Hey B, absolutely been hitting the streets. Here in Oakland the pigs and our pig-accomplice mayor are not fucking around. But it’s being led by kids and tutored by the elder generations (and I like adjusting to being an elder), we got such a tradition here. The property destruction (like everywhere else) is epistemologically and historically sophisticated. From the Wells Fargo and Chase banks that foreclosed on so many black homes ten years ago to the shitty dentist office that mistreats poor people (graffiti: “this is for fucking up my mouth”) to the same downtown Walgreens that gets hit everytime that hires roided up private security to harass and brutalize poor people every day to the whole fucking city of Emeryville (owned by the box store corporations that pay shitty wages and was built over an Ohlone burial site). The emotions I’m feeling right now are a rollercoaster obviously: elation, sublimity, fear, terror, heartbreak. Things are moving fast so I’m not going to get into my analysis right now. Just want to say that even though I think this is really a four hundred years in the making, multiracial youth revolt against not only capital and property but all the historical relations that have deformed us and stolen our future (I did an MDMA trip again just before this took off and in the middle I remembered the Robin Kelly line (I know you don’t like the dude) something like “racism was invented to control white people; for black people, guns and tanks will do”–well now white people aren’t being controlled anymore by racism, except for the so far mostly slumbering fascist herrenvolk MAGAts), it’s still proximatley what it’s about, which is about the violence that the state and society metes out on a daily basis to black kids, particularly these fucking pigs. So I was gonna say that I hope you are holding BK extra tight right now and letting him know–even though I’m sure he fucking knows–that his life is beautiful and worth defending.
Wrote a little poem last night after getting back from the protests. I never write poems but I just felt the need for something simple/from the heart. Figured i’d pass it along.
Stay as safe as possible, as they’re saying now. “Because we were never safe.” Abrazos, D
A Lyric Poem
when i learned the girl who fucked me up
wasn’t depressed anymore, stuck at home in venice, sullen and “gay,”
(what does it mean to be gay anymore?)
kicked out of oakland
with her five half-armenian brothers and widower dad with his swedish bimbo girlfriend and
their huge
swinging dicks and skateboards (learned on instagram where i used to jerk off
to her body pos naked pics from the time of liberal counterinsurgency
when she was really a kid, when we all were infantilized)
but had shaved her head and gotten the shit beat out of her
at a protest in santa monica, her middle finger up,
i checked the impulse in me to want her embalmed in erotic melancholia
and let her go. then i made a video of myself jerking off,
but this time for myself, and for a young mom in philly
who used to organize with a marxist-leninist party and sends me lactation videos
and gets turned on by my weird horny materialist stink
(we talk about what she can tell her baby later, if we’re alive to tell it
about the blessing of having been born into the improbable moment
when this shitty world founded on apocalypse begins to violently die:
and we wonder if any of us will be alive, if there will be life, to glimpse,
though we know that no matter what happens, it’ll be
better than this)