A Very Particular Horror
the funny glass of time
nostalgia is such a thing that the
past is rosier, sweeter, better than it was
and it glosses over how hard it was
the grayer side of ages
pain was so much worse than
we let it be, looking back
but go far enough away
or ask people in another culture
what do you think of psychological
torture that’s so mild, so insidious, so convincing
that you become completely alone among your own kind
you can't trust anyone, you are ashamed of your questions
your own people treat you harshly, impatiently, try to rid
themselves of you?
show them how everything looks pretty
but people kill themselves by the dozens
and kill each other even more, even faster,
and there’s no brotherhood, no sisterhood, no family
there are no walks through a forest, collecting and discerning
the most beautiful growth among us, the sun dappled leaves
pure water running over the rocks, herds of animals roaming
free to exist, buffalo not annhilated for white men’s amusement
and sport. tell the people who’s foreign to our specialties,
the relentless subjugation of everything female, the body, the spirit
all dissected to be applied to the work machine, as parts of the machine
working 14 hours a day, feeling despair upon waking each morning
feeling grief that can’t be named, can’t even exist unnamed, so powerful
so buried, so rooted with the trees of rage, that to be real and safe
become incompatible. to survive is to conform and die inside
but live out your days following rules, laws, directions, social, racial hierarchies, the merchant and petty-bourgoise class’s relentless disgust notwithstanding
not affecting you personally. they hate me, but i must keep working for them
or my babies will die. then they show you how they can kill your babies
if they want to, for no reason at all, and no excuse afterward
we are nothing to them, but we still do our lives, 9-5 and no more
if we’re lucky. if we're women, then all of our labor in the home is
rejected as meaningful, valuable, or worthy of recompense
then to live the horror but not be allowed to see it, say it, name it
to be shunned and bullied when they see you don’t like it
you don’t think cruelty is funny, you don’t admire them
you pity them, and they’ll kill you for that without hesitation
is that someone anyone with freedom would choose?
if they weren’t bound by it, like they didn’t attach that reality
to “the reality,” because it’s such a bloody set of lies
but the trinkets and bobbles, the benefits to classes higher
than straight up poor, the pathetic Amazon delivered bribes,
are too attractive to us. convenience is too valuable to America.
all this shit aristocrats invent and shove down our throats to
make american lives more convenient and cut off from the reality
of genocide and slavery, and we even think
'it’s not my fault, it has nothing to do with me,'
then why such misery, fellow shipwrecks?
if ‘it’s not our fault,’ why rush to gorge on addictions, beg for hits,
outsiders might say, they’re not living people.
being undead, dead, consumers, consumed
isn’t this a viscious sort of experience? learning to hate your
own body and view it as something the aristocracy owns
to use and dispose, to pretend to agree to that, is the pain
so not just the pain itself, but the song and dance for them.