What We Need Are Poems That Interrogate

What Would It Mean If We Lived In A World In Which No One Held Out For The Possibility Of Substantial Political Equality, Or For A Full Cessation Of Colonial Practices - If No One Held Out For Those Things Because They Were Impossible?

I Think Maybe The Destructive Pleasure Got Turned Into The Destructive Pleasure Of War (something We See Still In The Images Of Us Soldiers Urinating On The Dead Bodies Of Taliban Soldiers). Something Of The Pleasure In Destruction Gets Unleashed, And Then Becomes Part Of War Effort Rationalised First As Revenge (or Justice Defined As Revenge). But Then It Takes New Forms, As We See Now.

War Begets War. It Produces Outraged And Humiliated And Furious People. That Is Almost Invariably The Case.

One Of The Things That Neoliberalism Does Is, It Relies On Flexible Workforces Who Are Hired And Fired At Will And Who Are Basically Disposable Labor. You Can Use Them. You Can Get Rid Of Them. They Have No Rights; They Have No Security. Their Lives And Well-being Are Made And Unmade At The Whim Of Those Who Are Exercising The Calculus. So, Instead Of Looking At The Institution And Objecting To That Kind Of Organization, People Just Go, "i'm A Failure;"; "i'm Not Working Hard Enough"; Or, "i'm Not As Smart As The Next Person."

Some Trans People Thought That In Claiming That Gender Is Performative That I Was Saying That It Is All A Fiction, And That A Person's Felt Sense Of Gender Was Therefore "unreal." That Was Never My Intention. I Sought To Expand Our Sense Of What Gender Realities Could Be. But I Think I Needed To Pay More Attention To What People Feel, How The Primary Experience Of The Body Is Registered, And The Quite Urgent And Legitimate Demand To Have Those Aspects Of Sex Recognized And Supported.