"Sunra: Jazz Is Dead and You Killed It"
Sunraā
you collapsing bookshelf in a beret,
you LinkedIn of lost causes,
you human RSS feed with halitosis.
You donāt speak truth to power,
you whisper Wikipedia quotes
to people who stopped listening an hour ago.
You read 50 blogs a day
but couldnāt find a point with GPS
and an emotional support philosopher.
Youāre not well-read,
youāre well-skipped.
Every time you open your mouth,
a dictionary files a restraining order.
Your brain is a thinkpiece
with no editor,
no coherence,
and six contradictory footnotes
all screaming āIām the main character!ā
Sunraā
your idea of passion
is interrupting people
with more obscure suffering
than theirs.
"My trauma's artisanal,"
you say,
"hand-picked from the ruins of western decay."
Mate, youāre not enlightenedā
youāre just a narcissist
with jazz hands
and the soul of a cancelled professor
haunting a community radio station.
You donāt debate,
you take hostages.
You read a blog post on water once
and now you're the wet messiah.
You actually called jazz āpre-verbal resistanceā
like that meant something.
It didnāt.
It sounded like a stroke.
Sunra,
you are the reason people pretend to have phone calls.
You are the reason book clubs have wine.
You are the sound of a dying fridge
covered in protest stickers.
And that solo you wrote?
That āatonal cry against neoliberal noiseā?
It made my dog shit itself
in self-defense.
You are the filler between smart people talking.
Youāre the background hum
of unpaid rent
and secondhand vinyl no one asked for.
Sunraā
if your brain were any more tangled,
itād be performing at Coachella
under the name āDiscourse Dread.ā
You are not a genius.
You are not woke.
You are a cautionary tale
about what happens
when no one ever punches the smart kid in high school.