Khashayar “Kess” Mohammadi
“In the epoch of citizenship+ I must arrive everywhere twice-” -Natalie Diaz speaker in softer lift to resist the lyre. “wearing” fangs. “wearing” its venom. a few more days until “yet” can lapse. the theater sunrise, increasing its curtain. and works of deep engagement. wealth however sedimented. how rude to live. held fast in tension. how else to “facilitate the flow” among splinters of “speculation” citizens “rendered” in conditions of “Salvage”. if a camera is the enemy. if “escapism” is a method, now frowned upon, but not questioned as a concept. if a mint condition Lamborghini driving through private medicine. if “unity” flags posted on... well the masquerade. email me the receipt sure. I smiled but got deducted pay. they smiled but I still had to leave anyway. he smiled but the menial job still wasn’t mine. I smiled but there was nowhere I could imagine myself in five years with my feet wiped clean of blood. I smiled but I had no space for metaphor in bodies sequenced for death. I smiled but the “Queering act” slowly became its own military with its own marches for Ukrainian missiles. I smiled so on my behalf they acknowledged “The settlement”. I smiled in alchemy with the viral theater of the “Act” like English shed of its furniture, glued by professional mourners of all histories. THEN the imprints of European reason on daylight. THEN yoga in the mid-afternoon. the middle sentences where we have no reference held in cargo ships. CAPITAL C CAPITAL against the small c communes. I won’t speak of my ancestors. they didn’t give a fuck abt me but still expected way too much. I sit in a matchbox house. illuminated brick and steel. itchy from government and Friday/Saturday crowd. one slippery thumb off the one-tenth of a century -which we today touch- no new garments, just old ugliness of a promise. this is the last time we grow up. I sit and listen to news of love’s dead economy. I’ll be my story later on. I sit with my verison of a book of prayers which is just a lengthy guide to what else has been emulated by AI. I wish a single person, real or imagined, become a nonperson today. being the rained-on tin roof that I am today, in my sundress, untucked. I take disconnect seriously. plunder of rhymes from Zulaikha citations. voicelessly depicted lineage of figures, carrying the stress at the centre of the image, however distilled down from what was once promised but never in the end truly was. mothers start to earn money “Some other way” like from etsy and the like. find accomplishment in simple survival. self-taught peace. the way reading breaks it. the way writing breaks it. the barrier of “protest” to speech in containment. we worked for the revolution unpaid for too long. and we were loved by our food delivery drivers. and we were loved in containment. we thought ourselves ongoing. we thought this poem as a fraction of its tree, on this paper. unlived symbols. “a school boy unaliving...” or “dead to sewer slide” or “Fr** P*lestine” or “Isr*el” and an appeal denied by TikTok I cut my lineage today. I don’t wanna be an ancestor. the horizon is a primal invitation that I refuse. I’m crushed under the ballistic violence of “Nuance” that made “us” from a mandated diversity quota. this joy and laughter of labourers isn’t us. smiles form on anyone’s lips if infinitely filmed televised and montaged. the larvae beasts the apple-smile. the toothpaste ad tells me to count myself “1” so everyone else becomes 2, 3, 4, 5 and the like. perfection, in a grammatical participle. “If I were a Woman” questions still unanswered for every woman. gender blurred, but adored at the wrong time. misplaced egos and humilities subject to the material climate of us.
originally published in asides // besides #1 in December 2024.