I used to be against the aesthetic of puff coats, thought them garish and indelicate, scoffed at their function, thought them the swell of over embellished egos and all the torment suffocating under snow feathers plucked out from the Book of Job or the fifteen hour days ten yr old girls in toxic regions of rural china spend differentiating the carcasses of bloody birds from the influenza tract housing so Uniqlo can lower the price of blunt cotton and I wanna be down, I wanna be down with you, once a love song, still a long line of garment workers swaying and sneezing to pack the shell. I used to mistell the difference between armor and style. Paramour, Blackamour. Mantan Moreland. Bye, bye show will. Remember when Dior mistook the negro talk show host for a tin pan mammy. Sho is sweet to me. Show her to the revolving doors of hijacked soul, and call the applause So in Love, Curtis Mayfield version. Damn, sometimes I wanna be a virgin again. Walk through a reimagined erotic landscape, bleed into a new time-capsule-forever, yellow bright bird/yellow bright bird, watch the shine capsize into glimmer and then parachromatic shine again, today kind, against the swarm of our blessed reciprocal entitlement. Chinese girls in a factory full of infected feathers, trading their time for white rice and spices. Supplying our feathered armor, confiding in us and we pose back with depraved satisfaction. Call that the understanding. Tuck your hand in with my hand and lets skip across the metal detectors decorated in the understanding. The station will be crowded and newly gut renovated and Beats by Dre and puff coats all over like a faux rebel uniform of the proletariat. Let's share. You swipe your chip hand it back. And I'll slide it too, through the adverse strands of metal til it approves us both. And we can flood the gates in almost unison. The mundane reimagined as erotic. Cyborg closeness as we march toward home. Let's both wear our china feathers and stand side by side statuesque as the police surround us with their tantrum of accusations: Why did you share that paper magnet, why are your china feathers plush to the adversity. Where do they take the girls with swollen knuckles. Why are civilians filming us in love's defense, we're the thugs of state power, truss. Hands against the wall! Police crave affection too. Touch their blue compliance. Complement their confusion of force with lust. Starve the grammar of their consummation. Don't let them get off as they hit you from the back, blackman, blackwoman. They want so desperately to reimagine their erotic landscape with you in it. They want to be as important as this Subway Couple, two black teens in love, inflated by the puff of china birdsongs, huddled around a bent card, on fire. And then disappeared. Verb meaning to be taken by the state, made nameless. Shame is not a virtue. And then the civilians filming, disappeared. Ushered away in handcuffs and a cacophony of pleas. And then the doves with broken beaks appear on the tracks covered in oil, hope's zebra doves. A machine shoves into the tunnel like a stuttering phallus. Blood splatters all over the tracks in the muted strut of an emergency. The upholders of the authoritarian regime are very lonely. They dance us like blow-up puppets, they dress us as luckless birds, we step up like pageant contestants addicted to the casual invisible labor armoring our days. What difference does it make, whose blood shatters the walls and whose becomes the rubble.
