful flowers. And so it was.

Then we showed up with a hammer, and a sickle.

No one was more surprised than we were, at first. Each of us had been working in isolation, or with one or two comrades. Connections were made, conversations begun. Rich poets and foundations got called out. New journals and presses got started. Editors were overwhelmed by the amount of poems coming in. We started doing readings. And started to attract notice. So, it seems, now is the time to pause, to lay out some of the ideas behind the poets and the poetry, take a closer look at the who, what and how, remind ourselves of the why and start to talk about where we go from here.

2. We Do Not Live Quietly

The most important thing is to define the word “proletariat”.

This is especially true in the context of US literary (sub)culture. Not only do US writers share the country’s general confusion on class, they live in a world made almost entirely of bourgeois class power. We see this when they dismiss us as not “real” writers, when they look down their noses at our ways of publishing, and in how they respond to our critiques. For now, they try to deny us any validity at all. But in time, if we continue to build the kind of movement that’s now possible, even a monument to bourgeois ideology like Ilya Kaminsky will be claiming to be proletarian.

There are, in fact, already people with troubling relationships to class power scratching around, looking for a way in. Unopposed, they will take the movement over, destroy it, then retreat back into their class privilege. This will leave the rest of us, the proletariat, worse off than if we’d never met. Our best defense is a clear understanding of the politics, in theory and practice.

The problem starts with a misreading of the theory, which produces a misleading definition of “proletariat” as “those who sell their labor power”. This isn’t entirely wrong, but it is incomplete, like defining “sky” as “that which is above one’s head”. The sky is above one’s head, in most cases. But so are birds and airplanes and trees and buildings and a few astronauts who are above the sky. Of course, there is no real reason to define “sky” so broadly. The bourgeoisie, though, has an obvious reason to muddle the definition of “proletariat”: if we cannot even name ourselves accurately, we cannot organize. And if we cannot organize, we cannot act.

Usually, all it takes to do better than the above partial definition is to read the rest of the paragraph in whatever book. Knowing the dynamics of social class under capital can take us further. And an understanding of the proletariat’s historical role provides the rest.

3. Who Makes Who

In every text where class is defined, Marx and Engels’ definition of “proletarian” goes further than “person who has a job”, adding important things to the concept that can’t be tossed aside or overlooked. One is that a proletarian’s only economic means is the sale of labor power, which means things like rental income, stock dividends or inheritance place a person in the other class. Another is that use of labor power has to expand capital. This puts people whose wages are paid out of state coffers or other large reserves of inert capital in the other class.

These distinctions are not arbitrary. They follow from Marx’s observation that material conditions produce consciousness and they make a clear division between those who have value extracted from them (the proletariat), and those who do the extracting (the bourgeoisie). Those, at the end of the day, are the classes. Haves and have nots; makers and takers. Understanding this makes it possible for the proletariat to organize ourselves independently of, and against, those who live on our labor.

This is a threat to capital, so it counterattacks. It attempts to drive a wedge into the proletariat, pulling some of us up and pushing others down through the use of two tactics.

4. Your Boss is a Cop

The first of these tactics is mystification, which serves to muddy the distinction between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Weaponizing status anxiety, individualism and greed, it tries to siphon off a portion of the proletariat and turn it to bourgeois ends in the form of the petty bourgeoisie.

The petty bourgeoisie exists only to defend and serve capital. It consists mainly of proletarian elements who, in exchange for their service, are rewarded by the bourgeoisie with certain small privileges: business ownership, small scale landlordism, participation in the stock market or intellectual careers. They become managers, of both capital and its ideology. They are the consumers of lies like meritocracy, class mobility and the undeserving poor because these seem to justify their possession of what they have. Of course, any and all of these privileges remain revocable at any time. Should their loyalty slip or their management prove ineffective, they find themselves de-classed, pushed back into the proletariat and treated as such, usually to their amusing horror.

In the meantime, they occupy a fake gray area “between” the classes. They discipline and exploit labor for capital, and defend themselves by arguing, against the clear facts, that they do no such thing. So we find the owner of a restaurant who lives on the value extracted from 25 or 30 human beings defending themselves by saying they used to be a bartender. Or an academic who refines and spreads bourgeois ideology, arguing that actually they’re proletarian because their parents were construction workers.

When the proletariat begins to organize ourselves successfully, the petty bourgeoisie invariably arrives in the form of opportunists. Citing their credentials (which are nothing but a receipt for the privileges they have from the bourgeoisie) as their qualification, not only do they infiltrate the proletarian movement, they try to take it over. Under the cover of terms like “reasonable” “realistic” “possible” and “fair”, they steer us as far from proletarian goals as possible. Usually this means just leading us around in circles until we lose our momentum and cohesion altogether. At which point the “backwardness” of the proletariat is blamed for the failure.

5. Pedagogy of the Depressed

The second tactic the bourgeoisie uses against us is violence.

For the proletariat, life under capitalism consists almost entirely of violence. Highly varied, it takes on more forms than can be counted. Each of the isms and phobias with their particular targets. So-called “social ills” like drug addiction, alcoholism and houselessness. The predatory nature of the prison and healthcare systems. Finance with its weapons of credit and debt, de-skilling and unemployment. All of these work together, intersecting and interlocking, to break the proletariat as a class, as groups within that class, and as individuals. The result is the creation of what Marx called the lumpen-proletariat, the underclass of people who capital can no longer exploit efficiently, who it discards accordingly. All an individual proletarian has to do to wind up lumpen is live long enough, and millions of us are pushed there long before.

This serves capital in two ways. The lumpen acts an abyss into which proletarians may fall at any time, which has a disciplining effect. And those in the lumpen are often so burdened with surviving or dying that they cannot organize. A heroin addict with an addiction to feed, a person abandoned to mental illness, a houseless person constantly forced to flee harassment and search out food and shelter.

Marx and many of his early interpreters tended to write the lumpen off. They saw it as a politically unviable element, likely to be reactionary if it could be politicized all. Their focus was on the industrial proletariat and those elements of the petty bourgeoisie who could be won over, especially philosophers and cultural workers. However, 20th century Marxist formations like the Black Panther Party found that significant numbers of people who’d been passed over by more traditional parties responded very well to organization and political education. Especially when helped by poverty alleviation programs, they made very able cadre, and their parties were able to do considerably more than would have been possible without them.

6. Class War 101

There’s a restaurant, which is open 5 nights a week. It has 1 boss, and 10 employees, each of whom makes $50 dollars a night. Each night, it feeds 60 customers, each of whom spends $25, plus 5 more people who eat out of the restaurant’s garbage because they have no money.

So on a given night, the labor cost is $500, and the money made is $1,500. The boss’s take is $1,000 or twice the total earned by the workers altogether, each of whom individually makes 5% of what the boss does. That the workers do all the work it takes to make the restaurant function is obvious. The boss, of course, does nothing. If he’s like most restaurant owners, he sits at the bar and drinks. If, at some point, the workers drive the boss away and begin to divide his take equally between them, even if nothing else changes, then each worker takes home $150 a night, triple what they used to make.

But things besides who makes how much would change if the boss was gone. For one thing, absent the boss doling out abuse and giving irrational orders simply because he’s the boss, the workers, who because they do the work know how to do it best, could work more efficiently. This saves the restaurant money, which in turn enables the workers to invite the 5 people who have been eating out of the garbage inside for a proper meal, something the boss would have never allowed.

The thing is this: only the workers can do this. The customers cannot take the restaurant over and run it better than the boss, and neither can the people who eat out of the dumpster. If one of the workers decides they should be the new boss, it doesn’t work. If they decide they want to drink like the boss used to, it doesn’t work. If they decide to go off in 10 different directions and do whatever, or they burn the restaurant down, everyone starves. But if the workers are united, if they have a plan and the group discipline to see it through, then with the restaurant in their hands the situation improves for everyone, a little bit for the customers, a lot for the workers, and a great deal for the former garbage eaters.

Drastically simplified as it is, this example illustrates Marx’s theory of the proletariat as the revolutionary class, which can get rid of the boss and bring about a situation in his absence which improves things for everyone.

Only we can do both, but it takes a fight. But, if we don’t fight, we die under the heel of capital. If we fight and lose, we die at the hands of capital. But if we fight and win, we free everyone from capital. Those are the stakes. And that’s why it matters that we know who is with us and who is not. We have to know who the enemy is and we can’t afford unreliable comrades. But before any of this is possible we have to know who we are and become aware of what we can do. We have to first get to class consciousness and then make the leap to revolutionary consciousness.

This is where proletarian poetry has a potentially decisive role to play.

7. Not Your Uncle Joe’s Proles

There is a stereotype, rooted in retrograde Soviet-era culture policy and spread by bourgeois propaganda, that proletarian art must necessarily conform to the tenets of so-called “socialist realism” or otherwise be less than bourgeois art. Less complex, less aesthetic, less interesting. This is classist and false.

Maybe the most basic idea in Marxism is what’s known as the Labor Theory of Value. This was something Marx took directly from the early capitalist, aka “classical”, economists before him, specifically Adam Smith and his student David Ricardo. The short version is that economic value can only be produced by human labor. Simple idea, enormous implications, well summed up by the old slogan: labor is entitled to all it creates. Which is, in a word, everything.

So the factories and machines are ours, along with what they make. And so are the cultural equivalent, up to and including those forms and modes that exist only because leisure time and capital accumulations made of our blood and sweat made them possible. Symphonies and cinema. All of it. Even opera. Once it’s in our hands, anything we can’t use will be destroyed. This goes as much for nuclear missiles as it does for the work of Kenneth Goldsmith, but that in no way equates to a system of reductive aesthetic dogmas in the present.

Such dogmas are kind of workerist tailism, which calls everything the workers are doing good and follows behind, inventing reasons why that is so. Or worse: blames our supposed “simplicity” or “practicality” or even “stupidity” for what is actually an alienation inflicted on us. This is an abdication of the proletarian artist’s role: taking a vanguard position, leading by example, educating and helping the masses to an awareness of who we are and what we can do. This can’t be done with bureaucrats, cops or aesthetic dogmas, all of which have been tried. The only thing that can do this is struggle by us, led by us in our interests.

The best vehicles for that struggle in the past have been political parties, revolutionary unions, and the social and military formations that grow out of them. We had all those things in the US 100 years ago. What’s left after 70 years of reactionary attacks are much reduced in functionality and much too small in membership to be effective at a mass scale.

There is a new class consciousness emerging, however fragile. It’s been brought about by the inevitable predations of capitalism and has mostly taken shape in space opened up by the failures of electoral politics. But this is always a limited tool, at best, for proletarian movements, a road taken in the absence of revolutionary consciousness that would lead away from a battlefield chosen by our enemies because the terrain very much favors them.

It is true that the proletarian movement is in the best position we’ve occupied in decades. It is equally true that our position is yet very weak, little more than a very tentative (re)beginning. Which brings us to the old question: What is to be done?

8. Serve the People

Spread class consciousness, grow into revolutionary consciousness, write about and through that process, find comrades, build proletarian culture and fight the class enemy.

It doesn’t matter where you are in your political development. If capitalism still stands there’s more to do. So study, talk and think things through, take action. Then bring that to your poems. The things you write will push you forward in your own development. They’ll bring you comrades. They’ll make new comrades, giving rise to class consciousness in people who before were merely dissatisfied, or who knew something was wrong but lacked words for their feelings before they heard you say them. There are things poetry cannot do, such as substitute for study, but it can be a vital aid to all we have to do, the spark that can jump across the gaps between concepts and people. And who can know that it might not, in the end, make all the difference?

Our mere existence, at this point, represents a significant defeat for our enemy. So it’s time to take the next steps, solidify our position and extend our activities beyond the current circle of comrades. Publishing one another’s work, doing readings and articulating our positions are important, and will continue, but we have to do more.

Some comrades are printing broadsides and posters and stickers; a logical next step, especially if distributed as widely, and as publicly, as possible. Organizing ourselves at the local level and taking definite action to bring as many people as possible into contact with what we’re doing makes sense. Building on that local structure toward a broader coalition logically follows. Anything else I could say now would be too general to be of use to comrades I haven’t met, whose specific political conditions I cannot guess. So I will end with the following propositions:

That where possible we form groups of comrades on the loose model of the John Reed Clubs.

That those groups take specific action where they are to advance the proletarian cause.

That a means of linking these groups for the purposes of coordinating actions and exchanging information be set up.

That we hold a Proletarian Writers Council no later than summer 2021.

__________________________

KM Cascia can be found on twitter and they’ve got two books of poetry available in pdf form here.

a lie: no one is coming to save you — meredith k. t. hanlin

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:26:43 -0500

someone may come to save you, someone who loves you, counts your breaths at night, but you shouldn’t tell big groups of people that // someone may come to save you, but because most will sit and wait, noses dripping, hoping that they are one of the someones, their belief in ‘some’ or ‘one’ falls farther from meaning, for some // getting in there, doing the saving, it will be painful, as unhinging the maw of a steel-jawed bear trap from the leg always is, if there’s blood going to it // you must run once they are free, if you can, lest they lash out // but they’ll be back, scarred over, ready to do the same with you // for there is someone that always needs saving, and one can quickly become some

______________________

meredith k. t. hanlin is stuck in california and needs to get back east before the state falls (their mom doesn’t know how to use a gun.) [@meredeathcore]

eternal horizon — Vin Tanner

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:20:37 -0500

___________________

“eternal horizon” is a poem which will be found in Vin Tanner’s upcoming chapbook, “i don’t want to be beautiful”. The sun may give them migraines but they encourage you to watch it sometime soon. They are a writer and poet currently obsessing over sustaining life without industry.

Temporal Rodeo — Dustin Brian Kennedy

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:16:00 -0500

Why is it that I left the city?
Back to the humidity of foothills
and combined statistical areas,
living at the convergence of
half-hour drives to the paved
paradise and other unsavory
references. This place is just
one bad memory we return to
with textile ruins threading the
needle, warping the wefts that
loom over unemployment lines
and fast food milkshakes with
bible quotes on the side. It is
hard to say there’s a me when
our fingers are looped into string
figures, many cats in a convoluted
cradle. At least that’s what it feels like
outside of the city.

_______________________

poet, retail guerilla and constituent ghost of the spectre of communism (@mysterybouffe)

A Table Ceaselessly Being Set — Brendan Joyce

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:14:00 -0500

Cicadas’ radio static blanketed after-hours patio’s alcoholic echolalia.

A restaurant authored by amateur hours & baptisms by fire into the charcuterie coterie

works like clockwork: coke, everywhere smoke, ash, everywhere ash, past, everywhere past.

We pull the fire to our mouths like the night pulls the sun back to the horizon.

Cicada’s radio static blankets after hours’ alcoholic echolalia.

Repetition beats the brakes off of us. We stop for no signs.

One day I stopped to start. Stops cost friends, sparks, screech, other remarks.

One day I put an apron on & broke my busboy heart

& didn’t stop scrubbing until I named each callous after

all of my dark. I’d like to say for once I was right but I can’t lie,

I miss the night so much I’ve made a career off of its scars.

______________________

Brendan Joyce is publishing too much [editor’s note: this is incorrect]

Lessœn — Karl Dando

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:12:06 -0500

_____________________

Karl is an artist. At the moment he mostly does “Red Mage”, a webseries about occult communists. The pilot is on YouTube and it’s great: watch it. (@karldando)

Shift Drink 1/4 — Jonathon Todd

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:05:58 -0500

48 hours is long enough for the veil to lift / i think that’s what they mean by armageddon / Injecting magic in the hope of something eventful / reading Emma’s essays on violence / What’s a few broken turnstiles in light of consumption? Or history, a circle leaves you without close ties to the land / not property / But a place to be / increase of abuse & isolation products of products / I had a home once Now overrun we rebuild only as commons / we are told master the self / but I don’t believe in it / lived with its mumbled insecurities following me across the highways to this stoop / Pop music on repeat / a sink full of things to be cleaned / it’s damaging to believe in this illusion / yet / here I am making little marks on paper

_______________________________

In between stacking boxes, I write poems. First chapbook Over/Time was written on the clock. Steal your time back. (@JonathonTodd1)

✨🌙Moon Poem for the New Decade🌙✨ — Jonce Marshall Palmer

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 07:02:44 -0500

__________________________

Jonce Marshall Palmer says trans rights every day of the year. This poem comes from their chapbook manuscript Anti Pastoral, which is still being written. They are the author of Searching for Smoke Rings, which is forthcoming from marlskarx. Check out their website at https://jmpalmer.carrd.co for more poems and stuff.

Poem That Has Nothing To Do With Time — Tom Snarsky

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 06:59:53 -0500

Hugging the minimal lake to my chest
I think again about the canoe full of deer
Heads we saw at the antique market

The quilt full of eyelets your mom said
Her friend knew the technique for making
She took a picture so she could show it

To her at some later date maybe hey
Did you know Alfie Allen’s body double
Died on Christmas Eve for Game

Of Thrones I mean his name was And-
Rew Dunbar I am so sorry for his family
I took a video of my cat earlier under-

Neath the Christmas tree because I
Have such strong memories of the odd
Vibration that seemed to accompany

The Christmas tree when I was younger
Memories made purely by proximity
So when my grandfather died on XMas

Eve Eve Eve Eve it hurt my dad extra
I’m sure the same will be true for Andrew
Dunbar’s family which is on the one

Hand so fucked but on the other such
An obvious fact of the coexistence
Of meaningful time and accident can’t

Hope for anything deeper than luck
That the big sads will miss you on days
You are meant to feel nothing but love

But people still work all the holidays
Without even making time
And a half so that’s all a crock of shit

Anyways Jesus time and a half is the
Best I could come up with and I fucking
Identified Andrew Dunbar by his

Job before his name and he’s fucking
Dead what the hell is wrong with me
Better tweet more poems until I develop

A conscience surely that will be enough
Or maybe if I organize at least my life
But preferably a general strike maybe then

There will be no more deer heads to
Mount the phrase “minimal lake” will no
Longer feel like a necessary mantra we

Will be able to go to sleep without thinking
Of the thousand ways we will disappoint
Each other tomorrow and the earth

Will stop weeping its deer head tears
Will stop weeping its deer head tears
Will stop weeping its deer head tears

____________________________

Tom Snarsky is complicit

Biography — Shinjini Dey

Tue, 07 Jan 2020 06:53:53 -0500

What is the lexical difference between the ‘commute’ and the ‘daily commute’—is the latter a tautology and—therefore—a better articulation of the monotony? If it is stylistic, what is it to ‘ride in style’? What if I have taken two autos, the metro, and walked to get to work—can it be a commute? What if it was just that singular time, is it still a commute? Is it about the mode of transport (public or private/your own two feet, which is neither) and the continuity of work? What if I had to ask the grocer for ten cardboard boxes and pay the cheapest moving van to relocate for work—is that part of the commute? What if you have to take a flight or a train for work, is that it? What if you take a leave, and a more successful colleague, asks you to buy some time for yourself?

You are sensitive to time, you have to be – having learned that you have an age and that the world has an age too. You have learnt the taxonomy of the morning and the afternoon and the night and seen its corresponding animals.

What if there’s no office to punch in punch out? What is a smoke-break in the alley—what if there are five? What if you’re fired, but you still have to go there to pick up your things and your friends, and Accounts still hasn’t processed the overtime—what if you, just this one time, indulge in a cab ride? What if you have to ask for directions?
Is it necessary to be paid for, for it to be a commute or is it enough to grumble through the work? Is every movement (twisted hands off its twisted hands) away from the clock¬—but you’re still working—a commute?

Is a working machine a commute?

Is an animal a commute, or is it just the hunted animal?
Is narrative a commute?

___________________

Shinjini drops out of/quits all her jobs. ACAB. (@shinjini_dey)

∆ — roy

Sun, 29 Dec 2019 17:18:36 -0500

We stole a mini fridge from a sky box at the local baseball stadium one night; the stadium was paid for by the voters, but we didn’t vote.
 Wikipedia says voting may be hereditary;
 I wonder what ‘evidence’ they found for that.
 We can find ourselves right here, right now. It might be as simple as asking “Who was responsible for the suffering of your mother?”

  I’m removing this poem from the museum; it is work that must be done
 from London to New York to LA the evidence is building… not a museum exhibit, but something that knows
 one day it will change. We looked at pictures of pictures to try to determine what the original photographer saw;
 what happened to the people who this photographed ‘artifact’ was stolen from?

  If 'barely anyone is talking about’ what you care about then you need to read different things, watch different things, talk to different people.
 We’re out here monkeywrenching every damn day:
I don’t want the trains don’t run on time & they shouldn’t Auschwitz prisoners worked for Siemens
 The useful Nazis returned to work so drugs & rockets could be developed and the Cold War fought–
 And then they made a fucking movie about it! And it was critically acclaimed! Are you fucking kidding me!
(“Their Germans are better than our Germans.”)
 Smash your combination coffee maker and alarm clock; I already do in my dreams. Do you?

  One day soon I’ll be able to tell you how work was. I try not to think about that usually, but I promise I’ll think about how doing my job feels to me soon. Maybe
you feel the same way; we really should know that.
 We don’t know the true extent of corporate espionage… against rival firms and against ourselves as consumers, employees, ‘citizens’
 My history teachers called me paranoid until that archive was opened;
 Life shows us thousands of small things
 and all of them are significant. That’s what I see every day in the snapchats I get from you.
 I will always remember that picture of dinner you sent. I love you too.

__________________

roy says listen to the marxist poetry podcast @creepingmraxist

witching hour — brendan joyce

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 20:17:54 -0500

I’m alone with the night again thinking

every union, every right: ghosts of a

failed general strike. The smoke laughs out

of me against the night every union, every right:

ghosts of a failed general strike.

My father taught me how to play poker

next to the Murphy bed. After every deal:

“the pot is right.” Every billionaire, every cop:

ghosts of a failed general strike.

In his metallic mauve Altima the Black &

Mild’s cut sharpie-sized holes in the

tan leather interior. Every cigarette,

every night: ghosts of a failed

general strike. Back on Peony the

bikers across the street would get

coked out & then start shooting.

They ripped that building out probably

ten years ago. Every tear down,

every tavern: ghosts

of your safe & happy life

haunting mine.

The stars the moon the sky

ghosts of a failed general strike

The rain the wind the cold

ghosts of a failed general strike

Cars highways single family homes

ghosts of a failed general strike

downtown the neighborhood & what is left

ghosts of a failed general strike

my body my life

ghosts of failed general strike

who survives & why

Ghosts of a failed general strike

_______________________

Brendan Joyce is is and is

RXhausted — Farah

Sat, 28 Dec 2019 20:13:48 -0500

Take 40 mg of Celexa
Take .5 mg of Xanax whenever needed
Try Serequel
No, don’t do that, and no more Celexa
Take .5 to 1 mg of Klonopin instead of the Xanax
(Xanax is good for about 4 hours, then it wears off, but Klonopin
lasts for 8 to 12 hours, so you’ll feel better, and you’ll sleep
again too)
Take 10 mg of Lexapro, then titrate up to 20 mg — this replaces the Celexa
Try Abilify, just 10 mg
Try Abilify again, just 5 mg
Try Abilify one more time, just 2.5 mg
Stop taking the Abilify
Take Gabapentin; you’ll go from 300 mg to 600 mg
Take 2 mg of Rexulti
Try Wellbutrin
Take Wellbutrin in the morning, and take everything else at night
Take 450 mg of Wellbutrin
Never mind, try 300 mg of Wellbutrin
Actually, let’s do 150 mg of Wellbutrin
For the decrease in libido, take horny goat weed and ginkgo biloba,
maca is fine too, but start with horny goat weed
To combat excessive drooling, hypersomnia, and flat affect, ween off of the Gabapentin
To relieve tremors and homicidal ideation, titrate off of the Rexulti
— please know that there might be withdrawals, including heart palpitations and sweating from breaking fevers
Have you heard of Latuda? Let’s start with 20 mg of Latuda
The pharmacy said you owed them $65 for 7 pills?!
Here: Take the 20 mg sample then the 40 mg sample then the 60 mg sample
You might need to take the 120 mg sample, but be sure to cut it in half
Tell me if you ever feel restless, nervous, or confused
Your insurance may or may not cover this
I have to prove that you need this, that it’s really working
No, we don’t work with Medicaid
Never have and probably never will
Anyway… Need any refills on those prescriptions?
Wanna take home any candies?
See you in two weeks!

__________________

Farah is a leftist feminist writer from Los Angeles. She is passionate about mental health and frequently shares her experiences with the medical-industrial complex. Her aim is to shine a light on taboo and stigmatized topics while remaining as accessible as possible. She hopes to see socialized health care — including fully government-subsidized psychiatry, therapy, and pharmaceuticals — in her lifetime.

A POEM TURNED POLITICAL — Kevin Latimer

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 16:09:42 -0500

_____________________

Kevin Latimer is a poet from Cleveland, Ohio.

“gas station” by young nudy — Marzi Margo

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 13:02:14 -0500

why can’t the lyrics be about a trans woman? ~ a trans woman who has a thing for diamonds & men who wear them? ~ a trans woman who might tweet a selfie with the caption “#hotgirlsummer”? ~ who sticks herself with a two-inch needle once a week? ~ who isn’t interested in bottom surgery? ~ who has been a sex worker or a bartender? ~ who has been unemployed & homeless? ~ who has slept in a parked car with no heat in the dead of december? ~ who once worked in retail but was fired because of baseless customer complaints? ~ who used to have a sugar daddy almost three times her age? ~ who grew up yearning for the touch of a man & feeling terrified by that want? ~ who loves smoking weed but also depends on it? ~ who worries about dying before the age of 30? ~ why can’t the lyrics be about a woman rejected by most? ~ why can’t the lyrics be about a woman rising like a glowing phoenix from the flames that try to engulf her?

__________________

Marzi Margo is a person who writes and resides in Cleveland, Ohio. Ver most recent book is “pink maggit” (Ghost City Press, 2019). Ve has a website (translucent-snapdragons.gq) and a Twitter (@wigglytuff_pink).

Pressing the Advantage — Rishee Batra

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 12:59:37 -0500

Jiu-jitsu is a yielding art: one that redirects an opponent’s force and uses it against them.

When the king shows the crown of his head
the opportunity is ripe for a guillotine
choke: simply snap down his neck
and wrap your arm around it. Clasp your
hands together
and arch your back,
cutting off airflow through the trachea.
If needed, you can drop to the ground,
wrapping your legs around his torso
for added torque. Remain adaptive:
depending on his reaction, you may
have to switch to an anaconda
or an arm triangle. Only one thing can be said
for certain: once you’ve caught the head

stay tight:

do not let it go.

__________________

Rishee Batra is a poet and graduate student living in Chicago. When not reading, writing, or teaching, Rishee can be found training martial arts or playing with his cat, Obi.

the discourse — Liv Grace

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 12:53:03 -0500

there has been war there is war there will be war again
i am just waiting for the war we will start
in the names of the people who have already been killed
i am waiting for the battle of freddie grey
round two
where we kneel in trenches making a battle crying
because only now do we understand sleeping in tents
we have counted each light and dark hour leading to this
moment and they were not good
we were not good
when it’s going down
will you walk me to the grocery store
to buy my abortion
from the cop
behind the counter at the pharmacy
when it’s going down
will we
three tabs deep into a six-pack
still wanna trade gun secrets
no longer gun shy
we’ve somehow become an armory
even though we need ids to buy chef boyardee
and when the internet
crumbles and
our phones don’t work anymore
i will be grateful
for all of the paper you collected
i will build houses
out of the flyers
from the tenants meetings
where we
fell in love

__________________

Liv Grace used to live on the other coast and now lives on this coast, seemingly perpetually moving from one house to the next along with their dog, Karl Bark, and about 100 houseplants. Liv’s chapbook, Driveway to Nowhere is out with Radical Paper Press right now. Their work has also been published elsewhere. Liv dropped out college three times and has no degree.

anti-work christmas carol — scout faller

Wed, 25 Dec 2019 12:51:10 -0500

the butterflies and the sows,
i mean badgers not
pigs,
female badgers are sows just like
pigs are. but anyways,
the butterflies
the fastest ones, fly thirty-seven
miles per hour which is
faster than bison.
bison can run thirty-
five.

there are facts in my
advent calendar and i
pry open the little perforated
cardboard door
and scratch at the foil wrapping
with my nail and get
to the small
(but weighty)
coin of
chocolate in the shape of
a bunny? or bird?
and i crunch on that
drink my morning coffee
and get ready for work

sometimes this happens
around eight-thirty.
other times it’s
four am

advent calendars were built
for poetry: which is to say
consumption
there’s facts and there’s
days and suturing together
the reality of the day, of work
it’s a clean substitution
forget everything you
know
but remember (essential!)
that there are eight thousand
kinds of spider
in the world

these are supposed to,
like the stock photo image
of the leaf heavy with drops
of water,
soothe you. think
of the eight thousand
spiders, or the sows,
or the ducks with
no nerve
endings or blood vessels
in their webbed feet.
(the lack of)
allows them to feel
nothing
in the winter cold

on the last day we
rip out the tiles,
the little doors
the entryways of advent
and spread them out
on the dining room table,
arranging them into an
anti-work cryptography.

if we say it out loud,
it is so. the programme
lies
somewhere in this
fact about squirrels, how
they plant trees
while forgetting where the loot is.

(there are 5k spines
on every hedgehog.
the workday
never ends, just turns
and in turning,
resolves
back into
itself)

probably by
day nine i’ll be all
stupid fucking squirrel
i’m on a mad butterfly-dash
eating and not quite
remembering
where the loot is

__________________

scout is tired, but happy to be here. @a_dumb_broad

To Future Generations — Bertolt Brecht, trans. Seph Mozes

Fri, 13 Dec 2019 08:58:09 -0500

To Future Generations
Bertolt Brecht, 1939
translated 2019 by Seph Mozes, who does not speak German,
with help from Dan Ackerman, who does

1
I sure do live in dark times!
It’s unwise to speak a candid word. A smooth brow
Means a hard heart. Someone’s laughing.
They must not have heard
The terrible news yet.

What times these are, when
A conversation about trees is almost a crime
Because it’s full of refusal to speak about the atrocities!
And a person calmly crossing the street
Has probably stopped answering phone calls
From friends in danger.

It’s true: I still earn my living
But believe me: that’s just how the chips fell. Nothing
That I do entitles me to keep feeding myself.
I happen to have been spared. (When my luck runs out,
I’m lost.)

I’m told: Eat and drink! Be glad for what you have!
But how can I eat and drink when
What I eat, I snatch away from the hungry,
And someone without my glass of water is dying of thirst?
And yet I eat and drink.

I’m hungry for wisdom, too.
In the old books it says wisdom is:
Keeping yourself out of the strife of the world
Spending the short time you have without fear
And getting along without violence.
Repaying evil with good.
Not fulfilling your dreams, but instead, forgetting them
Is what they call wisdom.
I can’t do any of that:
I sure do live in dark times!

2
I came to the cities in the time of disorder
When hunger ruled.
I came to the people in the time of uprising
And I revolted with them.
So my time passed
That was given to me on earth.

I ate my food between massacres
Laid down to sleep among murderers
Love grew, and I nurtured it recklessly
Gazing on nature, I felt impatient
So my time passed
That was given to me on earth.

In my time, the roads led into a swamp
Language itself betrayed me to the butcher
I didn’t manage to do much. But the rulers
Would have been more secure without me. That’s my hope.
So my time passed
That was given to me on earth.

Our energy was low. The goal
Lay far in the distance
Clearly visible, but for me
It was hard to reach.
So my time passed
That was given to me on earth.

3
You, who will emerge from the flood
In which we have sunk
Remember
When you speak of our weaknesses
The dark time
That you have escaped.

We went, changing countries more often than shoes,
Through the class war, despairing
When there was only injustice and no revolt.

That’s how we know:
Even hatred of oppression
Distorts your face.
Even rage against injustice
Makes your voice grow hoarse. Ugh, we
Who wanted to clear the ground for gentleness
Could not ourselves be gentle.

But you, if you have progressed to the point
That human beings are there to help their fellow human beings,
Remember us
And try to understand what it was like.

____________

seph lives in chicago and loves brecht