
Two Excerpts from WOKE MIND VIRUS
☣︎
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.