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—
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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.

In the shopping center
     I feel like an exile.
     As I write this,
sitting on a patio furniture display,
I realize I am the only one
without a cart full of cardboard
and artless plastic.
     A seasoned couple quarrels in the next aisle over which
shower curtain to go home with
as if it really matters at all.
     Children yearn for the colorful things, women the shiny,
men the dangerous.
     I want to tell them that if
they want color, brilliance, and danger,
they should listen to Elvis Presley
or read Tom Robbins.
     Anyway, I buy the lawnchair
I've been sitting on
and walk out the door.