Antibody

These posts stay free because I don’t believe good writing should live behind a velvet rope. But I also don’t believe writers should work for exposure. If you like my work, subscribe, pay what you can, share it, or drop a tip. Every bit of it keeps this going.

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I was a cog once,
perfectly trained, obedient,
filing my teeth down
against the grinding jaw
of the magnificent machine.

There is an erotics to erasure
becoming less to fit more in.
Don’t let anyone tell you different.

They said: fit in, fit in, fit in

until the mantra wore a groove
in the grey matter of my thinking
with the warmth of being wanted
even if the wanting
is only for your labor,
only for your silence,
only for your
perfectly calibrated compliance.

Do not resist the turning.

Do not consider
that the axle
does not even know your name.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

Then I became a rock.
On the conveyor belt I choked,
the halted line,
the maintenance crew already coming
with crowbars
and a replacement cog,
interchangeable
as a cell the body sheds
without grief.

I stood in the wreckage of my compliance
and blamed the system
the way a man curses rain
from inside a house the rain washed clean.

I hated the system
the way you hate a mirror
that will not lie for you
furiously,
with full recognition,
with the sick disgust
of seeing yourself
in the thing you came to destroy.

the invisible hand
is invisible
is a hand
is reaching
into your our my

pocket

Here is the black jewel,
the irony of iron:

To break the system
you must think in systems
you must learn its every hinge,
and in the learning
become its most devoted student,
its most fluent speaker,
its most elegant proof.

Photo by Miklos Gabor on Unsplash

To make the system
you must think in systems,
and in the thinking
become what you drew blood
to escape, the antibody
that learned the antigen so well
it forgot which one it was.

we will overthrow reform dismantle rebuild
the corrupt broken illegitimate system
and replace it with a system structure framework
that is just equitable free

ours

We will mean it
with our whole torn bodies,
with our dead,
with the children
we are trying to hand a world to.

And we will also
become it.

So I confess:
I am the cog who dreamed of being a boulder.
I am the boulder who became the cornerstone
of something I would have torched at thirty
with both hands and a song.

I would have been right.
I would have been wrong.

Now I hold both.
Never flinch.

I hold both
like the exiled holds the key
to a door that no longer stands,
in a house that no longer lasts,
in a country they will not let him name
without correction

still, he holds the key
to the bomb.

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Thank you for reading my work!

Hi, I’m Nicole. You can read here a bit about myself!

I am a full time writer at the moment - I write poems when I’m angry, fiction when I’m hopeful, and essays or dystopias when I’m really digging into possibilities.

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I am a published writer. Curriculum of Feelings is a haunting, six-part journey that spans centuries and species, a visceral exploration of the “Problem of Evil.”
Through a collection of short stories, you follow five distinct vessels: a poetess silenced by her world, a slave who finds freedom in language, a tree that witnesses history’s worst acts, a whale carrying a dying song, and a boy tracking a collapsing future. Each life is a lesson in humility, humanity, and pain.