so, the coffee only comes in black or with a splash

of milk, but she wanted cream; yesterday the only drink was coca

cola – how noise not always music, soda not always a drink – no,

that’s not right. it’s not

the drink – it’s how we want

the drink to be fixed and what we think it will do to

us; it’s that the muzak makes us feel even though we can’t decipher what tune

its cover conceals
what if she is just tired of the ambition she was coerced into wanting – no,

this is a lie – she cannot want

not-ambition; but she cannot want ambition either
there is nothing she

can want that is something that will help

her, so she scrolls

– sie weiss es, aber sie tut es trotzdem (she knows it, but she still does it)
she scans for markers

of being – she forages a maw of identity like dog bylan crafts

a seven-and-a-half-minute song about a single woman comprised

of all the world – he AI before

AI, culture slurper
like kafka’s protagonist witnessing corporeal

punishment methodically enacted by state apparati, she beholds the

structure, feels its menace, knows it is not her yet tries to enfold her

self into it somehow
something remains

though – aprons more constrictive than they looked on the content

creator; baking fun for a tight

five but dishes gratingly soporific 
the part she can’t

metabolize into the identity, the

“leftover”                                                                                                                                         
            far from hindering the full submission of the subject to the ideological command, is the

            very condition of it
what does this mean? sometimes your kids can’t

tell what’s made from left

overs but the squishy blue

berries fire saled into the

muffins – their bulbous shape

shifting, their boozy ting – you sense

these attributes invariably, yet also variously, despite the

recipe’s click

bait image



  Slavoj Žižek riffing on Blaise Pascal, The Sublime Object of Ideology, 2008, p. 43. ↩