What whiteness wants . What might life feel like for all those folks
who traversing it with ease wanting for nothing
but vanilla shots & all the copper just waiting,
this being what whiteness always wants, always grasping
chucking its weight about forgiving debt like only
whiteness can, flexing for the ‘gram & putting the plebs
on blast for loving their hand sanitizer, their lit
bunker porn, it bashes trannies for lip-gloss sunk broken
costs splintering crunk’s anti-value hinterlands
boggy, sopping wet with what whiteness wants boss-level .
What whiteness wants . What whiteness wants it gets & getting
what it wants is whiteness’s raison d’être . Policing
discourse, whiteness also polices public toilets
& the prison industrial complex stockpiling
all the frothy oat milk, the dankest memes ingest’d
expectantly metastasizing white people dread
demands aggro residuals which is just a way
of griefing that balcony life as hypersocial .
I bite my thumb . We suck our teeth . Whiteness makes its own
swiping swingeing gestures , gesturing in your sick maw
& mine demanding everybody else just turn up
expect’d to smile, how fucking hard what whiteness wants .
What wanting bears witness to immobile & bereft
like statuary, witnessing white’s micro-aggressions
in sullen acquiescence to their rightness, their right
to stand in the sand listing sickeningly westward .
How hard for Christ ‘sakes to tick the damn box you got
given . What else but whiteness wanting, a world showing
up just to dwell swole upon its every whim, every
simpering gaslighting tug at yr skirt & stroppy
boys rolling up on other boys just as petulant
just as impossible to ignore or disinvest
those stories whiteness tells, how we’re just shit with money,
how we don’t deserve to be happy, the real reason
we can never have nice things, never shear the edge off
this immisseration . What whiteness wants or doesn’t
is herd impunity, not even when the phone shop
shuts its doors like an impossible & utterly
unforgivable breach . We breathe still, feel the gifting
breath wherever we still can find it, perhaps creeping
darkly & unheed’d but comforting under stairs
someplace, finding comfort in the brush of dark carpet
thickly of what whiteness wants between the nap & weave
the pall of breath spark’d, which is fiery, coppery
furnace-like . She sez I creep brooding & impishly
watchful from a vantage where our right to self-define
is a given in its’ pedagogy, an ethics
of quotidian oppression tho quite whose being
is oppress’d by who is not what bleak life matters most .
Contrition. You think flux, don’t think there’s much left to fear
from a whiteness that fucks, shutting the war machine off
at the spigot, what else would we have to admit .
The unkempt & those we can’t keep, cannot starch we kill
shattering bonds that might otherwise have kept, white
obstinate sureties & thru it all, the desire
to trend-hop, codeswitch & culture shop that is the way
too shi-shi prerogative of whiteness, blowing up
viral this travesty of bougie necessities
all our most ugly feelings . What else is there but vague
feelings of shame & shamelessness, of hope & its loss .
What whiteness wants it takes & doesn’t even want
anyway, doesn’t even feel the burn, colour-blind
as only it can afford to be, vectors clamour
hopelessly obstructive to diverse commonplaces
to the common-sense of cunning women, of heedless
hope hidden in plain sight & our quiet unshaming
