That may be a little too pretentious of a post title, but what do want at 2:00am?
It’s been quite a while since the last time I posted on here. It’s not been for nothing though, and I ‘ve had good reason to be gone!
I’m finally done with my student teaching experience and will be graduating in less than a week!
In the time I’ve had off (specifically late at night this weekend) I wrote a poem I think might be pretty decent. It’s a poem adapted from an article in one of my old Cultural Studies textbooks. I created it using a “cut-up” method in which I simply read through the text and pulled out words and phrases that I proceeded to patch together to create a poem. I hope you all like it. Feedback is more than welcome as always!
Serial Killing for Beginners
Private desire and public fantasy cross
Convening around scenes of violence
Public fascination
Torn and open
Bodies
Torn and opened
Persons
A collective gathering
The shock
The trauma
The wound
The Unforgiven
Something strange and something new appears
No longer the mark
The stigmata
Neither the sacred nor heroic
A culture centered on trauma
People wear their damage
Like badges of identity
Or fashion accessories
Body and society
Identity and desire
Violence and intimacy
Sex and crime
The stigmatized person
Marked for all time
Potentially dangerous people
A potentially dangerous individual
The serial killer emerges
The dark intersection
Even when evidence for it is absent
Persons were faceless numbers and types
Awaiting execution
“America’s murder epidemic”
A national malady of trauma and violence
The fear
The desire
Murder will spread
A mask of normalcy
Fading into the background
Makes visible this version of commonplace
Natural and collective
Private fantasy and public space
Intimacy and publicity
Corporeal compulsive violence
A malady of agency
The identification of destruction and possession
The logic of killing for pleasure
In a murder machine culture
The species of person proper
“The common individual”
“Be Your Self”
“Obey Your Thirst”
“Each for each”
“All for all”
The profile of a serial killer
The very icon of the mass in person
The mass-market genre of bodily violence
The self-made man
The mass spectacle
Torn bodies and torn persons
The crowd gathers
Sexual
Social
Technological
Artistic
The serial killer makes visible
A lifestyle
A career
A calling
The serial killer has become something to be
Just like me…
WordPress won’t allow me to format this correctly, so here it is in its final form: Serial Killing for Beginners
Another Bad Decision 