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Now reading
from Junk
Wherever we go, needs feed and I find it harder and harder to believe benevolence is the thing Thousands of Yazidi girls missing and plastic fills the ocean’s mouth and the cursive of yr name still occupies the canopy of my throat Fuel, the under- pinning What fires your gd engine Rigor, mortis Cold as unmoving or unmoved The opposite of music Warm in the cold universe Molten, forming A rock becoming magma becoming lava becoming land Land, the trauma of lava Lava the lamp of the ancestors and later a cheeky find in the Junk shop and rising in our living room Livin groom Just bc nothing cares doesn’t mean it lacks meaning What’s the point of curiosity but a train rolling past the spot where the Donner Party feasted n then go on a four hour Wikipedia downward spiral I’m the closest thing to a mime parade I whisper, home late tiptoeing down the creaky hallway tryin not to wake my roommates Nice chicken parm, sluts, I say to my fingers at lunch Dissociation is evacuating from the inside I just know we’ll have a good time Junk: a relief map of yr traumas Dipping yr whole arm into the bin of sunflower seeds I’m in my Shonda Rhimes Year of Yes n so far it’s pretty freak Gave a beej 2 a logger in town for a football game at his hostel (almost wrote hostile) the old-fashioned way, as in I met him at a bar after lingering eye contact No apps Told him I was writing this poem Flush with success after only eating half the cheeseburger for dinner For the first time in my life it wasn’t no burger or four burgers Full on Rocky situation He said he was flattered every time his gf’s gay friends grabbed his beer can Bacon-wrapped- date-flavored Doritos The artifice of order Predictability, measured time, present wrapping Order, Order, Pockets of Order Or, Durham I dumped a boy from Raleigh today The baton of Junk The dance whirls Whorls War Tortle Cut to mall dressing room thousand outfits montage Ignorance as a tool to revive the feeling of doing something new Junk has to be the poem of our time Pointless accumulation Clinging to a million denials Why do you need an assault rifle? What if radioactive bears Buying in bulk Afraid of forgetting that night in 2007 when Chantal shouted jamiroquai is holding this party together!!!! Junk is the garbage ppl keep Didn’t they tell you I’m a meteorologist but for people What’s that called? Psychic? Psychic side chick In maths, “arbitrary” is a thing w/o specific value Quite the Junkery The world, all of its rock formations and space missions and presidents and religious phobias and fashions fossils All of it has always seemed so arbitrary to me, bc to survive this long into an occupation feels sometimes so arbitrary to be And then sometimes so divine Who else could survive but my line It’s true, your Junk won’t save you from a tsunami, but I’m descended from a group whose culture history language gods cosmology calendar stories government gait was capital “O” Obliterated I’ll stop writing this when it stops hap- pening So when I “get” anything it’s hard to let go Resisting death for generations, I want to make the opposite of death No excuse for a vanilla bean tapioca ball attitude Ever bought a McFlurry n shouted yr dead inside but yew were pointing a finger at yrself and, horrified, yew screamed Ran home but half- way home yew forgot what yew were doing n bought a pair of sneaker boots at DSW or just me? I’m building the archive of a life that shouldn’t exist Wristband from that gay club in Cartagena where we danced w/ the self-proclaimed Perez Hilton of Colombia Every bar frankly should have tostones smellin up the grill Is a poem abt Junk itself merely an accum- ulation of doomsday and birth certificates If part of Junk is letting go, partly Junk is letting go of you Junk finds a new boo • “Control” by Janet Jackson is one of the greatest songs in the nation Warm hearts sparkle in the colonial afternoon Control is a reaction to something smacking that cracks the future w/ no precedent We call this a paradigm shift — say we were totally blindsided Janet wants to take control from her parents From the loss of a first love Control of the narrative Janet wants to Black Cat in boxy military garb Janet wants to show you her midriff and introduce J. Lo to the general public in a few albums Shock is a kind of collision A booming confusion The shudder and the shot are almost indistinguishable Shock has its electric correlate, but is also itself by what surrounds the event: a quiet dinner party vs sweaty racing thoughts And what do you make of it My friend said he found out his crush graduated college in 2014 n hates himself And I’m like wait til yr my age thinkin, I totally still look like I’m in my 20s Then it turns out the dude you were makin out with was born the year Janet, the album, came out What the literal fudge An hour ago you were singing “That’s the Way Love Goes” at karaoke In my defense, taller dudes always look older How to negotiate control and the lack of control When yr slap hand gets itchy OK whenever anybody dumps you just think of them as a gif of a white dude wilding out to Wu Tang in a cardigan then suddenly falling into the Grand Canyon — Dating is all the way dumb I don’t know what, if any of this, will reach yr peepers but I want to ask you this (and I am guilty of making ppl wade thru some bullshit b4 getting to my point): What do you turn to when breath dashes from yr body like it’s on the lamb? Cindy Craw- ford says lighting is everything Take a selfie from the sun- blown window Even supermodels say “lighting” It’s comforting! But there’s also value in exposing yr engine #BadSelfie Archaic but also so fresh: self-expression Trust is a thing that guides you thru a feed The voice like a handshake I’m in front of you There is paper and a trade-off This is ancient, like pixel drift What’s under the hood of irritation We call complication a knot A knotted life that doesn’t get to be undone Who here has a clear, linear rope? Denial! You have to love yr knots You have to shout them out Curate if need be Janet turns her knots into songs Sonic beauty (tho fuck beauty) Knot is the response A manager is like a politician Not the minutiae but the orchest- ration The dark forest It’s hard not to inhale The cave is where to turn when you’ve no other recourse This isn’t a discussion This isn’t a mandate (lol man date) This isn’t an answer This is a lineage: Lascaux, Keith Haring, Rihanna How do you draw breath? In and down Heel to crown Janet says I’m in control and ends Don’t make me lose it As if she knows what’s to come. The battle of control is in learning to make, and giving it up