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 Jan 2018 Anastasia Helarch
Akemi
Barbiturate is one of the few drugs capable of killing you painlessly, so of course the state has banned it. Instead we get paracetamol, a ****** over-the-counter painkiller that leaves you in pain for up to five days while your liver and kidneys shut down. Suicide prevention is a ******* joke. Secular appropriations of Christian values that assume life is worthwhile, whether you desire it or not. It’s long been known that rates of suicide rose dramatically with the birth of modernity—techno-scientific paradise for the middle-class which stresses efficiency over existence. New forms of automation, the human body disciplined into repetitious acts, the partitioning of workspaces so that no single worker could operate the whole—so that any worker could be fired and replaced with the minimum amount of training necessary for capital to continue circulating. The body is individualised, scrutinised, and punished by rich kids playing panopticon, so that any mass agitation is coerced into silence through the threat of destitution.

Slitting your wrists barely succeeds and more likely than not leaves you with tendon and muscle damage. Catalytic converters in cars now convert carbon monoxide into harmless CO2 and H2O. Drowning is one of the most painful ways to die. You cannot escape. The state places helpline numbers around suicide spots to treat life after the fact, rather than at the source of suffering. Vocal band-aids, ****** ******* aphorisms that seek to revert you back into a happy state-serving commodity. Things will get better. Life is worth living. Think positive. Alienation is omnipresent. Neoliberal discourse requires you to be subservient to the greater system of capital and the easiest way towards this is the instilment of comfort, of pleasant nullity, the circumscription of emotional capacity and reflectivity. Suicidal thoughts are abnormal, because life is worth living. Eat your packaged food item and watch Netflix.

For a drop into water to be fatal, it has to be 250 feet. Try to aim for your head to maximise brain injury. The most prominent suicide spot around here has a drop of 100 feet. They cordoned it off anyway. Your life doesn’t belong to you. The first time I tried to suicide my mother asked ‘why would you do that?’ as if it was the dumbest thing in the world. The second time, the doctor looked at me in an exasperated manner and prescribed me lots of drugs. Geettt bettterrrr. Nobody cares about you, they simply want you to return to normal. Normality as in serving your parents, serving your friends, serving the state, and serving the market. Normality as in not questioning social norms and institutions. Normality as in get a stable job (i.e. compete against other workers in an exploitative, undemocratic system that values and inculcates self-serving desires), get married (preferably to someone of the opposite *** who is middle-class and imbibes European culture), get pregnant/get someone pregnant (but only once or twice, because anyone who has more children than that is backwards), invest in housing (those students and lower-class families need to learn how the world works; really, it’s a benefit to take their money), watch sports (to instil national pride in your children; no son, we didn’t colonise the Pacific Islands, keep watching the man with the wooden stick hit *****), eat out every week (preferably exotic restaurants), go see the world (preferably exotic locations, so you can be served by exotic people, take in exotic sights, then leave without considering where any of your money has gone to, whether any of it has reached the slums, whether the beach you lay on is accessible to the people living there, or whether it has been privatised by the tourist firm so that only rich tourists like yourself can lie on it), join a club (those capitalists were innocent, it was the indigenous folk that were making a ruckus over the new golf course; it’s not like we’ve been colonising their land and culture for the past three centuries), donate to charity (but never any charity desiring systemic change; that’s crazy), consume, always consume (keeps the economy going; why question the desire for infinite growth in a world with limited land, resources and markets?), replace your phone every year (those poor workers in Asia need our help), repeat to the point of nausea.

The most successful method to suicide is a shotgun to the head; high calibre, slug rounds. Of course, with all these methods, the chance of failing may leave you disfigured, paralysed, mentally disabled or physically crippled (spinal damage, broken limbs, failed organs), with no guarantee that your family, or even your state, will allow for euthanasia. After all, the popular discourse paints suicide as selfish—an irony, considering liberalism places the self first and society second. It is viewed as sinful regardless of context—deontologically detached from anomie, alienation, material deprivation, social pressures, psychological affectations, any cause or structure. Life is worth living. This ignores that the subject is situated in existence. The subject moves through existence to live. Life, then, is the totality of the subject’s interactions. It cannot be universalised into a single state or judgement that merges all subjectivities into a catch-all worthiness. Worth is dependent of the subject.

I don’t know why I’m writing this. Maybe I just want everyone to **** themselves, because the world is ****** and the majority of people are ******* it worse. Most people think being nice makes them good. They turn blind to the systems of oppression they partake in. A while ago my mother was asking if I’d heard about the mass suicides happening at Foxconn, the largest electronics manufacturer in the world. This year she showed me her new iPhone. I don’t ******* understand. I don’t understand how people can be outraged at humanity abuses, yet do ******* nothing to help or change their ways. Yes, market solutions are ******* ****, but these commodities are still coming from somewhere, and while capitalism is in place, our money is still flowing back. I don’t understand how people can be concerned about ecological issues, then pour dishwashing liquid down the sink every night, dissolving the gills, eyes, and organs of fish in rivers and oceans. I don’t understand a ******* thing. I feel physically sick most days. I can barely function outside of university, because engaging with real people, in real systems, just reminds me of how careless, worthless, and disgusting they are. When I first turned vegan, my dad simply said plants are living too. Well no ******* **** dad, why didn’t you ask me my reason for turning vegan, rather than simply repeating the dumb **** everyone else says? If you were stuck on a desert island. Well I’m ******* not. I’m stuck on this **** world filled with nice people who don’t give a **** about anything. I’m stuck every week walking the same roads, to the same university, where I become more and more distanced from reality through abstract philosophical theories that no one else cares about. I’m stuck walking through the supermarket every week, to purchase overpriced commodities produced by transnational corporations I don’t support, but nonetheless have to buy to survive. What alternatives I buy are mocked because it's so funny being ethical in our day and age. Because it’s so much more normal eating pies, and drinking beer, and treating women like objects, and affirming nationalistic sentiments of white supremacy, and making fun of ethnic minorities while they’re incarcerated, and beaten, and killed. All lives matter, the liberal conservatives cry out, while doing ******* nothing to help any cause. I don’t understand this world, and I have no desire to be in it if this is all there is.
The first thing that happens
is the world collapses.
That is, it reduces down
but only I seem to notice.
Everything becomes flatter,
the depth stripped away
like rotted lumber,
like when they gut a building
but leave the historic facade,
and I feel like I'm limping
postcard to postcard
until eventually like I'm peering
into a discarded diorama,
where everything is smaller
than it should be,
the crudest copy of itself, and
everything is bounded
by shoebox limits
I can sense them everywhere.

The second thing that happens
is that I avoid everyone.
I avoid my mother on Christmas,
I can't look my therapist in her eye,
I cancel a date because
I can't handle the contact.
I touch my skin and it's like
touching paper that's been creased
hundreds of times -
old pulp that frays and splits.

The third thing that happens
is that I lose interest.
I put in whatever minimums
the day requires
and not a scratch more.
I put my mail aside
and watch crows
gather on the branch,
facing the valley,
black eye to black eye,
base wings folded against
the sleek unbearable body.

The last thing that happens
is that life cheapens.
It's hard not to notice,
since the papers and the news
and everybody's phone
blasts forth the parade of death.
No one is spared, children,
animals, the happy, the hale.
And soon these thoughts -
that life ends without reason,
that God has retreated from the world,
that no step is worthwhile -
begin to bleed in my head.
They lead to the paralysis
of a patient wrapped in gauze,
leaving only the eyes free to move
and notice the great black wing
that scythes into the valley,
feathers dark as stout,
the sun setting in its usual
incompetent way, the wing
so graceful that it might be
the only beautiful thing,
falling out of sight,
into nothingness,
down the *****
into the stale dusk,
into the exact center
of a limitless depression.
he interrupted me
in the middle of
an earth shatteringly
pointless story
to tell me i had
a cute laugh,
in a smoke-filled
garage infront of
all of our friends.
i said,
"alright dude
*******"


that night
i slept in the fetal
position with four blankets
and craved his skin so
bad i didn't even notice
that i bit my lip
until the pool of blood
collecting inside the deep ditch
of my gums, began to taste
of hot metal

today he texted me
while i was at work
and asked if he could
bring me a coffee
i looked at myself
in the bathroom mirror,
sighed and told him
we were busy
then i bought a
coffee for myself,
let the bitter sweet
warm liquid
linger on my tongue
and pretended
it was his lips

alone is a state of being
and i have never been alone,
lonely is a state of mind
and i have never been anything but
 Oct 2017 Anastasia Helarch
mzwai
I go to public places to be alone...

I sit amongst the crowds,
listen in to their instigating alluring words,
Exhaust myself with the false pretense of social-comfort
And think about death.
As it has always been and how it will always be-
More potent than human interest, temptation, enticement or fulfillment.
In the depths of these crowds I surround myself with
The culture of the unconscious.
Nothing has ever mattered but the collected cognizance of
The fact that no human being has the internal ability to become immortal-
And nobody who belongs to the crowds worries about that. As,
To be comfortably existent means to be uninformed about your own
Insignificance.
When I am aware of my own body I am more afraid than when I am not.
I watch myself from a blackening screen,
as I destroy what I was born into until it becomes
A habit instilled within both perspectives.
I let the crowds ruin me with glances and words and drunken love
That they will not remember.
I exist as a vessel, and let the pain of my future determine the pain of
My present.
I seek to hide within the dark of a night like this that has experienced my absence and enjoyed it but,
Their glances make me feel so present...

..I can only hide within myself
by pretending that I am outside of myself..
Watching from a blackening screen...
 Oct 2017 Anastasia Helarch
bleh
when i was young
i never intended on living to adulthood
    i didn't have any dramatic plans for my death
    but i hadn't planned for the contrary, either
and so
time rolled on, the way it does
and through pure neglect
i found myself here
   alive today

and the years keep passing, the way they do
time's funny that way:
it increments in loops;
      another year forward,                
      another revolution of the same.

when i was younger
i didn't believe in the future,
i still don't, but now i find,
that the present tends to stick around.
and one's seeming imperative thoughts and actions,
one's urgent sparks of actuality,
aren't flames of some eternal logos,
but are more
the random shower of a Catherine wheel
spinning aimlessly on a pike

and so, through sheer inertia
the world keeps on turning
and you with it
till one day
you stop
and are left
disorientated and thrown
into a wall

i'm not sure what i'm trying to say here,
or if this maudlin sentimentality amounts to much
but if i had any truism
from my time spent,
it would be this:

the self is a clear plate of glass
onto which meaning condenses like steam
at first invisible to yourself,
you become aware of your shape through
the foggy coalescence of the things you cherish.
but sometimes,
those meanings become too much to bear
and they condense
into a liquid
and silently drip off.
then
maybe you wait,
slowly drying out,
for the process to hopefully start all over again
but in the mean time
you're left there,
gently and vacantly
estranged
translucent

and damp
i'm not really sure
clinging on to dead meanings is too painful
casting them aside and just carrying on is too painful
and it all becomes
softly and quietly
utterly absurd
and while Camus says to carry on in loud defiance,
all the endless spinning tends to just leave me
winded and nauseous


   “a line allows progress, a circle does not”
but time's a spiral
and a spiral's both


anyway

happy birthday, everyone
How heavy the days are.
There's not a fire that can warm me,
Not a sun to laugh with me,
Everything bare,
Everything cold and merciless,
And even the beloved, clear
Stars look desolately down,
Since I learned in my heart that
Love can die.
 Oct 2017 Anastasia Helarch
Akemi
open home
gutter bird
head apart, apart apart

all toil, toil
sheets and time

why’d you bring me here?
we never should have arrived.
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