it’s so hard to live with an awareness with the measured social death and widespread necropolitics of the u.s.

this is a country committed to destruction: of the self, the planet, and the unilaterally assured descent into apocalyptic outcomes, first and foremost of Black people

it’s hard—if not impossible—to articulate the degree to which every day we are living the latest, most insidious manifestation of settler colonialism: state suppression, economic exploitation, pillaging, forced displacement, criminalization, labor camps (prisons), etc

the psychic toll that it takes to know and see the ways we normalize and operate in the rotten calculus of human capital is immeasurable. the state stands idly by while the loss of life piles up as, trades in our consciences for algorithms designed to convert bodies into capital

a toxic cocktail anti-Blackness, neoliberalism, capitalism, settler colonialism, white supremacy, and the normalization of racialized social death have landed us here. it’s what drives the roe v. wade reversal, anti-trans bills, CRT backlash, replacement theorists, mass shootings

republicans, conservative talking heads, corporate media, even the office of the president have done such an excellent job convincing white americans that they are living in schmitt’s state of siege, employing terror and reason rhetoric to stoke extremism & radicalize generations

it’s textbook makings of fascism. and one of the key features of a fascist state is its unsustainability and tendency toward self-cannibalizing. the neoliberal market mentality has robbed us of our foresight and thus our future. the damage is incalculable & i fear irreversible

meanwhile Black folks are dying slow painful deaths en masse from structural violence, disguised as the impartial whims of the market—forcibly displaced, segmented, revolutionary potential quelled by in/visible warfare, displays of dominance and the threat of gross violence

how do we come back from this? everywhere i look i see the way generations of electoral politics have centralized power and influence in a handful of oligarchs, *successful* mass propagandizing of neoliberal thought, community distrust, insularity, individualism, nationalism

this rot is running through the veins of this country and we’re watching as the entire organism dies a preventable death from metaphorical a septic shock. and the best we’ve been offered in response is increased military funding and ramped up police

i’m sitting here crying about the latest lots of life in Buffalo, Dallas, Uvalde. so many dead, elders, children, women. pillars in their community, caretakers, holders of generational knowledge, wealths of wisdom, claimed before their time. youth, with so much life left to live

I wrote a poem a few months back which I said;

a thousand thousand deaths
but no funerals to match
when, if ever, do we mourn the loss
of what could have been

the loss i feel from a life so violently taken is ineffable, innumerable, immeasurable

how do we lay to rest stories never told? the recipes we couldn’t share? the moments they never got to live? do we light a candle for every laugh we never heard, every kiss and embrace, every second of every day that was rightfully theirs? this is the violence i feel most sharply

but we’re “so strong, so resilient, we’ve been through so much more and so much worse.” i’m actually not strong—i’m fragile & soft, and i’m tired of the work it takes to act otherwise

most days i feel like Death playing at Life, a person separate and apart from personhood

i yearn for the day Black people are seen neither as superhuman nor subhuman, where we can simply be, exist, live or lives without the threat of brutal, violent, death and the collateral trauma that follows

many a revolutionary thinker reminds us that one of the key components of any successful movement is holding onto optimism, fostering an intentional practice of building and sustaining envisioning a better future, but some days—like today—I feel the distinct absence of hope