You reject property, copyright and originality and cannot deny how much it hurts when someone reads excerpts of your phrasing, writing as their own. You do not know what to do but you think about saying something. Do you say something. Do you ask them about citation practices. You wonder if it is easier when the offender is a stranger why is it so difficult when they are familiar. You know the answer well and do nothing. You do nothing because you accept the conditions of language. You do nothing because language is unfound. You accept no one but the law and conceptualists mean harm and concoct how perhaps, their language system too is delinked from their memories. Is that so?

It is true you change for the worse. You grow secretive in unnecessary ways. You write accusatory poems with lines like are you close to steal from me and lock them away. You accept none of this would matter if your position their position was not of this earth and you accept how much you want them to know. You accept how you do not say this out loud and how a therapist would diagnose this as your folly, your cowardice, your making. You think about how a linguist might defend you. How she might explain metamessage. How in her expertise of language she might untangle the space between what’s said and unsaid, how she might offer what happens in the absence of language as primary. You rejoice in the ways her expertise can be wielded to reject the artifice of its power and wonder how she came to this conclusion while remaining entranced in it. How does she defend you with explanations on silence and how do you accept them as your own—

*

You only trust those who recount their memories as the antagonist. Who ask you tell me how I've been your antagonist. You’ve spent your lifetime thinking about the differences between those who narrate as the protagonist, and those who narrate as the antagonist

The protagonist tells you about the antagonists in their lives and they tell you how nevertheless they prevailed and if they prevail and they are clean in their memories. They are clear in their memories of only the harm others have done to them and how they have been harmed. They must be avoided.

You want to hold all those who remember themselves as the antagonist. You want to feel their burden as your own. When they tell you a story they do not narrate as the singular victim. They tell you how they punched first, punched second, they tell you how they screamed and what they said to crush their opponent who is also their kin. They always remind you they are fighting their kin. They tell you they were wrong but how they wanted it anyway. They remind you again and again how they fought back, and didn’t win or sometimes won and how they feel guilty or not guilty. Their memories are full and uninterested in empathy or sympathy or understanding it is fucking exhilarating to hear them speak to receive their call to hold their hand when they tell you about the betrayal, the loss, the longing, the fighting, the fighting. They are full, their desires are full. They punched first. They won they lost. Full and here they are

*

You watch yourself outgrow people, ideas, tactics and grow increasingly suspicious of solutions. There are no simple out-of-misery-formulas. There are tensions, clear differences between fiction and reality, between fantasy and legislation, between critique and censorship and they insist there is no difference. They claim it’s the same: your critique their censorship. Your fantasies their laws. Your poems and their reality and what more can you do but retreat. You retreat. You remove yourself as the last offering. You begin to look inside wells, stones, trees, and what can you say. You are not a chosen mythic creature with superior abilities. You crack bruise break die without replacements so you must retreat

Your pain makes nostalgic familiar discomforts, all that which you left behind. Your once lover. Your last humiliation. Anything but the present. Everything but the unknown. Dear antagonist: how long does it take to sacrifice the present flesh of today?

You want clever buttons, butterflies, green everywhere. In lieu of absolution your dentist, your doctor, receives a second chance and you realize the distance between her and you is the distance between enemy and parent, hatred and love, ocean sky. Which to say the distance is what is considered open. Does it touch there or here are you making unrequited unrequested cocktails forcing a learning where it need not be. Look up. Where are you. Come back to me

You’re an amalgamation of the qualities you wished the people who hurt you had, an amalgamated projection of who they were and could not be and you are the perpetual fear and acknowledgment that you could one day wake to be them because this is what you have known: please let this not be all that you know

*

Dear antagonists: You are not an object. You are not a divided subject who makes objects. You do not write self-contained immutable singular entities that can be broken off from you, your community, your life, and preserved elsewhere, by someone else, as something else. Let the record reflect that you die, what you make dies, and you labor towards this finality.

We will say it again tomorrow and the day after so find us if and when you need to hear: You are not an object. You are not their divided subject—

once in a while you joke, you say, violence is the only answer and laugh but the truth is you’ve never made a joke in your life. you only say you’re joking to avoid termination, institutionalization, more, and even now you write just kidding only joking but it’s true you’ve meant every word. always you mean every word: just kidding violence is never the answer just kidding violence is the answer just kidding amen