elegy for collective subjectivity

let’s imagine that our relationship to the city is reciprocal; 

is special;

is material;

is calibrated.

let’s refuse to fit our bodies onto the frames we’ve been given.

let’s inflict primary stigmata onto our bodies in honour of those we’ve loved who’ve lived through years of chronic pain.

let’s choose to believe that these are the hideous faces we would have chosen for ourselves.

let’s practice becoming quiet. quieter. quietest.

let’s resist morphing into caricatures of our own carefully crafted personas.

let’s rip out an equal ratio of brown to white hairs from the scalp. let’s recognize that the practice of hair twirling as an anxiety-reducing mechanism will eventually lead to bald spots and self-made cowlicks.

let’s use pushpins and layers of flesh to draft this map.

let’s destabilize the subject.

let’s set up a tripwire.

let’s annotate the abuse scripts of our childhoods.

let’s crowdsource the funeral. let’s kickstarter the family burial plot.

let’s cauterize the wound.

let’s ease up on the clutch.

let’s stop breathing. let’s photograph our naked bodies.

let’s plagiarize ourselves.

let’s lose everything.

let’s peel down our faces. let’s saw open our rib cages.

let’s open our skulls. let’s take out our brains.

let’s take out our organs. let’s weigh them.

let’s shout instructions to each other through the cracks in the drywall.

let’s instagram our brain tissues. 

let’s send samples to the laboratory.

let’s put it together. let’s tear it apart.

let’s stop fetishizing healing.

let’s grow down. let’s give up

let’s grow down.

let's go. let go.

let's go. let go.