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Pearson Bolt Aug 2017
we held hands behind the Black Lives Matter banner.
we took to the streets in solidarity with Heather Heyer
opposing white supremacy and every vestige of bigotry.

the cops stood idle while racists circled
the park like sharks to shake our resolve.
but we carry a new world in our head and hearts.

we marched down Kennedy and Ashley
no badge or gun could hope to stop us hundreds.
we mourned and wept and rose like lions.

no justice, no peace! no racist police!
1-2-3-4, this is ******* class war!
5-6-7-8, organize to smash the State!


i cannot find the rhythm and beat amidst this misery.
but, in her memory, we will drive the fascists out.
from Tampa Bay, FL to Charlottesville, VA: *¡No pasaran!
This is less a poem and more a collection of thoughts, images, and experiences. For Heather Heyer. Rest in Power. Martyrs live forever.
Pearson Bolt Apr 2017
this is not a dialogue.
tug the cotton
out of your ears.
free speech
is the banner
fascists wave
to propagate
their hate, hissing
with forked tongues,
spitting vitriolic venom.

speak in a language
they cannot fail
to comprehend:
kick a racist
in the teeth.
*******,
**** ****.
no pasaran!
they shall not pass.
we won't go meekly
into that dark night.
National Poetry Month, Day 15.

Solidarity with antifascists everywhere. No pasaran.
Akemi Apr 2017
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.
Pearson Bolt Apr 2017
when you only
see the world
through the prism
of an Instagram filter,
the spectrum's
overshadowed
by black and white
vignettes.

brick-by-brick
you build that wall
around yourself,
closed off to the plight
of every one else.
who needs borders
when you refuse to see
beyond the periphery
of your iPhone's screen?
refugees? border patrol?
endless war?

merely fragmentary
snapshots
in off-kilter
snapchats
casting grim light
on contemporary
outcasts, rebels
built to outlast
the vitriol leveled
at modern-day martyrs
by tyrants and overlords.

'cause when you neglect
to read the passages
of history, you scapegoat
the brave, can't see
the forest for the trees,
reduce the complex
to Manichean binaries
of Good vs. Evil,
Left vs. Right,
an infinite etcetera
of demagoguery.

noses glued
to illuminated screens,
ignoring the visionaries
for illusionary fantasies:
one-click—purchased
happiness, bread
and circus.
advertising
has us chasing
a feeling fleeting
as a riptide when we
ought to be rallying
on the front lines,
punching Nazis.
a black bloc
tossing bricks into
storefront windows.
There is a time for reciting poems and a time for fists.
~ Roberto Bolaño, "The Secret Detectives"
Kagey Sage Feb 2017
Is it the human condition to be swayed by morons
whose only talent is to talk big and vague?
They get paid in bribes
cannot turn on empathy
toward those harmed
"What's best for me is best"
narrow-mindedness
Cannot see past
Cannot see:
"What harms another, harms me"
always
Polluted the air
to make some dough, now
you're breathing the cancerous soot
Lower the workers' pay
live in a world of hungry thieves
Kagey Sage Mar 2016
This divided society
putting most of us in poverty
but can't do nothing 'bout it
cause the computer cuts us too neatly
Still upholding the divinity of Austrian economic theories
when for the last hundred years
the rise of the dollars been all about
demographics & behavioral science
Capital is nothing more than a natural resource
I don't care that you got there first
The aquifer runs wide
please don't poison mine
Profit is nothing but an unpaid cost of labor
Cause I agreed to a certain pay
I must work the rest of my hours as a Wage Slave
Yeah, you could say it was consensual
but don't have much choice
when I got mouths to feed, a checklist of other needs,
and no extra dough to risk buying
exclusivity rights to plunder a piece of Earth

Human Beings: We call ourselves advanced
when we never been closer to death  

Human Beings: We fear the government
while proprietors with most control grab up more

Human Beings: I get more joy buying things today
than playing with the things I bought yesterday

Human Beings: Millennial pessimists, riding out the apocalypse
instead of promulgating progress
pookie Mar 2016
Life isn't optional,
We are all born,
We all take our fist steps and say our first words,
We all take those steps and we laugh at the joy of the freedom of movement,
We all say our fist words and smile and laugh at the freedom of being understood.

But then we grow older and see these actions in a different light,
our steps controlled and manipulated,
our words changed and banned,
our freedoms gone,
its chained to reason and the higher ups.

so we make bricks of reason, bricks of passion and we fight back how ever we know how as it is said:

“A concept is a brick. It can be used to build a courthouse of reason. Or it can be thrown through the window.”

so what will your choice be to build a house of law like those of past and achieve what so many others have failed,
or do you fight with your bricks and succeed we all others have failed.

Or do we change the course of history!

Take a chance, start the movement, take the first step and speak of freedom.

Not the childish whims of no law and no consequences but the freedom to live.

throw off the chains of technology and social media,
throw off the chains of theology and religion that bind us to war,
throw off the megalomanic controllers of our world and take a stand.

life isn't optional but Freedom is!

break those chains and life for freedom.
live for life its self.
Freedom
Life

we are all intertwined by the decisions that we make.
so lets choose together.
Lets make Freedom possible.
sick of the chians that drown us and tie us down.
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