STOMACH SLEEPER BY MANUEL MARRERO

Artwork by Johnny Scuotto

Half a decade ago, the political ship sailed and rewilding was underway. The average millennial catatrophized over concentration camps on the border, the fraying of international relations, trade war with China, nuclear war with Iran, Russiagate, the rise of white supremacy, climate inaction, and the enshrinement of a majority conservative Supreme Court. Clickbait cycles and culture war theatrics, the language of the collective voice, scrawled the writing on the wall.

I care about human dignity. The machinery of totalitarian impulse, a crisis not wasted. Let’s remember together— two weeks to flatten the curve, no more than ten people legally allowed in your home, mask up over your nose and chin, sterilize surfaces, wash hands. Avoid loved ones. Eat the unvaccinated. Leave grandma in the nursing home.

Died at home of a broken heart. Died at home of tumors. Dead of an overdose, at home. Dead of blunt force trauma. Stay right where you are and die at home.

We are complicit, more eschatologically obsessed and pathologically preoccupied with health than our spiritual well-being.

Squabbling over intimate age differentials, indoctrination, interpersonal celebrity drama, cretinous show trials, human resource management. They grasp for culture. I pray on my knees, I sleep as though shot through the back of the head.

Menticide is a masterpiece— a different flavor of kool-aid for each crop.

Wake up. We are strung out, keyed up materialists. We pledge fealty to the nanny state, motivated by lucrative incomes, rarefied skill sets suborned and made nefarious; cryptic, esoteric and abstruse to smokescreen abuse, weaponized to prey on financial illiteracy, to alienate anyone but insular specialists. We affirm compliance to biosecurity policies. We inherit this evergreen generalized anxiety.

The UK press is onto something, the scourge not invisible but camouflaged against so much banality. They call it excess death.

You will willingly participate in obedience rituals, consent to be diposable.

These are the correct political opinions of the time. Sometimes I don’t know the answer. Sometimes I don’t even know who my Congressman or woman is. And that’s okay.

No invective can do it justice, the loamy accrual of loss. Rights can’t be returned.

We need more fear. More belligerent political symbols like medical masks, picket signs, BLM, Ultra MAGA, Red Star. Collect debt 18 hours a day. I, survivor, express myself best maimed by lockdowns and vaccines. The year of Ulysses not Achilles, the chthonic rictus of vortical cruelty. Ash on the floor, piss in the sinks, revolution and terror,  the tenor the day they murdered the soul, crimes against the human spirit of resilience, people who didn’t see anybody during the pandemic, the camps, scalability of web3, gilded age body ravaged, refugees from gulag country, war for the nuclear family in Trump country, neurasthenia, piety for the pitiless featureless technology magnifying mimetic grief. You have the right to bear arms and die at home. You have the right to bodily autonomy and you can bet your ass you’ll die at home, on your computer.