SIXTY PERCENT

Neon bleeds through wet asphalt.

A cigarette burns past the filter,

searing straight into the knuckle-bone.

The city is a bloated artery.

I am on my knees,

tongue on stone,

drinking the gutter raw.

I. THE SACRED PURGE

Scum-bitch hypocrite.

Quoting Adorno in dive-bar stalls.

Scrawling manifestos in smeared lipstick

across cracked mirrors—

then pitching forward to purge.

I mutter Bataille into porcelain,

wiping bile with a frayed sleeve.

Hunting for the acéphale.

Headless ecstasy.

The terrifying, sacred violence

of absolute self-slaughter.

II. THE KITCHEN TABLE GHOSTS

Back home, my mother kneels to a pale ghost.

Keeps the hearth swept.

Keeps the bloodline pure.

Prays I am her quiet daughter of the dust—

a sterile vessel for a history

that survived fire, razor wire, and famine.

She doesn't see the rabid thing stepping into the storm.

Doesn't hear the rusted sirens pacing my skull—

famished matriarchs howling for marrow and iron.

Teeth filed down on raw contradiction:

a junky for chaos,

a whore for experience,

starving for the sickening weight of real flesh—

cold spit, wet iron, stale cum drying on bruised thighs.

III. BOG-DIRT AND PANIC

A low, static fever between my thighs.

Irish bog-dirt crossed with Romani dust.

Two bloodlines of runners, thieves, fugitives.

My spine is a tuning fork vibrating on pure panic.

I pace like a caged bitch in a leather coat,

clawing forearms because quiet feels like rot.

I want the open road.

The riot.

The needle in the vein.

The 3 AM freight train tearing through the dark.

Muscle fibers screaming to tear something alive into pieces.

IV. THE MUTT IN THE ACADEMY

Trapped in the static between worlds.

A mutt with no native tongue.

Too slick for my own blood—

a grotesque bird singing in a stolen accent.

Too filthy for academia’s fluorescent, sterile halls.

Too jagged for the elite.

Too raw to be their performative pet project.

I refuse to perform my trauma on command.

I am not their success story.

Not their cautionary tale.

Just a bloody, jagged glitch in their funded pity machine.

IV-B. THE ARCHIVAL TAXONOMY

They sterilize the crime scene with white gloves.

Lock my grandad’s hunger in acid-free boxes,

slap a DOI number on the bog-rot,

and file our generational agony under Post-Colonial Studies (Folder B).

I watch them digitize the mud.

Convert our starvation into metadata,

curate our blood-spill for JSTOR,

and award each other tenure for measuring the depth of the grave.

I sign the copyright transfer with a pen that feels like a syringe—

draining the last warm drop from my pulse

so some tenured clerk can cross-reference my trauma

against a peer-reviewed footnote.

They think they’ve taxidermied the beast.

They think if you box the ghost, it stops screaming.

V. THE MARK OF THE ANCESTOR

And yet I sit at this rotten desk, choking on ink.

Writing a book.

Say it out loud—

it tastes like formaldehyde and grave-dirt.

Sixty percent of my people cannot read these goddamn lines.

Great-granny tracing shapes on a newspaper like a spell.

Great-grandad holding a trembling pen,

marking an ‘X’ on his military papers—

conscripted flesh marched straight into the trench-mud

for a king and country that branded him a parasite.

An ‘X’ because he couldn't even spell the name his mother screamed when he was born.

He left an ‘X’ to bleed out in the mud.

I leave ten thousand words on a page.

Don't let the binding fool you—it’s the exact same mark.

A desperate, bloody incision carved into the desk to prove a ghost was here.

Sixty percent trapped in that illiterate dark of pure survival.

Lives written only in scars,

hands that never held a pen

because a pen was just a weapon used to register their corpses.

VI. THE VULTURE AT THE LECTERN

And what am I?

The ultimate thief.

The academic vulture.

I commodify their generational agony,

package it into neat, bourgeois paragraphs,

and sell it to rich white liberals for applause.

Gramsci lied about organic intellectuals.

I’m a scavenger picking meat off my ancestors' bones,

using Foucault and Derrida to excuse my decaying conscience.

This pen isn't a voice—

it's a bayonet I'm shoving down my own throat.

VII. BRANDO AND MARX

I stand at their mahogany lecterns

like a ruined Marlon Brando in a torn undershirt—

sweating animal threat,

mumbling trauma through a mouth full of broken glass

while they drool over the spectacle.

I could’ve been a contender.

A real fucking force straight out of the dirt.

Instead, I took the dive for chump change.

Swapped the alleyway knife for a cheap pen,

sold my rage to the highest bidder,

and became the ultimate high-art pretender.

Brando knew the trade:

rip your gut open on stage,

feed the pigs the bleeding performance,

and hate them every second they applaud your ruin.

And right beside him sits Karl Marx,

wagging his finger about the commodity fetish and the theft of the commons—

like I don't know I’m the biggest capitalist whore in the room.

I took my ancestors’ starve-rot,

ground their bones into ink,

and packaged my people's misery for elite consumption.

Marx said the machine turns living flesh into dead value.

The old bastard forgot to mention how sweet the payout tastes

when you’re the one signing the bloody receipt.

VIII. THE PARADOX OF THE REVOLUTION

How do I build a revolution when I am hollowed out?

I believe in nothing,

and I believe in everything so hard it burns my retinas.

I see God in a puddle of spilled beer on a sticky dance floor.

Five seconds later, I know we are just meat rotting in real time.

I want to smash the state, burn the prisons, free my people—

and in the exact same breath, I know Cioran was right:

salvation is a delusion,

every ideal just a slow, pretentious form of suicide.

I want the revolution, but I want the collapse.

I want salvation, but I am addicted to the stench of the ruin.

IX. THE TERRIBLE FEMINIST

A terrible feminist.

An absolute fake.

God, I love the filthy thrill of it.

I watch tweed-jacket academics flinch when I drag raw violence onto their floors.

I thrive on horrified gasps when I spit on sanitized empowerment—

when I confess to crawling in the dark,

begging for the choke, the bruise, the holy humiliation of total submission.

My libertine hunger isn't an escape—

it’s a blade in the throat of everyone who needs me pure.

Fuck your noble suffering.

Fuck your clean martyr.

I claim the gutter.

The gore.

The stain.

The disgusting ecstasy of my total undoing.

X. THE VOYEUR

And you—

watching me from behind these pages—

don't pretend you're any better.

You lean in closer, darling.

A sick, voyeuristic thrill.

You get off on watching a half-feral girl bleed on command.

Watching me tear my chest open,

turn ghosts into prose,

and feed you raw organs while smiling through broken teeth.

Touch the wet edge of the page.

You play the delicate spectator.

I make you pay for the show.

XI. SWITCHBLADES AND TONGUES

I mask.

I perform.

I switch tongues like switchblades:

Demure, soft-spoken, and sad for the family table;

Sharp, arrogant, and clinical for the movement;

Filthy, feral, and pathetic for the dark beat of the street.

Ground to powder between two bloodlines—

Irish famine-rage and the Roma shadow.

I refuse to give you a clean, manageable corpse.

I am going to eat their canon raw,

digest their high theory,

and shit it across their gilded podiums:

a rabid dog in a tailored coat,

biting the hands that try to stroke my head and call me 'brave.'

XII. THE UNHOLY CONVERGENCE

Let the movement call me a loose cannon.

Let the family whisper I was lost to the dark.

Let publishers print my name on heavy 80-pound gloss

while I’m out back in the alley, knees deep in glass,

exchanging blood for liquor and theory for a stranger’s tongue against my neck.

The unholy convergence:

the scholar who knows too much,

the savage who feels too hard.

An absolute nightmare of an insider

who knows where the floorboards creak

and where to drop the match.

Call me a traitor.

Call me a whore.

Call me a vulture.

I don't give a fuck anymore.

My blood survived the fire, the wire, the bog, the famine,

and the black ink of their registries.

If I am damned to be a parasite,

I will be the most dangerous, beautiful beast in the room.

I will chew their dialectic,

spit vocabulary in their eyes,

burn their altars,

and leave my bloody ‘X’ carved so deep into their clean white walls

that no amount of white paint will ever cover the permanent scar.

XIII. THE HOWL AND THE SILENCE

I write with dirty fingernails,

typing through the nausea,

bleeding poisonous ink onto paper.

A sick animal howling at a neon sky,

coming for every drop before the city opens its wet, black throat and swallows me whole.

I am chewing through my tongue to taste the silence underneath—

the mother-tongue they burned out of my great-granny's mouth with shame.

Spitting out an oppressor's language lodged in my jaw.

A borrowed blade I keep swallowing because I don't know how to scream without it.

I write in their grammar and hate myself for how smooth it tastes,

how easily the sentences slide down when I want them to catch, to tear, to bleed.

So let me choke on it.

Let me gnaw the syllables down to gristle.

I will unlearn their syntax one bitten nail at a time,

drag my ancestors' broken vowels across the page like a wound that won't close,

and when I am finally wordless—

feral,

mute,

a howl without a mouth—

I will still be here.

A smear of ink.

A filthy prayer.

A ghost with no language left to haunt them...