It had snowed all week in Buffalo. Every god damn day. I was on my back on the couch recovering from a work-induced migraine. And found out Protean had republished “Fugue 35 | Overproduction / Reintegration” from my 2023 book, Fugue & Strike.
This was cool as hell. I respect Protean a lot. They’re an explicitly, out-and-out leftist publication. Not squishy left-ish. They’ve got a firm Marxist common-sense backbone. They rise to the moment. In response to the genocide of the U.S.-back colonial entity occupying Palestine, they’ve published a series of letters from Gaza and Fargo Nissim Tbahki’s blazing “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide.” Also, the poetry is great. Case-in-point, Laura Jaramillo’s “Handedness” layered: “Always to work. I am a hammer broken / against work.” Goddamn. Yes.
It’s a small thing but I appreciate the succinct framing of the framing of my poem in their tweet: “[it] explores the ways in which wage labor drains the meaning from our social relations.” Explain a poem? Why not. This puts the poem into dialogue with concepts foundational to a transformative politics: the current regime of work sucks so bad it must change (and, if we follow that, the political economy that secures this regime of work and the capitalist social relations of production that organize this work and…). Or else we die on our feet or at our desk giving our life away—and keep working in that death, our life already gone, already taken, before it can ever reanimate us.
Yeah, I hate work, because it’s stealing me from you or you from whoever you desire. When C or I get home, we often hug desperately because now our life can begin again—for about 45 minutes—before our attention is on getting ready to work again.
Look, I’m not hopeless. The recent spike in labor militancy is encouraging. Sean Fain’s call for a general strike? Great. But I am sick (disabled, in fact). And tired. I gave twenty years of my life to work and want it all back. That where this poem comes from: finding yourself at a drug store exhausted and longing for people your exhaustion is separating you from and knowing—knowing—if late capitalism was a machine, something grinding away in front of you, you’d stick your hand in it, just to jam it up.
There’s a genocide going on. As I write this before work, the colonial entity (on a U.S. umbilical cord of cash and bombs) occupying Palestine has killed over 25,000 Palestinians, has—and is—destroying hospitals, sniping nurses, and leaving NICU babies to rot. In the imperial core, we sense, as our leaders provide glib, unconvincing cover for the genocide—that we, as a society, are in a profound moral collapse.
But that’s not it. I’m seeing videos of people fighting for their liberation with homegrown weapons technologies, with words, with their bare hands saving lives from the rubble. Yes.
So I want to turn to the limitations of this poem, the history it doesn’t account for, and what I’ve written about labor: those struggles must have an internationalist dimension, must be invested in the liberation of peoples from the tyranny of imperialist and colonial domination—the bomb, the Apache helicopter, the Elbit surveillance tower, the sniper drone, the structural adjustment program, extraction and ecocide by energy and mining companies—and tracing these links back to where we live and work so the struggle isn’t just for better wages but to replace the wages of empire with something entirely else. In the meanwhile, here’s to publications like Protean. It’s still wild to me that I got in there.
JOE HALL 