Villainy
Playlist by Andrea Abi-KaramIf we are to start again, "renewed or better," VILLAINY insists, we’ll first suffer the pain of radical un-making. Willingness to suffer such pains, in, for example, the desire to be "flat" (which would hurt) constitutes villainy while the world belongs to "1. CAPITALISM 2. THE STATE 3. COLONIALISM 4. NAZIS 5. RACISM 6. OPPRESSION." This is a text that performs the awful compression – squeezing – of our capacities collectively to deal with reckless disrespect for life not just under this government. This book is fire. But not to burn-it-down. To light my way to a friend.
—Simone White
from The Aftermath
I STARTED OUT THIS PIECE
I STARTED OUT
I STARTED OUT BY TRYING TO INHABIT FANON
I STARTED OUT BY
TRYING TO FIGURE SOMETHING OUT
it’s easy to think the poet is the problem
but the poet is really just sad or maybe
even just nothing & the poet can’t
burn down J’s cell or the entire prison
or all the prisons & the poet can’t even write
a fanonian poem because what would that actually look like?
the poet can show up sometimes or not
the poet can watch
the poet can write, or not
because what would the fanonian poem even be—
it wouldn’t even be a poem or a phrase or a piece of art
in the middle of the street
it would just be fire itself
WOULDN’T FANONIAN FORM BE SUCH A GOOD ALBUM NAME
it has the same problem still tho
tapes to set yr tape player on fire
light it up, light it up
Hold My Hand
in response to David Wojnarowicz @ the Whitney (begun last day of the Whitney DW show 9/30/18, transcribed 11/11/18)
I u made me want to get fucked intensely & anonymously hand slow, cock hard in bright, fall/en light break thru the gauzy exterior of streetlamps @ the edge of the water @ night the kind that eclipses depth perception making every thing so much more immediate amongst the lies the institution told me: desxualizing intimacy is a failure of visibility
II the gradual interiority of watching someone flip pages & pages of photos of the one u/love personal collapse/ slide in to icon i wake early ready for a fight i wake early ready for a fuck sometimes i think they’re the same gesture b/w us
the way the visual notebook clicks
III we sit close but & revel in this static of proximity pressed up against DW’s visual mausoleum people enter & exit the grid—mid loop we wait for the loop to repeat anti linearity of water falling upwards famous gays are only pristine when they’re dead
IV quick cut/off
V we sit in between gallery walls facing others oriented transit parallel recordings of DW sprawl out along the tempered light nonstop with the weight of mortality / immateriality / hopeless rage i want to grab yr hand close the blanks between bodies in present mourning of the decades of queer bodies propelled toward death by state sanctioned abandonment air bears heavy electric net of implication in the next phase of queer hxtory refuse the archive / demand the immediacy of extensions pressed sharp we breathe the same heavy air of rage pressed play amps crackle with loss loosened + looping
VI coins cascade down on to my face + brace for impact keep eyes open to see where the glisten lands they recoil on my cheeks & my eyelids & my hollows—mirrored each shadow holding a loss @ its corners i let the elasticity of the screen stretch over me taut & hope i can still breathe i wield my queerness like a leather jacket sexy & resilient that fine, brutal line b/w visibility & surveillance but god yr spiked leather motorcycle heels are turning me on thru the window of incomplete desire these zippers make me wet i bite my lower lip & make direct eye contact with the cycles of production until it grinds up against me i reveal my hardness in the space left between red suture drawing yr lips together blood & cum form rivulets down yr chin caught by my tongue along carotid i open up in heavy prep to get fucked by late stage cap nonstop for 8 hours feeling yr hard cock @@@ then frame—shift—click
VII i love to watch the planes fly over NY from my roof, light grids of transit hanging low in the sky cmon pick me up like u did last night @ the leather bar the shadows of anonymity exceed identity politics for a few hours
VIII “xerox former self ”
IX quick cut 2
After Cecilia Vicuña
The “about to happen” / “poetry as forces”—when Cecilia Vicuña says that the lies (the words, the language) of the Chilean dictatorship murdered & tortured thousands of people I remember the power of the word & i remember the power of poetry—“made of forces”—that holds something in the action of language—material consequences can occur—not always—literal action is necessary but the line between language & action no longer feels quite as precise as the street vs. the aftermath—an emergence of literature—unrestrained
i ask questions like
how to weaponize my own body
or what’s left of it
how do we weaponize our selves
how to weaponize the poem words as weapons
give the poem teeth
overflow its vacancies
with sharpnesses
momentary, transitory
criminal aesthetics
an unpublished sketch
of affinities
explicit revenge fantasy
& pride orgy
accumulation becomes
a book
a constellation of bruises
a blockade
a dance party
on the freeway
alongside, from
within, erupting
out of
we sharpen
our teeth
& make attempts
glass breaking
disruption
simultaneous