I Wonder Who Devotes Their Time To Editing Wikipedia And Whether Or Not They Would Sacrifice Their Fingers If It Meant The People They Love Could Live Forever

Evan Martinez

after Hanif Abdurraqib

I spent half an hour reading Marvin Gaye’s page while I should’ve been writing eulogies for the dirt under my father’s nails. He hasn’t murdered me like Marvin’s father. Our relationship is art obsessed with madness, light becoming treasure written in shadows, or pandemic, patriarchy, swing batter, battered swingers, violence and consent. I think I should submit to hysteria, submit to my dream journal, the one with all the black and brown queer disabled writers reimagining borders, consciousness, geopolitical vaccumes, volumes, lifted voices carrying what they can, bare on front covers, ears trampled to the ground, woman hoisting the dead weight of man, slinging bags over shoulders, slinging masks over crowded mouths, teeth, disease, damn panic, the disco burned down when white folks moved in. I read that Bowie’s major tom didn’t live to see us eat each other alive and that it’s nearly impossible to cancel someone after they’re dead, and cancel culture is a myth anyway, just ask R. Kelly or Trump. Thank Satan for that, thank g*d, thank the bus driver, thank the janitor, thank me for not giving up, say I’m sorry to the bus driver, look a homeless man in the eye, give him five dollars for a beer, say I hope this helps you make it through the day, say I saw a video that plainly stated COVID-19 will kill more people than the flu this year, and I ask myself how many refugees have died in ICE custody that they’re not telling us about. The news is moot on that point. The numbers are brainchildren, braindead, incubators, sore throat, ragged bones. I wonder why you always bite the same spot in your mouth from yesterday, why it doesn’t bleed so much as swell, why the body can take so much beating from the inside, something about the heart beating against rib cages begging to be spared in sweet air, cartilage bars undigested. The body has been carefully mapped by those with control over their own, the articles say as much. Say a prayer and goodnight, spore, infestation, poor guy, he never stood a chance, blood before it’s set free, brain before coffee, before the world was big, before we thought the politics would kill us, now we know the virus will kill us but the politics will draw the bridge to our vessels, gates smashed from the inside. Mac Miller’s death hit me hard because he wasn’t trying to beat me to the punch, his ghost can’t come back to earth, I wonder what it felt like to die doing what you love most, I wonder what the folds of my brain feel like. There’s not much here about performing your own brain surgery. There is feeling, there is no feeling, there’s the chance to get lost in margins, there will never be enough time to understand how we got here, so far off topic.