“…Kurt?”
“What?” Kurt says from the kitchen, focusing on stirring his tea. He’s already made a habit out of not really listening to whatever Santana says — and she’s only been living with them for a few weeks.
“Is there a particular reason you have the Men of McKinley calendar hidden in your room and it’s still on January even in March?”
Kurt drops the spoon.
I am fifteen.
I find freedom in backseats
Driving in circles in drugstore
Parking lots. We drink cheap
Vodka and smoke cheap cigarettes.
We are too young and we are
Going nowhere but with our
Eyes shut it sometimes feels
Like we can go anywhere.
I don’t know much about art or
Literature or films, I am not your
Sophisticated type. I watch silly
Movies about people I want to be
I read books that make me feel
Like I can be anything other than myself.
I listen to sad songs that remind me
Of people who left me behind.
I won’t be able to impress you with
Historical facts or figures. I can’t tell
Good jokes or recite any poetry.
I never pay attention in class
And I’m not all that clever so I
Won’t expect you to like me much
Because most days I’m still
Trying to like myself but I’ll
Sit on your lap and let you
Tickle my spine and you’ll hold
Onto my thighs on those sharp corners.
I’ll roll the perfect spliff
And I’ll pass it on and
Maybe I’ll grow up tomorrow.
The sheer number of women forced into prostitution (through both physical force and poverty) by the collapse of the USSR is something I can think of hardly a more accurate description of than a mass rape, and yet liberal discourse allows no provisions for addressing it as such or recognizing it as an act of violence done by one class to another (specifically international capitalist class to working class and poor Eastern Europeans), or in any other way holding someone meaningfully accountable. The next time liberals try to insist to you that the erosion of third-world country’s national sovereignty by the creeping tendrils of international Human Right’s law is acceptable because of some emotional need to hold perpetrators accountable, remember that not only will that law never be used against the Pinochets and Montts and Suhartos while they’re actually doing the capitalist’s dirty work, but that for liberals the horrendous crime committed against the women of Eastern Europe didn’t even happen as such, that no one but ‘blind, immutable, uncontrollable economic forces’ manifesting themselves in particular, decontextualized incidents can be held accountable, and that not only are such atrocities completely invisible to international Human Rights law, as an institution its literally complicit in them every time its used by the West to justify turning another pocket of resistance or alternative development into a neoliberal hellhole.
