by Eli Lambe
How can you have anxiety and whatever
and read aloud to rooms.
How do you flinch at loud noises and not stares?
Speaker, the mind is unintelligible
and this unwell mind doubly so.
I do not hyperventilate this performance,
or rarely,
is this performing the cause.
Trees do it.
Certain brands of chocolate can do it.
Proximity does it. As does attending these things alone.
Speaker, you don’t know this and you won’t.
Speaker, the self-obsessed is revolutionary,
the confessional is critical,
and, I, in confessing to a room my utter failings.
“How can intelligent people be taken in by this?”
Vision of care and community.
Don’t they know there’s no magic money tree?
Dear speaker,
you use intelligence like a personal tool
a way of categorizing and condemning
you treat this as a goal, as something to be or not be
and something to shame in absentia.
To you, speaker, intelligence is a standard with a fixed definition
hypocrisy is intelligence,
intelligence is hypocritical.
Intelligence is condemning all violence not enacted by the state,
and supporting the violence done by it,
because state violence has been your lifeblood,
it has made you belong and be proud,
you are lonely, speaker, and bitter.
Dear speaker, this is why we don’t talk anymore.
How can you be, what’s the word? Queer, or whatever
if I think your partner is a boy.
It’s been 7 years
surely you’re normal by now?
It’s a *~normal~* relationship, right?
Let alone, speaker, everything else.
Fuck right off.
Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
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