Pessimism isn’t the disaster that we should be looking at. It’s optimism, it’s this cruel motherfucker dressed in White and Floral and Sequins and yet is nothing but Dagger and Sword. Fire that scorches. Fist and pummeling. Hope is important but it is also destructive. Assume that pessimism leads to nothingness, to helplessness, at your own peril. All of these terms can be made deadnames to the things that they’ve been assigned, the things we understand to describe, names that do not fit the bodies of these texts, these texts that are our bodies, My Body.

Anything can be equipped with a motor for an action, an actioning away from this or an actioning towards a disaster. And we look towards this insatiable capitalism to prove that we vermin can make and exact and continue and maintain such a ruthless economic system of frank exploitation, exploitation out and of every single damn thing we name. Thinkers living in mansions in Bloomsbury thinking on million-pound chairs. Aestheticians performing melancholia on The Real Housewives.
Suburban boredom and depletion.

They said, “In the future, there will be no money.”

Well I hope you are fucking happy
We ain’t got no more money and instead we got
A Hope that can be employed to do dastardly things.
A Hope that can be twisted and made into weapons of mass destruction.
Hope that can be warfare.
Hope that could be thinking this world is over right now, Hope that can take away someone else’s breath. My breath.
A Hope that kills.
A Hope that creates a new world order.
Hope that can serve a look, a function, turn it into money in no money land.

I’m just speaking from a dissonance
From this harmful state of affairs
Is all.

*Hope is also an essential part of comprehension. We shall not get rid of something we have all deemed so necessary.
**My entire existence is spent disassociated so don’t believe anything I say.
***I am not a stable narrator, I am not a stable wreck.
****There is nothing you would see that will show you that any of this is real

Good Things Come to Those Who Have a Bad Attitude by Malik Nasad Sharpe is featured in Issue 3.43 (Winter 2021), guest-edited by Aisha Sasha John and Alexa Solveig Mardon. To read the piece in its entirety purchase a print or digital copy here.