Let's workshop this prose poem, set to the song "American Girl," about a clash between a black man late to a job interview and "antiracist" protesters who will not let him off the subway train.
"Subway Restraint" is a dramatic prose monologue of extraordinary formal ambition, structured around the prolonged management of violent desire and its ultimate release. Its deepest subject is neither race nor politics nor violence as such but the psychology of incubation — the process by which a mind cultivates rather than dissipates its own rage, converting restraint from a virtue into a technology of intensification. The piece presents itself formally as a practical guide to self-control — "Serve the long game," "Breathe," "Restrain yourself" — yet everything about its architecture reveals that these instructions function as instruments of concentration rather than reduction. The narrator does not calm himself. He refines himself. Rage is treated as a resource to be made more potent through delay, and the work's central irony — announced in its title — is that the restraint depicted here is genuine without being virtuous. It is deferred eruption.
The second-person address is the piece's most formally audacious and most disturbing choice. "You" implicates the reader not as observer but as agent — the narrator is not telling us about someone who committed this act but telling us, as we read, what to do next. This collapses the conventional distance between reader and character that literary violence typically maintains, placing the reader inside a deliberative process calibrated to feel reasonable, patient, and philosophically grounded. The effect is not identification in the usual sense but something more unsettling: the reader experiences radicalization not as retrospective confession but as live instruction, and the prose is designed to make each step feel like the natural consequence of the one before. The second person is not a gimmick but an argument — that the funnel from legitimate grievance to catastrophic action is wider at the top than we prefer to believe, and that the steps leading down it are comprehensible at each individual point even when their aggregate destination is not.
The piece's most original formal device is what might be called eroticized aggression. Throughout, violent impulse is rendered through the language of sexual edging — waiting, building pressure, postponing release, letting frustration accumulate into something richer and more satisfying. The language of libido and the language of violence become indistinguishable: aggression is sexualized, sexuality is weaponized, and the subway becomes less a political space than a pressure chamber in which psychic energy seeks an outlet. The edging metaphor extends to the prose itself, whose sentences are long, recursive, and clause-heavy, always deferring the syntactic resolution that a period would provide, enacting at the level of form the same economy of deferral and accumulation the narrator is practicing psychologically. The piece deploys "jouissance" — Lacan's term for a pleasure so intense it becomes indistinguishable from pain — to name the trajectory precisely: what the narrator is building toward is not satisfaction in any ordinary sense but a release that will destroy the conditions of its own possibility.
The repeated instructions to breathe are equally important and equally inverted. On the surface they resemble mindfulness exercises. Yet their actual function is the opposite of therapeutic regulation. The narrator explicitly treats calming techniques as instruments for preserving rage rather than dissipating it, converting the language of self-care into a technology of self-radicalization. What appears healthy is revealed as another mechanism of escalation — demonstrating that the most dangerous passions are often not the hottest but the most disciplined, and that a mind sufficiently committed to its own radicalization can recruit any available resource, including the resources designed to prevent it, into the project.
The sensory writing performs a parallel function at the level of environment. The opening olfactory barrage — the layered subway smells organized around contamination and infection — is not ornamental description but perceptual argument. Nearly every sensory impression arrives already infected, bodies bleeding into odors, odors into judgments, judgments into ideological conclusions. The environment itself seems diseased. This saturation of perception mirrors the narrator's mental state: he cannot encounter anything neutrally because every perception is immediately absorbed into an interpretive system already vibrating with grievance. The world has become fully legible to him — and crucially, the piece insists that this legibility is not entirely delusional.
This is the revision that the piece's architecture demands and that conventional radicalization narratives typically foreclose. The standard literary closed loop involves a protagonist whose interpretation of the world is sealed off from reality's corrections — paranoia mistaken for pattern recognition, delusion mistaken for diagnosis. "Subway Restraint" refuses this comfort. Jakim's reading of progressive institutional culture — its dependency economics, its performative allyship, its self-perpetuating grievance infrastructure — is rendered with sufficient intellectual force that the reader cannot simply locate a break with reality and file the violence there. The piece gestures toward real institutional entanglements: organizations presented as gold standards of anti-hate monitoring implicated in the very dynamics they claim to oppose, DEI frameworks that produce the outcomes they claim to prevent, progressive cultural machinery that profits from the persistence of the conditions it nominally addresses. Jakim's conspiracy-adjacent thinking is not pure paranoia. It is pattern recognition arriving at the right destination by a path that looks unhinged. The world keeps confirming his diagnosis.
This is what separates the piece from simpler radicalization portraits and gives it its most disturbing literary quality. The tragedy is not a man destroyed by delusion but a man whose accurate perception of real corruption has been captured by the daimonic voice and metabolized into something that destroys him and others anyway. Correct diagnosis, catastrophic prescription. Truth, in this piece, is not corrective. It is accelerant.
The piece becomes most formally interesting when the speaker is understood not as identical with the protagonist but as functioning in the role of a daimonic presence — a tutelary voice, a parasitic advisor whispering into the ear of its charge. The voice addressing "you" does not simply encourage violence; it trains attention, teaches interpretation, transforms every confirmation of Jakim's diagnosis into fuel rather than into actionable understanding. The daimon's most insidious quality is that it never disputes the accuracy of what Jakim sees. It disputes only what should be done with it. "Serve the long game." "Give your defense attorney at least a little to work with." This is not impulsive rage but strategic rage — and the daimon's power derives precisely from the fact that it never needs to lie to its host. It simply redirects what is true toward what is catastrophic.
The lead protester blocking the subway exit ceases early to function as an ordinary person and becomes instead a condensation figure — a single body onto which the narrator projects the entire apparatus of what he believes poisons Black flourishing. The subway scene accordingly acquires the dream logic of psychoanalysis: a single figure accumulates vast symbolic weight, carrying ideological, historical, and emotional burdens far exceeding her immediate presence. The shift from micro to macro is one of the piece's defining structural achievements — a blocked subway door expands into a grand historical argument, and the expansion feels, from inside the narrator's perspective, not like distortion but like accurate perception of connections that were always there. The piece neither fully endorses nor fully refutes this expansion. It holds the reader in the uncomfortable position of being unable to locate the precise moment where pattern recognition becomes pathology.
The racial ideology the narrator constructs demands serious engagement rather than dismissal. The narrator is a Black man who has arrived, through a specific intellectual and emotional history, at a position simultaneously anti-white-progressive and anti-victimhood — one that draws on genuine arguments about dependency culture, the paternalism embedded in certain forms of allyship, and the ways progressive racial frameworks can function to maintain Black people in a posture of permanent grievance. These arguments have intellectual genealogy and genuine advocates in serious academic discourse. What the piece traces is not the corruption of these arguments but their capture — the process by which legitimate diagnosis, denied every other outlet, is metabolized by the daimonic voice into mass violence. The narrator's logic is internally consistent throughout. Each escalation follows from the previous position by comprehensible steps. What transforms the sequence is not irrationality but the absence of any mechanism by which accurate perception can discharge into something other than destruction.
"Subway Restraint" is a dramatic prose monologue of extraordinary formal ambition, structured around the prolonged management of violent desire and its ultimate release. Its deepest subject is neither race nor politics nor violence as such but the psychology of incubation — the process by which a mind cultivates rather than dissipates its own rage, converting restraint from a virtue into a technology of intensification. The piece presents itself formally as a practical guide to self-control — "Serve the long game," "Breathe," "Restrain yourself" — yet everything about its architecture reveals that these instructions function as instruments of concentration rather than reduction. The narrator does not calm himself. He refines himself. Rage is treated as a resource to be made more potent through delay, and the work's central irony — announced in its title — is that the restraint depicted here is genuine without being virtuous. It is deferred eruption.
The second-person address is the piece's most formally audacious and most disturbing choice. "You" implicates the reader not as observer but as agent — the narrator is not telling us about someone who committed this act but telling us, as we read, what to do next. This collapses the conventional distance between reader and character that literary violence typically maintains, placing the reader inside a deliberative process calibrated to feel reasonable, patient, and philosophically grounded. The effect is not identification in the usual sense but something more unsettling: the reader experiences radicalization not as retrospective confession but as live instruction, and the prose is designed to make each step feel like the natural consequence of the one before. The second person is not a gimmick but an argument — that the funnel from legitimate grievance to catastrophic action is wider at the top than we prefer to believe, and that the steps leading down it are comprehensible at each individual point even when their aggregate destination is not.
The piece's most original formal device is what might be called eroticized aggression. Throughout, violent impulse is rendered through the language of sexual edging — waiting, building pressure, postponing release, letting frustration accumulate into something richer and more satisfying. The language of libido and the language of violence become indistinguishable: aggression is sexualized, sexuality is weaponized, and the subway becomes less a political space than a pressure chamber in which psychic energy seeks an outlet. The edging metaphor extends to the prose itself, whose sentences are long, recursive, and clause-heavy, always deferring the syntactic resolution that a period would provide, enacting at the level of form the same economy of deferral and accumulation the narrator is practicing psychologically. The piece deploys "jouissance" — Lacan's term for a pleasure so intense it becomes indistinguishable from pain — to name the trajectory precisely: what the narrator is building toward is not satisfaction in any ordinary sense but a release that will destroy the conditions of its own possibility.
The repeated instructions to breathe are equally important and equally inverted. On the surface they resemble mindfulness exercises. Yet their actual function is the opposite of therapeutic regulation. The narrator explicitly treats calming techniques as instruments for preserving rage rather than dissipating it, converting the language of self-care into a technology of self-radicalization. What appears healthy is revealed as another mechanism of escalation — demonstrating that the most dangerous passions are often not the hottest but the most disciplined, and that a mind sufficiently committed to its own radicalization can recruit any available resource, including the resources designed to prevent it, into the project.
The sensory writing performs a parallel function at the level of environment. The opening olfactory barrage — the layered subway smells organized around contamination and infection — is not ornamental description but perceptual argument. Nearly every sensory impression arrives already infected, bodies bleeding into odors, odors into judgments, judgments into ideological conclusions. The environment itself seems diseased. This saturation of perception mirrors the narrator's mental state: he cannot encounter anything neutrally because every perception is immediately absorbed into an interpretive system already vibrating with grievance. The world has become fully legible to him — and crucially, the piece insists that this legibility is not entirely delusional.
This is the revision that the piece's architecture demands and that conventional radicalization narratives typically foreclose. The standard literary closed loop involves a protagonist whose interpretation of the world is sealed off from reality's corrections — paranoia mistaken for pattern recognition, delusion mistaken for diagnosis. "Subway Restraint" refuses this comfort. Jakim's reading of progressive institutional culture — its dependency economics, its performative allyship, its self-perpetuating grievance infrastructure — is rendered with sufficient intellectual force that the reader cannot simply locate a break with reality and file the violence there. The piece gestures toward real institutional entanglements: organizations presented as gold standards of anti-hate monitoring implicated in the very dynamics they claim to oppose, DEI frameworks that produce the outcomes they claim to prevent, progressive cultural machinery that profits from the persistence of the conditions it nominally addresses. Jakim's conspiracy-adjacent thinking is not pure paranoia. It is pattern recognition arriving at the right destination by a path that looks unhinged. The world keeps confirming his diagnosis.
This is what separates the piece from simpler radicalization portraits and gives it its most disturbing literary quality. The tragedy is not a man destroyed by delusion but a man whose accurate perception of real corruption has been captured by the daimonic voice and metabolized into something that destroys him and others anyway. Correct diagnosis, catastrophic prescription. Truth, in this piece, is not corrective. It is accelerant.
The piece becomes most formally interesting when the speaker is understood not as identical with the protagonist but as functioning in the role of a daimonic presence — a tutelary voice, a parasitic advisor whispering into the ear of its charge. The voice addressing "you" does not simply encourage violence; it trains attention, teaches interpretation, transforms every confirmation of Jakim's diagnosis into fuel rather than into actionable understanding. The daimon's most insidious quality is that it never disputes the accuracy of what Jakim sees. It disputes only what should be done with it. "Serve the long game." "Give your defense attorney at least a little to work with." This is not impulsive rage but strategic rage — and the daimon's power derives precisely from the fact that it never needs to lie to its host. It simply redirects what is true toward what is catastrophic.
The lead protester blocking the subway exit ceases early to function as an ordinary person and becomes instead a condensation figure — a single body onto which the narrator projects the entire apparatus of what he believes poisons Black flourishing. The subway scene accordingly acquires the dream logic of psychoanalysis: a single figure accumulates vast symbolic weight, carrying ideological, historical, and emotional burdens far exceeding her immediate presence. The shift from micro to macro is one of the piece's defining structural achievements — a blocked subway door expands into a grand historical argument, and the expansion feels, from inside the narrator's perspective, not like distortion but like accurate perception of connections that were always there. The piece neither fully endorses nor fully refutes this expansion. It holds the reader in the uncomfortable position of being unable to locate the precise moment where pattern recognition becomes pathology.
The racial ideology the narrator constructs demands serious engagement rather than dismissal. The narrator is a Black man who has arrived, through a specific intellectual and emotional history, at a position simultaneously anti-white-progressive and anti-victimhood — one that draws on genuine arguments about dependency culture, the paternalism embedded in certain forms of allyship, and the ways progressive racial frameworks can function to maintain Black people in a posture of permanent grievance. These arguments have intellectual genealogy and genuine advocates in serious academic discourse. What the piece traces is not the corruption of these arguments but their capture — the process by which legitimate diagnosis, denied every other outlet, is metabolized by the daimonic voice into mass violence. The narrator's logic is internally consistent throughout. Each escalation follows from the previous position by comprehensible steps. What transforms the sequence is not irrationality but the absence of any mechanism by which accurate perception can discharge into something other than destruction.