SMILE UNDUN, DJANGO UNCHAINED

Allow me to preface this, briefly, by acknowledging the nature of the essay to be winding in its set up and its stylistics. I concede to the complexity of it. I attempt to mitigate that with overt markers of clarification and simplification—e.g. “Clarify:” and “Simplify:” among others, with the same intent. The piece moves, from a marker of my own breaking, my own fracture, to the fracture that is blackness, to haw that works psychologically or psychically, and how that is sutured to the equality between blackness and slaveness. This allows me to setup the engagement with the film from the direction of an engagement with black enjoyment.

“Nothing doing. I explode. Here are the fragments put together by another me.”

---Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

“…I am broken,I am open,I am broken open”

---Alike, Pariah

I am split, passing the event horizon, mid-

spaghettification. Being black, or, reminded of Christina

Sharpe’s introduction to Monstrous Intimacies, black(ened) being—

blackened red and brown, in my case—submits my being to the

perpetuity of political ontological breaking with and by

inescapable gravity and absolute darkness, such that, on orders

of time and space both macro and micro—being, life, existence,

knowledge, ethics, as they are framed by the permanence promised

by capital “D” Death (social death) and the temporariness

inherent in lower-case “d” death (corporeal death)—I, we, break.

Blackness breaches, is breach impervious to breaching. It, to

draw from David Marriott and Frantz Fanon, breaks (blacks) from

within and without, shatters the potential or capacities for

relationality and humanity (read: Human subjectivity), marking an

approach to a negative infinity in and of the space-time of black

psychic, maintained by both splitting and shattering, and by

(re)memory.

Breaking, Closed

Clarify: Fanon writes, at the outset of the most well-known

and (in)famous of chapters from Black Skin, White Masks, that the

forthcoming account—a recollection—of what happens after the even

more infamous hailing, “Dirty Nigger!” or “Look! A Negro!”, will

be told and dissected as a piecing together of fragments,

performed by another Fanon, one that is split from and yet

internal to Fanon (BSWM, 89). Clarify further: He recognizes this

on the train, almost jokingly, and familiarly, noting that this

other him that is also him, the first person Fanon reflecting on

the third person Fanon (which, I wager, alters the understanding

of perspective when asking who wrote this account—I believe it to

be both Fanons, simultaneously first and third persons)—noting

that this other him collapses/splits/shatters/breaks again, “no

longer in the third person but in triple,” and, the joke in the

visualization of it, that “in the train, instead of one seat on

the train, they left [him] two or three” (92). Expand: Marriott

works to unpack this in the final chapter of Haunted Life, “Bonding

Over Phobia,” which importantly and skillfully dissects the

psychic operations of this breaking, this joke, adding to the mix

the consideration of “location” or, more broadly, space, which

allows for a particular theorizing of and/or/as line of inquiry

about black(ened) psychic space—How does it look? What dwells

there? How are the imagoes and egos oriented? Are there multiple

planes/dimensions to it, specifically as they might relate to

repeated breakings like Fanon’s and Fanon’s?

More importantly—which is saying something—Marriott, though

seemingly in passing, also adds to the mix the consideration of

time via the invocation of memory as a mechanism for repetition

and permanence. Clarify: Memory, via either conscious recall or

external and/or subconscious evocation, allows the hailing,

“Dirty Nigger!”, to bore into psychic storage, to lie dormant

there, and to reemerge via its availability for conscious access

or because of some internal(ized) or external stimulus or

trigger. Clarify further, question: If the (re)marking of

blackness from outside Fanon recalls—“Dirty Nigger!”—acts as an

emblem for any such occurrence at any such moment in time for any

such black, a symbol, a reality meant to be allegorized (without

ever forgetting the reality), and if these moments cause psychic

ruptures, shatters or splits of black psychic space, splitting

them (me, us) into first and third persons, and then into triple,

ad infinitum (as life events permit), what happens when they are

remembered? If black psychic time, or at least the psychic time,

the psychic longevity or temporal durability, of these moments,

is, then, infinite, or approaches infinity via memory, and if

these moments relate to black psychic space by repeated rupture…

Begin again: If, at each version or reemergence of “Dirty

Nigger!” in encounters with Human or subaltern subjects, or anti-

Human objects (Blacks, pace Wilderson) with media, with and

within the state, its institutions and its agents, and in memory,

the psychic space breaks again and again, does not the rupture of

black psychic space approach infinity? Do I, we, not experience a

breaking over and over again toward infinity, from within and

without? Is the world of Human and subaltern subjects not a black

hole, and is this not spaghettification, absolute, from within

and without, across the duration of black social death—capital—

and extending even beyond the moment of black corporeal death—

lower-case?

Simplify: The reemergence of blackness in moments like

“Dirty Nigger!”—and I use very “moments” broadly to include

“events” as well as (engagements or encounters with)

“objects/subjects”—as a form of breaking, splitting the black

(psychic, political and ontological) self, performs this breaking

ceaselessly, in both the actuality of the event (when the “Dirty

Nigger!” moment happens) and in the memory of the event and its

effects (when the “Dirty Nigger!” moment is remembered, or

externally or subconsciously evoked). This produces a kind of

infinite breaching, or at least a breaching that approaches

infinity, that happens psychically, within the space and time

(space-time) of the mind, over and over again, and has effects

upon or contributes to or remains entangled with the political

and the ontological ruptures that comprise blackness. I, we, find

kinship not just in the shared impossibility of kinship, but in

the infinity of the spaghettification, the atomization, of being

that blackness marks as it emerges and reemerges and reemerges

and reemerges and reemerges and reemerges and reemerges and…I,

we, experience and remember personal or public iteration of

“Dirty Nigger!” and, each time, ceaselessly, break. The vicious

circle, the black mamba Ouroboros, the event horizon of the black

hole; the vacuum breaking, devouring, spaghetti al nero di seppia off

the fork.

This to explain the beginning, which demands repetition,

which as reification promises its own kind of ‘new’ rupture: I,

we, break. Blackness breaches, is breach impervious to, beyond,

breaching. Clarify: blackness is absolute in its breaching; its

triptych breaching—psychic, political, ontological—is total,

happening always and over and over again, from within and

without, personally (as is Fanon’s case) or impersonally (of or

about blacks or blackness in general, ‘fictional’ or ‘actual’)

breaking down being, for the black, to…let’s call them psycho-

politico-ontological atoms, without the hope of recovery or

redress, like the black crossed the event horizon of a black

hole, or began to, and spaghettified, or began to; the black hole

being a useful metaphor, since the gravity of blackness, once the

threshold is crossed, is absolute, no light (no being) is able to

escape. Simplify, contextualize, a question, a stage for staging:

“events,” like the search for and burning alive of Christopher

Dorner following declaration of war against the LAPD, and

“objects/subjects” like Django Unchained and its director, actors

and actresses, and supporters and critics, I suggest, operate in

conjunction with one another (are interrelated) as markers and

makers of this kind of “reminding” I’ve been thinking about, as

versions of “Dirty Nigger!” made anew, reformulated, re-emergent,

and re-breaching, collapsed into one another as fragments of a

whole context, a world-scale antiblack space-time, both

spaghettifying.

What will follow is a discussion of the latter, Django, and

how the above, its marking and making of the permanence (via

absoluteness and repetition)—the infinity—of blackness breaching,

as breach, becomes entangled with the support for, and

justification and enjoyment of the film. Need a map. Plotting the

trajectory of this thought vector demands, on the one hand,

acknowledging its origin point somewhere around and in

recognition of the singularity of the black hole, which demands a

recognition of the spatiotemporal—state, or quantum—entanglement

of blackness and slaveness on the level of the psychic and

political ontological. On the other hand, plotting this thought

vector’s trajectory demands a holistic account of the nature of

the relevant topography—that is, it demands a contextualization

via its relation to, passing through and beyond, the general

content and scope of the discourse surrounding Django already

spoken and written, particularly that which expresses sentiments

like support or enjoyment, or any of their iterations. Hope—what

is hope to the pessimist?—‘lives’ in that the above will allow

for the most accurate approximation of the destination: What we

talk about when we talk about enjoying Django (by any name), and

where, when, and with and for whom that enjoyment rests.

Is This Why We Can’t Have Nice Things?

What we talk about when we talk about (black) enjoyment

(e.g. of Django) remains haunted, as all things do, by the

presence of the afterlife of slavery—presence, in double: in the

overtly clear sense, marking its existence in the “present;” and,

since for blacks, time and space collapse, cease to mean or move,

break, in the sense that it is the present, insofar as a ghost

implies a past-ness, and, when the past itself remains alive,

becomes present. The black’s enjoyment of its ‘own’ performances,

traces ‘back to’ the plantation, the coffle, both of which remain

chained to the silver screen, or the laughter or joy at, and

support and praise for, whatever it reveals. Clarify: The slaves

singing their songs on the coffle, dancing, once ‘emancipated,’

for whites, and, in this case, acting on and off screen in and

for, writing in service and praise of, Django, insofar as they

mark a kind of enjoyment, overlap, tangle, and become

contextually unique fragments of an element of antiblackness.

Clarify: The notion that the slave’s abjection is so deep that

even the enjoyment of its own performances, pre and post (the

non-event, to summon Hartman, of) emancipation, is owned by the

master, by the antiblack world, maps onto the black’s relation to

—in our consideration, enjoyment of—Django Unchained and ‘moments’

like it. Simplify, reduce: Blackness equals slaveness (and all

the spatiotemporal implications considered above); slave/black

enjoyment does not belong to, or is not for, blacks, but always

already for (ripped away, in the rupture, by) the antiblack world

and its masters; Django and enjoyment and support and praise of

it is not, never was, never will be—all those at once—‘ours.’

But/and it is and isn’t more complicated than that.

Pause, setup, summon: Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection

allows for a historicization of this political ontology of

blackness (as breach, as rupture) as it relates to the slave’s

enjoyment of its performances. She begins her entanglement by

weaving with two needles: in one hand, she wields questions

levied at the nature of performance, seeking to elongate the

notion of the performative to the every day being of slaves via

their visibility as slaves on the coffle and the plantation, and

in the quotidian nature of their minor transgressive acts; in the

other, she wields a pin pushing pressure upon the concept of

agency (which puts pressure on the concept of resistance),

throwing the term and its applications to blacks into crisis.

Increase pressure: Black performance and/as black agency

intertwine with one another, and their intertwinement entangles

with the intertwinement mapped above, between psychic space,

psychic time, blackness, and infinity. This tertiary and triple

entanglement deepens Hartman’s inquiry, and allows us to dissect

the nature of black enjoyment, for our purposes, of Django

Unchained, with the hopes of complicating its present

manifestations and deployments in discourse surrounding the

movie, primarily focusing the core sentiments about the narrative

(a slave who, as Django puts it, “[kills] white people and gets

paid for it…what’s not to like?”) and the consequences of the

narrative’s thematic orientation (it, in Tarantino’s words, is

novel because he “thought it (slavery) could be better if it was

wrapped up in genre”). Simplify: Hartman’s work in the second

chapter of Scenes of Subjection provides a place to set up camp; all

of the above (about psychic space and time and blackness and

breach and infinity) can illuminate (or darken) some of the

shadows around the campfire. This pause will be brief.

Repeat: Hartman’s engagement moves on two fronts, both

intertwined; one calls into question what constitutes the slave’s

performance, extending it to the quotidian (everyday) being of

the black (just being visibly black renders all acts

performative), and the other throws into crisis the applicability

and meaning of the concept of ‘agency’ (in relation) to the

slave, the black. In the first instance, Hartman relocates the

category of black performance to the performativity of blackness—

blackness as always a performance, black as always performative.

With clarion brilliance, she writes: “the performance of

blackness is inseparable from the brute force that rapes, and tears

open the flesh in the racial inscription of the body” (58). This

elongation of the stage in all directions of the dark, of

blackness, binds into itself the notion of agency and the

question of “how”—How might this agency manifest if, first,

blackness is performative, and, second, slavery totalizes the

subjection of the black in such a way that blackness (and thereby

black performance and performativity) belongs to masters without

the possibility or hope of, or opening for the assertion of,

redress? Simplify: If blacks are objects, and these objects are

inherently performative because they are black, how does—rather,

how can agency ‘happen’—how is ‘agency’ a word in the lexicon of

the black?

Hartman (and this is the second instance, if one is to keep

track), provides a very nuanced, archival account of the slave’s

agency, the black’s movement, how it manifested on micro and

macro scales, everyday and spectacular. In particular, she

approaches from the plane of the micro: frequent, repeated,

commonplace acts of everyday resistance and transgression the

slaves carried out as coded acts of protest, as glimpses into

what some might call action or “agency.” Songs changed, songs of

their own, dances, music, collective gatherings, stealing away—

these comprise a field of everyday practice engaged by—acted out—

by the slave. As evidenced by the accounts she presents, and by

some of Hartman’s work, itself, the import of these small acts to

the enslaved holds great importance relative to the ability of

the slaves to disrupt the everyday totality of domination with

senses of community and freedom that no doubt contributed to

their ability to endure. Internally, psychically, in terms of the

breaches of space (shattering the self) and ruptures of time

(memory of the shattering), these might provide a slowing or a

stifling of the breaking that, otherwise, hurtles toward

infinity, which might manifest as something called “pleasure”

(more on this in a bit). But, as Hartman stages in questions and

accounts and analyses again and again, these practices, this

agency, and this pleasure remain compromised at all times by the

totality of domination and terror against which they rise. Again,

with simplicity and brilliance: “the forms of action taken do not

transcend but rather are an index of the particular figurations

of power and modes of subjection” (56). Songs, dances, music,

gatherings, though sung, though produced by the slaves’ voices,

marked the slaves’ relation to their enjoyment from without as a

kind of festivity and amusement—they enjoyed their subjection;

plainly, their supposed enjoyment was captive to masters and

tooled to further their subjection. Or they were performed in the

presence of the master(s) in what D. Davis (the subject of one of

the slave narratives Hartman includes in her analysis) calls,

“going before the king” (45), in a procession that effectively

locates blackness, black performance and performativity, in the

hands and before the throne of the master. Or they stole away

stealthily in the night in community gatherings, singing songs

and practicing faith and simply ‘being’ together absent the

visibility of the sun and the whip, but even this is

automatically and preemptively criminalized—stealing away—in such a

way that agency, here, if it is here, is that of the perpetual

thief; they move, and that movement, if not overtly for the

master, is criminalized by the master. On every level, these acts

“are an index” of slavery, of terror and subjection, entangled.

Which entangles the slaves’ pleasure, as well. The enjoyment

of the slaves of their actions, however small, does not escape

the frame of subjection. Hartman recognizes this in her

juxtaposition (read: entanglement) of the “sense of possibility”

(57), which might foster something like ‘pleasure’ or ‘enjoyment’

in (non)beings for whom all possibility—for agency, thought,

liberation, Humanity—remains impossible, with the trajectory of

the performative, of blackness, and of ‘enjoyment’ not as modes

or forms of transcendence, but as indexes of totalized

subjugation and collective enunciations of shared pain (51). This

catapults us back into the psychic, as it is a psychic

entanglement, primarily—though it has political and ontological

consequences—and invites us to extend an invitation to David

Marriott into the camp (or onto the plantation). A thought from

his work on lynching photography, On Black Men—a thought which

inspired this entire piece, its many previous and failed

iterations, which is to say it is ‘important’ (which might an

understatement)—proves foundational (that might be the right

measure) to understanding why and how enjoyment might arise

within the black; tellingly, and conveniently, his object of

focus is the black’s revenge fantasy and its relation to the real

of the black’s subjection. As if prophetically engaging Django

Unchained’s narrative from before (primarily because Django is

neither novel nor unique, neither historically or aesthetically),

Marriott recalls a quote from Richard Wright, which he unpacks. I

quote at length:

‘My spontaneous fantasies lived in my mind…because I felt completely helpless in the face of this threat that might come upon me at any time, and because there did not exist to my knowledge any possible course of actionwhich could have saved me if I had ever been confronted by a white mob.’ No possible action, so Wright needs (and it is need rather than, say, wish) his defensive fantasy, his way of defending himself psychically against the death of a thousand lynchings. But no defense, either, because Wright knows that this fantasy has no

‘objective value’: it cannot be made real, unlike the racist fantasy which structures reality for both whites and blacks. (OBM, 11)

Marriott points to the psychic, to the protective necessity of

fantasy as it manifests in the mind, either primarily from the

imagination and memory, within, or from stimulation of the

imagination from without. This protective necessity, while

necessary, runs counter to the logics and actualities of the

real, which, for blacks, remains totalizing domination and

terror, like slavery, but of a different name, absent physical

chains, but soaked with the ink of bondage even after the

“liberation” of blacks (“and we need not pretend that even the

quotation-marks do not matter”).

Extend, plainly: What Marriot points to is nothing but

another form of psychic fracture (of space and time). The

creation of the fantasy modulated by the memory and actuality of

the event against which it is positioned creates a split in

understanding, or recognition, such that the understanding of the

real, the knowledge that the present state of danger remains

terrible and total, splits from—or, if there isn’t a total split,

there is a cracking, a formation of the beginnings or the

possibility of a split—the belief in and necessity of the

possibility of the fantasy. Simplify: Which is not to suggest

that, on the one hand, the black recognizes the real, and on the

other the black believes in this fantasy, but that the perpetuity

of the entanglement and breaking between the two signifies a

splitting, or a beginning or a possibility of a splitting, in and

of psychic space. The memory of this fantasy, maintained as one

of many plates of a suit of armor, or sections of a shield—as a

necessary psychic defense against the actuality of terror and

subjection—reenacts this splitting again and again; and as

moments emerge and are recalled and summon the fantasy, again, (a

new “Dirty Nigger!”, or a different version experience of a

lynching, and the memory of the invocation or the event), the

fantasy meets revisions, gains new friends or kin, and itself,

breaks, or creates breakages in psychic space and across psychic

time. Simplify: Psychic time and psychic space for the black,

themselves fractured by blackness’ emergence and reemergence in

the mind (from within or without, memory or event), fracture more

and more because of the fantasy, however necessary it is, however

deep the recognition of its fantasy, not-real status. Simplify

still: The fantasy, too, becomes a kind of “Dirty Nigger!”

moment, with similar effects, though almost completely psychic in

its origin.

Preempted: This seems to map neatly over Django, given its

narrative, given that is, in so many ways, a revenge fantasy with

which blacks can identify, which blacks can enjoy, which blacks

can add to that necessary suit of psychic armor as some part of

psychic defense, stealing away within, fashioning a protective

sense of enjoyment. But map it does not. From within and without,

Django is a white fantasy, an emblem of the continued and

totalizing subjection and terrorization of blacks in, by, the

antiblack world. From without: very simply, the movie’s writer

and director, Quentin Tarantino is white (despite his absurd

claims about reincarnation and a past life as a slave). The

narrative is his (which is not totally the case, since he plumbs

heavily from other sources). The words and voices and bodies move

as he directs them. No matter Foxx’s, or Washington’s, or

Jackson’s, or anyone else’s repeated assertions that this is of

their own volition, their blackness, very literally their

blackness’ performance and performativity, belongs in his

narrative and is subject to his will. Just as the slaves sang,

danced, stole away, their performances remain compromised by the

actuality of the contexts in which they emerge (that of the film

set, the film’s narrative, the antiblack world). From within, the

very trajectory and motivation of Django as a character is owned

and structured by Waltz’s character. From the moment he frees

Django and guides the other slaves’ anger, which does not appear

to be theirs since Waltz is the one who instructs them in

directing it; to the moment he tells Django the story of

Broomhilda, which serves as the skeleton for the entirety of

Django’s motivation and progression throughout the narrative; to

when he trains Django and prophetically names him the ‘fastest

gun in the South;’ to the moment he devises the plan that

ultimately comprises the bulk of the action of the film; to the

moment he kills Candie and sets up a vacuous battle between

Django, a bunch of nameless whites, and Stephen (an engagement

that demands its own, complete analysis); to the moment, even

after death, that his voice echoes with his naming of Django as

that “fastest gun in the South” in a flashback—all of this

locates Django as slave, no matter his nominal liberation or his

masterful (ha!) gun slinging.

What this does to the above is shift it: not only does this

fantasy fracture as it is internalized in order to protect, but

it is always already at every level outside ‘our’ possession,

which multiplies the intensity and scope of the fractures in

psychic space and time. Simplify: Not even the (revenge) fantasy

belongs to blacks. This is a double crisis in ownership. In the

analysis of fantasy Marriott presents, even if the fantasy is

“ours” (i.e. emerges from within, or, in this case, had been

written/directed by blacks), it causes or begins fractures,

splits or cracks, via its inherent impossibility relative to the

actuality of the terror and subjection of the real, which keeps

it from being completely “ours”—one foot bound by the world, and

one trying to steal away. But in this instance, when the fantasy

is in every sense already not “ours,” the initial fracture

happens because the fantasy calls to be internalized, to be added

to the armor—even in the deepest rejection of the film dwells, or

might, all other things wrought as they are, resonance with the

idea of a slave killing white people on a rampage for black love;

then, concurrently, a second fracture might occur, due to the

compromised nature of the narrative and the maintenance of

slavery throughout—a crisis in the psychic as the fantasy that

the fantasy of Django is ever “ours” at all. Simplify: Not even

the fantasy that the fantasy belongs to or is for blacks, the

fantasy of the fantasy, escapes being anything but fantasy, and

that double fantasy causes a suitably doubled fracture (not that

I presume to know the measure of the initial one).

“Enjoyment” of Django Unchained, for blacks, then, is fraught

and fracturing. At any level of identification with the film, I,

we, break; rather, at any level of recognition of the presence

and problem of the film, I, we, break. It is a critical doubling

of the psychic fractures experienced by blacks in encounters with

moments like “Dirty Nigger!”, Fanonian moments, black moments,

because, while in Fanon’s case and in the reifications of

blackness like it the pathologizing, or revealing of the already

present pathology, of blackness is readily apparent and totally

available to thought (which isn’t to say that it is thought),

Django Unchained, as well as the blindness of the praise and

support for the film, works to maintain the mask, itself donning

a black mask over its pallid narrative, doubly fracturing the

psychic space and time of blacks via its constitutive lie.

Simplify: Enjoyment, in this sense, is compromised, at once in

service of the maintenance and problem of the constitutive lie of

Django Unchained, and in service of the protective hope that the

lie of the lie is not lying; this is a split, a psychic fracture

of a different order, double because of the lie and blackness’

enjoyment’s relation to it. Reduce: Blackness’ enjoyment is split

because it always remains betwixt and between the unjustified

hope that the liar (Quentin Tarantino, and/or Django Unchained) is

not lying, or will not lie again, and the actual support

for/belief in the lie, witting or unwitting. Which might lead one

to say that, in this way, Django Unchained, in its manifestation of

this double breaking, is as unique, and new, and important to the

discourse about slavery as Tarantino and others believe it is.

But to say that--even that—would be to lie.

And so, in encountering this film, the discourse about it,

the unwavering support of it, the call to only recognize its art,

or the other call to recognize the brilliance of the narrative

and acting, or the other call to enjoy the black man killing

white men…In encountering all of this in a context in which

blacks remain unfree, this unfreedom remains unthought, Trayvon’s

body remains facedown on the ground, lifeless in the yard of my

memory, next to the jailhouse floor where Anna Brown’s body stops

moaning and dies over and over again, where the burned and

headless corpse of Christopher Dorner keeps burning, and

countless other corpses, named and unnamed, keep piling up,

toward infinity—all this happening on every single broken psychic

plane of my mind, toward infinity—and…In encountering all of

this, outside and inside, out in the world and within the mind,

I, we, break. Over and over again, we shatter at blackness’

juggernaut force—and this is only psychically, not even to

mention politically or ontologically—we break because blacks’

blackness breaks; in a different sense, or maybe in precisely

right sense, than Moten might mean, we are forever, ‘in the

break.’ And so I turn to Alike, from the film, Pariah, whose poem

speaks volumes; the whole poem:

“Heartbreak opens onto the sunrise for even breaking isopening and I am broken, I am open. 

Broken into the new life without pushing in, open to the possibilities within, pushing out. See the love shine in through my cracks? See the light shine out through me? I am broken, I am open, I am broken open. 

See the love light shining through me, shining through my cracks, through the gaps.

My spirit takes journey, my spirit takes flight,could not have risen otherwise and I am not running,I am choosing. Running is not a choice from the breaking. Breaking is freeing, broken is freedom.”

Am I, are we, open to the “possibilities within?” Is breaking

freeing? Is broken freedom? Dare I, we, cling to the hope, to the

sunlight, to the fantasy? My, our, psychic continuum shatters

again and again and again infinity but breaking is freedom and

broken is freedom so I, we, must be infinitely free or growing

free toward the sunlight of infinity—no!—not a black hole

vacuuming everything in infinite gravity but the sun shining

through my cracks with infinite light—yes!—I am, we are, free!—

yes…!

But then I, we, remember again, break again, hear the words

again, see the body and the noose above my, our, head again. I,

we, try to believe the lie of the lie of the lie of the lie of

the lie…one foot in, one foot out, try to keep both feet in;

trying, trying, trying. But “nothing doing…I explode.” Again and

again and again—I, we, explode. Sun goes supernova, or collapses

into…And here are the fragments of fragments of fragments of

fragments of a smile undun, spaghettified and strewn across some

pages.