Santander Bank was smashed into!
I was getting nowhere with the novel & suddenly the
reader became the book & the book was burning
& you said it was reading
but reading hits you on the head
so it was really burning & the reader was
dead & I was happy for you & I had been
standing there awhile when I got your text
Santander Bank was smashed into!
there were barricades in London
there were riot girls drinking riot rosé
the party melted into the riot melted into the party
like fluid road blocks & gangs & temporary
autonomous zones & everyone & I
& we all stopped reading

Don’t believe everything you see on YouTube
& I don’t mean don’t believe it

The way you wouldn’t believe something
On the cover of the National Enquirer; I mean
Don’t believe it like so many people

Believed lonelygirl15. Don’t place
Too much importance on a person’s intentions
Which for most people become clear

Only with time. You know
There are so many videos that will show you
How to do your hair like your favorite soap star.

It’s kind of incredible the innovations
That have been made in hair care products. Life
Before conditioner was never good

& it didn’t get better, but now when you get
Out of the shower it’s easy to untangle your hair. It’s not
A metaphor or universal but the idea is your hair

Will be soft

1.
If you were to wear a shirt that said leave me alone
People might not talk to you or harass you or assault you.
You might put them off. You might manage
To trick them, this time. That you weren’t even trying
Is a terrible sign—like an intersection with signs
That say don’t stop keep going.

2.
It’s the difference between all roads lead
to the kill floor & you can see
yourself out. I’m talking about the promises
Of art & the promises of civil war. I’m saying the coldness
Of that adjective is no match for the heat in parts of the south
Or for being without water or running out of food.

3.
People make things that reflect how they live, where.
These things are not to be confused with the shadows
They cast. When I write a poem I write about things
Like shadows, execute certain tricks. I can see why
People have compared it to dance, but have you ever
Danced in the streets? It’s better not to do it by yourself.

4.
Terrorist attacks are a consequence of wars
You’re not supposed to know about. Planes
Flying into towers don’t start wars more than you
Not shopping. It’s no wonder you believe magicians are men
With magic hats that double as wormholes for rabbits
From galaxies far far away & magical women for so long.

5.
At most, I can see a painting being like a bluff, a view
Of the back of your opponent’s cards when you’re playing
For money & you’ve already lost more than you planned.
But your relationship with it isn’t the most important
Or interesting one. Your love won’t change what a painting
Is, which is someone’s time spent working for someone else.

At the same time, a significant number of young writers—many of them teenage girls—are chatting online with Tao Lin or some other depressed man in his early 20s. They call this “Alt-Lit.” This is before one Alt-Lit woman turns up in an anarchist space in San Francisco & starts sleeping with one of the editors of a communist journal called Endnotes but after Kenneth Goldsmith “transcribes” the September 11, 2001 issue of the New York Times. publishes The Day & writes about being the most boring writer that ever lived. At the same time, more & more young artists & writers move to East Austin. It is recommended that you spend a few good years teaching English in Korea or Japan. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are killed by the United States. If talking about the past historically doesn’t mean recognizing it “the way it really was,” to what extent does it involve something like translation?

Does translation require a person or just language anymore? What is the legal age of consent in New Jersey & New York? These, perhaps, were some of the big questions some people were asking. “Providing scientific articles to those at elite universities in the First World, but not to children in the Global South?”—that was another. Aaron Swartz left Reddit. Open access is nothing like an exhibit at a museum. It’s not even like a museum membership. Not even like a highway shut down. The tech buses have been around longer than many people think. Fukuyama had predicted an obsession with form removed from anything like political life, as if the hipsters of the mid-aughts would invent nihilism. Some poets begin to speak in terms of a sincerity / irony binary. It’s possible the binary doesn’t apply to anything of note—not even in the always late United States where young people in black fuck up Starbucks & the Gap during the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle. Then again some of them claim a swastika can be ironic, while others claim it’s merely cultural, which is to say marginalized people should calm down, which is to suggest a swastika is a swastika is a swastika, which is to say it’s the swastika you’re afraid of, what the swastika can do & not the history of the people who make it what it is, which is not over, which is dead wrong.

I started to think about my father picking cotton as a kid & the hierarchy of the fields. How poor whites & Mexican-Americans got first pick. How undocumented workers went in second & African-Americans picked last. How my father said getting first-pick made him feel special until one very hot day, in Lubbock, during a break, his family went looking for water. How none of the white people in town would give them water. How on their way back to the fields, a truck of African-American farm hands offered them some. How they didn’t even have to ask. How my father says we’re all living like that—not even knowing who our friends are. How my father passes for white until he speaks. How a farmer & his wife, in College Station, told my grandmother they would adopt my father & raise him as white when he was four years old. How the men who hired my father at AT&T in the seventies laughed & said they were meeting the requirements of affirmative action with a man who “talks like a Mexican but looks white.” How, when my father tells this story, he doesn’t even seem mad.