Two Poems by Sam Cooke

Minds become delinquent when student loans become delinquent. They repossess your mind. You lose it in a literal sense. Nothing can prepare you for being mindless. Of course, you get to keep the body, thanks to an often-cited 1974 case. Wandering around aimlessly takes on a whole other meaning when you go out without a brain. Bodies revolt against the intelligence. Sometimes, even for those with brains, the body wants what the body wants. Lust is a real thing. So, for those who have been paying off their student loans diligently, you can still lose your mind; it's just less common. Youth lose their minds more often than older generations; that is simply the way it has always been and always will be. Age brings intelligence, but youth brings fun. Having fun sometimes involves turning off your brain. Delinquency with the mind, when it is unexpected and taken to pay old debts, that’s the worst. Where else do you think all that AI came from, besides students who could not keep up with payments? The teachable moment is never to take out loans from various financial institutions of ill repute, also known as the regular monetary system. As the Country Teasers sang in their song It Is My Duty – “Watch while the credit system fucks you in the ass uh huh.” Financial institutions used to be in it for the money back in the day. Then, the 1990s happened, and now it is domination, not even of the lustful variety, which I can at least understand from an abstract point of view.

Breakups hurt the heart. To disrespect a heart requires loneliness. Not everybody is made for relationships. Plenty aren’t. Society seems to emphasize the loneliness, to want it, to market towards it. Independent thought and independence from responsibility are the ultimate goals they sell people, making it appear as if you can leave society at any moment. In a way, you never can. You can create new communities, new places to hide, but society is always going to be nipping at your heels. Like the snake that struck at the heel of Adam and Eve, society needs to make you want more, in both literal and abstract senses. Want to know this thing? Sure, learn about it. Don’t want to remember it? Don’t worry, there is a way to engage with knowledge without needing to take it to heart. The heart aches for genuine connection, a connection that it rarely will get.