Two Excerpts from WOKE MIND VIRUS

Woke Mind Virus appreciates the moon and / then it takes a shit:

☣︎

Woke Mind Virus appreciates the moon and
       then it takes a shit:
       a tenure-track routine
       in the
Tortured             Poet’s             Department.

Woke Mind Virus is not a poet, but
it tries, anyway.
       A chemtrail by any other name
       would knell as sleet.

Woke Mind Virus is a frenemy
that lives in my bone marrow,
splooging my delights with the
pessimism of a business cycle
drained of will or intellect,
laden with pseudoscience
and the perniciously cute
       ghost of whim.

Woke Mind Virus is micromanaging
my labour and telling me to forget
all that talk of value-form;
it is plagiarizing Celan,
it is plagiarizing Stalin,
it is plagiarizing Endnotes
it is plagiarizing grief
and all the would-be programs
I misremember in the cool breeze
       of a room clogged with brims
       of air-purified snogs,
telling us to hurry up and win;
I am plagiarizing Woke Mind Virus
and wishing for the bin.





⚱︎

Woke Mind Virus is furrowing foreheads,
rapidly aging us in the permanent revolution of
encephalitis and prosey prions, telling
       every single poem to
       get angrier, more obtuse,
       road its rage but don’t worry
       about skyrocketing
       premiums, it’s fine,
       you’re fine.

When I ask for
a break, Woke Mind Virus enraptures
my heart-rate and dizzies my pace,
tells me to shut the fuck up:––
       I have no choice in the matter,
       Woke Mind Virus might
       thrum a clot to my lungs
       and fire me without
       hesitation.

Woke Mind Virus is moving
the goalposts, yet again.
From ten days to
five days to
one day to
no day.
Shilling normality and
centring itself––
Woke Mind Virus generously
offers a simple redistribution of
apologia for briefly masking our smiles;
it threatens to cleanse our aphorisms into
a less accidental trigonometry––
something
       shapely, a buxom wound apparel
               for all the revisionists who’ve
               nursed nothing but death to
               the slow unrest, the chronicled
               fatigue of my comrades-in-pain
               who never stood a chance.