daniel sarah karasik

last night i had planned to go out to a party but then felt instead like just boarding the subway & riding & riding with my body quiet & deep in a book but it’s hard to find quite the resolve to do that so i went to the party & did what i could to contain all that riding inside me

sometimes i feel
that all my writing,
even the most “finished,”
amounts to drafts
of fragments
of one long project
whose final form
isn’t verbal

a tiny shiver of messianic time for Shabbat:

imagine there were no oppression to produce our identities. no homophobia or compulsory cisheterosexuality to produce some of us as queer, no racism to produce some of us as racialized, just millions of forms of descriptive difference not essentialized & politicized by violence. when we said “i” in such a world we might mean almost nothing but a locus of desire

the point is not to win
but to free yourself & others

the point is not to win
but to free yourself & others

the point is not to win
but to free yourself & others

(jus talking to myself,
lil reminder)

my rage is a diva orchid,
i neglect it
for just one second
& it wilts into despair

oft adding “man” and “dude”
to the end of greetings,
men are very insistent
that you, too, be a man,
as if this makes it more certain
that they, too, are men,

that all maleness’s borders
are defended —

the way a flagging imperial army
warns its soft cadets
against desertion

the just telos of any institution
that is a flower or arm
of an unjust system
is to turn itself
into a challenge
to that system

the just telos of any institution
that is the bloom or hand
of an unjust system
demands it risk
institutional self-subversion

cis straight masculinity is less an index of desire & identity than it is a set of catastrophically self-defeating strategies for staving off the overwhelming sadness

1) what is this system of behaviour, i do not understand it & all my intuitions seem wrong

2) i shall study this!!

3) i have systematically theorized the norms & values of this system and will act in accordance with them, even at the expense of other norms & values i have previously theorized but am not currently obsessed with

4) ~surprising amounts of success that also conceal devastating blindspots & imbalances & failure~

5) wait these norms i’ve “mastered” instrumentally are maybe actually intrinsically quite fucked???

6) wait i’ve misunderstood everything oh oh oh fuck

7) “rebellion”/collapse

8) recovery & recalibration

9) repeat, perhaps with mitigation

10) maybe begin to notice a pattern

11) maybe begin to correct for it more adequately

12) wonder if it’s like this for everybody

13) is it

v enraging when people exhibit
reprehensible traits
that were also my own traits
until five minutes ago

socialism as narrative project:

to find & speak the unity
in the single-issue activisms
liberalism makes visible,
each one of which alone
leads to despair;

to abolish itself
as author, insisting
the actors in the tale
reclaim it,
since it’s theirs

child abuse language is domestic abuse language is online shaming language is cop language is dad language is i’m warning you language is don’t make me tell you again is consequences language is punishment language is the prison guard’s language and we learn it early is the torturer’s language don’t say i didn’t warn you is fascism

what kind of art do i like? O u know,
the kind that makes u want to die
but also behold it with quiet rapture
repeatedly,
which requires continued living,

~a dialectic~

shout out to anyone who dotes daily on the newer trauma because that means the older trauma can stay buried,

irradiating the neighbourhood,

though sometimes when you walk the new trauma it drags you to the old burial place

& scratches
& claws
& scratches,

almost helping you
make a connection
you almost make

nice National Poetry Day
you got there, would be a shame
if Poetry
were that which refuses
the Nation
even while sometimes
expressing it
& that which contests
the logic of Days
as experienced
within capitalism’s
evacuated time

i turned my website which used to house Opinions into a place only for Poems!!!

collected here are fifteen faves among the little prose poems or meditations or whatever that i’ve been posting on my facebook so can’t submit to Official Publication Places elsewhere, and possibly wouldn’t even want to, but perhaps you’ll find some of them Nice or Good?

i will likely update the site with more small words in the future, and if u follow/subscribe or we’re social media pals i can let u know when i do. they form part of a maybe-book (a Book of Maybe) i’m working on, which is an attempt at a queer & trans socialist poetics!!, informed by/in dialogue with ongoing work in social movement spaces.

in the meantime i think the internet should contain slightly (but only slightly) fewer opinions and exponentially (like wow a lot) more poems, so this is my tiny contribution to that digital world-making horizon. ok cool thx!

~

oh also a note on formatting: some of these texts are in lineated verse & some are prose & some have a bit of both, but you won’t always be able to tell which is which on a vertically held smartphone screen. for optimal viewing, check out this site on a desktop computer or a tablet or a smartphone turned horizontal!