KEEP PLANNING
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about
#003
Amelia C. Winter
solution to the aubade in four moves
1
a sunrise, like duration in general, steals from the poor and gives to the rich; it should serve as no surprise, then, that poorer men are more likely to get divorced than richer men, though the wealthy compensate in magnitude. this is just one face of the many-valenced concept of ‘family’ in american conservatism. politics is an art of pathetic fallacy. searches for ‘breeding kink’ picked up in 2020 and peaked in late 2021, reflecting a new calcium deposit in the modern consumer, the reproduction of whose labour-power can take place only in a stunted form. the king will hoard his bodies in any given episteme, and indeed, in terms of net expenditure, it is now more rational to abstract oneself than to have children, which is just what this bill intends to rectify. recent polls suggest that what is truly needed is a national myth: the youth, especially, today, lack a myth, which is why they are so lethargic, they sleep too much. mozart slept five hours a night. thatcher slept four. edison got us into this mess. this page is a list of murder-suicide incidents at disneyland hotel.
2
strictly speaking, the aubade is the address of a departing lover to a sleeping woman. in medieval gender metaphysics, gender was a warm place to sleep; gender studies, the citation-governed study of women, holds this position to this day. the ‘watchman’—a third, sleepless gender who wakes the lover from his reveries—is also frequently figured in this genre. mackinnon, for her part, states that a genre is nothing other than what men have made of it. for instance, it is common for male poets to refer to ‘poetry’ or ‘the poet’ within the poem itself; this reflects a destructive anxiety about labour, the fear that the man out of his bed and speaking is already usurped. every hotel room got the watchman’s chair. cuckoldry itself, however, is a literary device of later provenance, invented by joyce to depict his own fearful awakeness as a natal irishman. in the end, gender is only a tactic among others. what a fucking nightmare. it is of the nature of reason to regard things as necessary, not as contingent: the poet will never be the second person. they’ll anthologize him under his birth name, and every passing reader will know a speaker is buried there. anaphora would be a beautiful name for a girl. no wonder she left him.
3
sunlight is the best disinfectant, the justice said. partition is roughly two-thirds of the law and expanding all the time. whatever makes up the rest is not ours to know; the sun says ‘yes’ and the law says ‘no’. divine law is law that holds without context; human law is law that holds without excuse. if a man lays with a woman by force he will be joined to her by law. the man who subjects to law by pain of punishment is not properly just. solanas thus argued the law should do away with men—but then, there is no longer any clarity on matters of taste. the interpretation of law cannot precede the interpretation of oneself, et cetera—and the law, in any case, is not finished with men. lincoln, for instance, during his days as henry fonda, commonly shared his bed with male lawyers while travelling the circuit. this was the law of the time. but time has parted them, as time someday will part all warmths, long after the law: the law, which can lay down no rule beyond human wakefulness.
4
the bed is empty, the bed should now speak for itself. if there is no place for the self inside the diagram, one should not refer out: this is the point of it. self-reference is a search for a coathook in the dark. the human mind does not know the human body itself, nor does it know that it exists except through ideas of affections by which the body is affected: the mirror helps you with water. i tell people i wrote lyric poetry before i transitioned. i was trying to invent a speaker and quit when i found it. that’s what one tells people, for campaign donations. medical science is a basis for and insurance of descriptive sincerity: the a is a comforting fiction to the man who can’t satisfy his sleeper, the variable-length session is a crude joke, the public breakdown is a hypocritical dream of modernity, a genre of speech that wants to quit it. i have no way into my own body; i find it harder and harder to even feel it. i can only positively apprehend myself as a novel sexual experience for somebody else, and as soon as i’m doing anything i’m thinking about it being over. i once said more here. sorry. you are enough, as long as the incentives are right. we will kill ourselves when we know for sure that we can’t win. i promise i won’t leave you, so long as [tape noise]
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Amelia C. Winter is a writer of fiction and criticism living in Naarm. Her work has been featured in Meanjin, Action Spectacle, Cordite Poetry Review and X-R-A-Y Lit Mag, and she is currently working on a novel.
01 May 2025