“In each generation, unsurprisingly, these arguments are made on the basis of whatever happens to be the current mode of objectivity about the development of children—habits, the will, instinct theory, psychoanalysis, and today the brain. Social justice, it seems, lies not in tackling the causes of structural inequality, poverty, poor housing, unemployment, and the like, but in managing parents in the name of the formation of good citizens.” (Rose & Abi-Rached, 196)

 

What’s the essence of morality?

Is it an alloy of metals, cheap and bendable like a steel-aluminum compound,

Or is there a crystalline rigidity to its composition,

Built by a singular, signature element?

 

The gavel is a leveling technology:

It fattens out specificities of who’s and when’s and where’s—

I’m mostly scared of losing the why’s—

The insistence of comparability that assumes all murders are congruous.

 

Dogs bite the hand that feeds them for a reason.

You put too much trust in your fellow man,

Assuming that he’s not carrying poison.

 

People have always been reactionary:

We do things for reasons.

 

Retell my body repeatedly.

Use different languages, tenses.

Interpretation or translation?

Let my arteries reveal a map of intent

And my breath a cipher of childhood.

Explain my brain, my heart, my core

Toil away, spiraling closer

Towards anything that can be claimed

The most precious.

 

If you asked me to read my form,

I could explain every inch of weight.

I would tell you how freckles were once sun

Flesh once fruit

And scar once entry.

Every pock an imprint from another surface:

My boundaries are only explainable when read as nexus.

I don’t claim interiority:

I have never seen my insides;

If I had to guess how my body manages to stay together,

I’d explain that I’m a product of pressure.

Layers of sediment squeezed into shape.

Social concentrate.