13 January 2025

ON IKAROS




ON IKAROS
for Tammy

Child of a jealous,
Brilliant, arrogant,
Murderous parent,
The Leonardo of
Athens and Krete,
The inventor of
Everything important
Anywhere, ever, imprisoned 
With that famous
Father atop a tower,
Atop the Minoan 
Civilization that 
Same exiled dad
Had built with 
A wile and guile
Greater than crafty 
Odysseos would ever
Muster; his flawed
Parent made wings
Of ordinary things:
Bird feathers, bees’s
Wax, ingenuity,
Desperation, freedom,
Yearning, love;
And so they flew
Away into a kind
Of an expectation,
But the child was headstrong,
Like his parent, and
Exhilarated by flight,
As though he were a 
God, flew higher and
Higher, until you could 
No longer hear his
Father‘s horrified 
Cries to stop. Great Helios,
In his fiery chariot,
Looked down in
Disappointment, as
Waxen wings melted
Under the heat
Of his blazing gaze,
And Ikaros plummeted 
To splash into the
Wine dark Aegean,
As Bruegel foretold.

11 May 2024

Thirteen Enumerated Thoughts on the Rights of Women in the United States

1. The reticence of the Supreme Court in terms of allowing a patchwork of legal ramifications to occur when ruling on the right of states to deny presidential candidates involved in insurrection from appearing on a primary ballot was not at all active when “returning” to the states the rights of any ignorant asshole voted into their legislature to trample on the personal dignity, the physical autonomy, and the medical privacy of all women qua women qua their specifically reproductive capacity and by extension all citizens of that state, because if you can find a good reason to stick your nose into the medical decisions that one person is making for themselves with their trusted medical doctor, therefore removing the privacy necessary for such decisions about their own body, then you can do the same, remove the same privacy, the same autonomy, for any body at all.

2. This patchwork of legal difference and lack of legal diffidence also ramifies not only across women’s bodies and their rights in the states they live in, it directly impacts the abilities of medical professionals in states without any diffidence when it comes to making choices for women about their own bodies and futures because it criminalizes medical care and medical training based specifically on the pathetic ignorance and misogyny of the fuckwads elected to office in that state. 

3. Every woman of childbearing age—the legal ramifications of transmen of childbearing age are still largely unexplored, probably for obvious reasons—her subjectivity under the law, her legal autonomy over the movement of her body in space-time and the movements within her body of objects, chemicals, hormones, and other bodies, is shattered into at least fifty different other persons, fifty different bodies: she legally becomes a different person, with different legal status, subject to different criminality, restricted differently, as she moves, is forced to move, or is barred from physically moving from place to place, from state to state. 

4. Her status and state change as she moves or is moved from state to state. 

5. This is an burden, a hardship, and an injustice tied irrevocably to her ability to experience reproduction, whether she likes it or not, whether it is viable or not, whether she wants it or not. 

6. It fully bars her from equal status with all others who are not subject to this state and status, this in many ways unpredictable and ungovernable biological process, and it permanently restricts her from full participation in the promise of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness and property by eternally proscribing her into a second-class, or less, citizenship, subject to borders, laws, and whims of legislatures, by transforming her from a citizen into a biological function. 

7. It makes her the property of the fetus—or the prospective fetus—inside her, even when that fetus is not viable or is dead. 

8. It makes her the property of her rapist, even when that rapist is her father.

9. It makes her the property of her blinkered state legislature.

10. It makes her the property of her state court.

11. It makes her the property of the United States Supreme Court.

12. It makes her the property of Samuel Alito, who is the author of her slavery, and of the shattered law, itself. 

13. It requires her to be owned by nearly all others and never herself.