Continue to sleep on Beethoven's racist fucking bosom

This isn't a poem

We must be perfect

Our music must be

Exciting from beginning to end and

End to beginning

before we've even had a beginning

We must make people

Excited about our music from before

We've even started composing it and

People must be excited about the composition

Long after it's been performed

We are not allowed to be

Boring for one second

We can't fail

We can't be too loud

Or too brave

Can't be controversial

We can't show too much

Brownness

Blackness

Queerness

We can't compose anything more difficult than what a

Five year-old can play because

There is no rehearsal time for us

All of our music must be sight-readable

Because that's a universal term and what

One musician can sight-read

All others can

All while people pay to sleep through

Beethoven symphonies

He,

He gets to be

Boring

Uninteresting

Dull

Pathetic

Over and over and

Over

Again in

Half-filled halls and

Diminishing audience numbers

His damn Choral Symphony is

Repeated

Repeated

Repeated

Repeated and we are

Ignored because

We

Don't sell

Tickets and selling tickets only matters when you're

Brown

Black

Indigenous

Asian

Foreign

Queer

Trans

Lesbian

Gay

Androgynous

Nonbinary

Woman

We must do what even Beethoven cannot do

We are

Expected

Expected

Expected

Endlessly

Expected from

And no one does a single meaningful fucking thing about it which would make a meaningful impact for the everyday minoritarian composer

All people in charge keep doing is sucking on Beethoven's dick

White dick just because

Because in him mediocrity is acceptable and

Through him white supremacy can be and is sustained because if we all sleep through his music we can keep things

White

Before the Trump-Musk dictatorship it would have been easier to play our music Outside of the framework of whiteness

But now as the pathetic amounts of federal arts funding are cut

And demands are made that all art federally funded art express white Americanness

Will you play our music?

Please,

Continue to sleep on Beethoven's racist fucking bosom

Ignore the sounds of

Deportation

Murder

State sponsored police brutality

Let the white psyche rest

This is not a poem