The first world was suffering, suffering. The second world was liberation. Liberation!
But why, said the first world, does it look so much like suffering?

Like suffering only once, the second world said—like suffering plus change.
Is that not the first world? No, said the second world, the first world is

suffering plus nature, the second world is suffering plus change. How come,
someone said, and we can’t know what world they said it from, how come

you can’t get rid of suffering. The second world answered, well then where
would the world be. We don’t want to free ourselves from the world.

---

THE WORLD

The first world was a world, the second invention. The first world was
a world, the second critique. The first world was a world, the second

the survival of the first in other terms. We had started saying phrases like
Bad Utopia. Collective speech like a mime was shoplifting nouns from

imagined shelves, so well imagined, I wept to see how empty they were,
as punditry sounded, what is this, Venezuela / Texas / the Soviet Union / the

world? What is this, theworld? So we started speaking, not quite at the same
time, until someone thought the voice was plural, and that politics

had arrived like a breath of fresh pollution. The first world was a world, the
second invention, tried to reverse the coordinates but got stuck on the same

equation: labor & punishment, prison & syntax, even the sodomy was
trickle down. Picture this: the first world was

theworld, the second was again, the first world was thestage, the second
was the set, built from the planks of the first world’s stage, & the more

elaborate the escape towards the rafters, the more hollow the foundation,
ensuing collapse, & the second world looked just like the heap of the first,

falling, rise higher

---

THE WORLD

The first world was born and the second world was born, but the second world had
to cannibalize the parts available, this baby sibling world, mirror

of the first. The first world was a world but the second was a smart ass, seeking
revenge and reversing the predicates, beckoning the first world

forward, scooting away, to watch the world fall on its face. This was the second
world, the world that forgot it was the first world, because it called

for the abolition of the first world, but forgot to abolish the first world in the
second, it forgot that it was a peninsula. But the first world was made by

someone else—was it God, or Thomas More, or my mother—and the second world
was made from the pieces of the first—like yours More, or my

tract,  written from your text, can only figure an ocean between landmasses. But
like a little sibling cannibalizing the parts available, devouring the affect,

stringing up a more convincing marionette, a second world which said “down with
the first world,” forgetting it was the first world, it was the first

world’s little kin.

---

THE WORLD

The first world was to lose but our chains but the second world was nothing
the first world was the world the second was but didn’t know it was I’ll be

back said the first world, the second world was do not go gentle into that
good was, the first world was losing its world to the second, the second

world was coming, but when it came to the door, it answered in the robes
of the first world, so when you said four score and seven so when you said to

be or not so when you said frankly my dear I don’t give a when you said what
the world had said, the world was world, and you couldn’t get out of it. So

you had to say what the world said against itself, you had to say make
America you had to say sexual relations with you had to say ever after you had

to let the world say what it says. You speak in a locked room, which creates
another room, even if you can’t get out of it.

---

THE WORLD

But the second world was when the first world forgot itself, a phrase like Bad
Utopia, like blackheads in the mirror, you had to squeeze the mirror, and see

if the blackhead would leave your skin. The world was like that, at least the
world the world was was like that. But we wanted it to become the world

the world was not, so we squeezed the mirror very hard.

---

THE WORLD

The world! The world was the world. And then there was a world the world
was not, call it the second world, the world the world imagined it could be.

The world! Semantic satiation of the world. The world was a sound losing meaning
through repetition, so a second world emerged, in the mind of

the first world, a world starved of meaning. And the second world negated
the world, as it took its bricks it decried the mortar, as it constructed the

edifice it defied the foundations, it became a better world, but forgot it was
the first world, so it rebuilt the things it abolished, in negation. Island

forgot its connections.  Every so often, as you walk down a street, you come
to a large building, which has a special name of its own. Hello special name of

its own. Hello a large building. Hello walk down a street. Hello the dead mix
freely hello or not to be. The Utopians are their own

nothing to lose but.

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