THE GULF WAR DID NOT |
THE GULF WAR DID NOT |
THE GULF WAR DID NOT

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Staid quanta of individuality. Phenom asks if they can go. The Big Mouth replies, babble babble. In a fit of rage, Phenom shouts, I’ve had enough of this. They wrench themselves off the dissection table, fetters flying into the air, but a sudden bout of vertigo sets in. They lie back down. The Big Mouth sticks a thermometer into their mouth and begins heating a can of corn soup.

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Professor Kippotkin takes the stage. She coughs into the mic to quiet the audience, but they are caught in sordid *******. She coughs again, managing only to project a trail of spit onto the shoulder of the nearest security guard. He turns immediately, a perfect ninety-degrees spin, automatically signalling the first in command. He has been trained since seventeen for this one task of momentous disciplinary precision. The first in command bellows, Let her speak! a phrase his colleagues repeat in serial down the chain of command.

The crowd soon catches on. An isolated few nod in consternation. Let her speak! they yell from the pits of their lungs, Let her speak!

Thank you, thank you all, Professor Karlpoppins exclaims, cheeks flush with amazement. More and more of the crowd join in. It is a rousing spectacle, a poignant display of human decency. But something is awry. The professor’s gratitude is swallowed into a cacophonous whole. Let her speak! The carnal grip of the big Other’s command unleashes the crowd’s jouissance. United in the master discourse, the crowd fragments into a bewildered totality. Let her speak! they scream at one another, arms jostling, heads tilting back, necks bared to the beating pulse of the earth-sky. LET HER SPEAK! Their combined blows begin to generate an ominous om.

Pl-please, Professor Kibbiezsche sputters, please, everyone! but the crowd have already forgotten her existence. Reams of toilet paper fly through the air. A crashing plane sounds in the distance. Crops burn.

The security team are forced to intervene. They close in from the sides, wielding riot shields and tear gas. HYPOCRITES! one of the members of the crowd screams. OPPRESSORS OF THE WORD! another follows. Footage of security guards flailing on the ground circulate on social media, tagged with the phrase WHO SPEAKS MY SPEAK?

Within twenty four hours, the whole country is ablaze with media coverage. Political scientists gather with literary scholars to speak the unspeakable into commercially-viable forms. Semiotext(e) sign a deal with Hollywood to write a docudrama about Baudrillard’s turbid *** life. Professor Kubblebutts is flown to Hawaii to give a speech on combine harvesters.

WHY WE OPPOSE:
I desire, therefore I am not. Incantation of the other spills through my greasy fingers as I fumble towards the hot sauce, dollop dollop, chicken salt strewn across the nommy wedges. That’ll be $4.50. They have already handed me the note. Our fingers touched for the briefest second, an anointment of the greasy chicken, the wedge fingers, the have a good night mister gurgle bop.

The taxi man sits outside in the cold, back heated by the friction of the smoothie machine, an indefinite spin, western civilisation’s meltdown. The turgid heat breezes past my neck and I sigh, almost in delight, but mostly out of convention and solidarity with the other workers. I hear the pitter pat of my shiftpanion as she scoops hot chips into the fresh night; it is so fresh, there is still so much night, why are you giving me $5 dollars, there is a bug on your face.

I take a break. The cool taxi man glances over just as I put my hands down my pants to shift my boxers into a more comfortable why is it always like this.

Everyone blames Foucault for destroying agency, but agency only arises in the gap between discourses, which is never a gap in power, but rather, the transversal of one power relation into the discursive matrix of another; what appears original is merely the same performance in the wrong site, that’ll be $24 for your **** and condoms.

The crumbled fish is shrinking with each passing day, little gasping body beneath the heat lamp, waffle waffle, waffle waffle, I am suffocating :)

WHY WE OPPOSE:
|||||FEeling BOLD? FeEL BOldbous ;;;; new Paracetamol Jelly and the KINK-CATS tour out the last week—
Thank you for holding. Please note this conversation may be recorded.
To continue, please state: 'my voice confirms my identity'
||"my voice confirms my identity"
and again, please state: 'my voice confirms my identity'
||"my voice confirms my identity"
Please note that this conversation is being recorded for the purposes of confirming your identity.
||"thanks"

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Slowly, slowly, Juniper sinks into the bed frame, the draughty window, the rotting sink. Hibiscus coveted for its prophetic dreams, pale steam smites nostalgia for a vision of the beyond. Streamlined entry into New World, an endless reshelving of family-value Mi Goreng, stormwater through the hollow vessels that twist beneath Juniper’s soles.

Juniper climbs the Garden steps. Pale trace of past motions set to automate at the slightest incline. The cloying rot beneath the pines pulls her closer and closer to the vital cache, the hidden excess. Another hedgehog climbs the mound; it admits its body, it expands in putrefaction.

Exiting onto the street, Juniper is greeted by a sign that reads “Caution. Night Shooting. Stay Out.”

WHY WE OPPOSE:
Steam creeps the mouth of the lid. Pallid flesh of yesterday’s body, settles the kitchen table, the hand, as motes crumple beneath gravity’s well. Mottled refuse, tied with a plastic ribbon, thrown into the street. Keys digging trenches, grandfather, the hollow behind my knee.

Last summer I waited for the rain in the dry concrete channel of the Leith. I was alone with the kayaks and the road cones and the fish, holes festering, showing their ribs in the walls of our flat, legs spread wearing high school sweaters, unable to breathe through cling wrap.

The summer before that, I watched films of myself bashing in the heads of strangers. Every night the ceiling of my mouth would transfigure into a doorway and I’d force my tongue through its serrated edges, waking with a new face. The cassettes would arrive soon after, testimonies of a brute physicality I could not remember enacting.

Earth grins, death strides. Hydraulic incisors pry the dead awake. At the smallest unit of life: phones, condoms, water bottles.

i think we lost the world
decades ago.

i arrive
fragmentary trajectories
polyvocal mass

burning assemblage of resentment
walking to the kitchen to grab an apple
leave me alone

i lock the door
i eat my apple
i feel no guilt

panoptic father
you know

we tried
with the counter
the indexical signs of worth
the grade average
you let fall

three years is too long
to watch the same *******
repeat
to provide multiple outs
you didn’t want
except the one who was
never enough

i’m done with feeling
anything.

hi
for the past 3 years ive gone by a made-up name that i penned for myself (shiloh) due to the crippling fear of anyone i know in real life finding my writing and in turn invading the darkest parts of my mind
but ive decided im done hiding
so hi again
my name is caja
and that’s all for now

that's all you are, he said: love addiction.
everything is a drug these days but it's all
pluh-see-boh, haven't you heard?
keep grinding the sugar into the carpet.
keep telling yourself it's not the amphetamines making you jumpy.
all the scabs you're carving out hook themselves onto me and they're
rah-vuh-ness, can't you see i'm getting oh-so-thin?
my skin is healing over the ants.
yesterday i picked them up because i saw them drowning
i was almost distracted by the dandelions, you sneaky *******, because they look just like your freckles dotting the lawn
but they were suffocating under the ice-cream i dropped
it melted and crushed the flowers too. they're swollen and ripe and bowtie boy says it's
feh-cun-duh-tee, can't you give that to me?
i know your hands are starving.
i know you're empty and all you dream is to lick the sweat from my slick thighs
holding my virginal knuckles tight in your callouses
take me back home when you're sober,
roh-mee-oh

miles of endless restlessness and hands tied together with string
(like delicate handcuffs with a summer-orange scent)
hiding within fields of oxeye daisies where lips hold yearning like a mosquito's bloodlust for a certain syrupy red wine that's held in containers of flesh and bone
the proboscis breaks the surface like an embroidery needle and the sting is sewn to the skin like round buttons on soft cotton tops
as they drink from the holy bodies sunk deep in cool soil kissed by pious rays of lucent starlight
and we itch from an insect's touch and a lover's kiss