Quiet Destroyer 52.333

[A reply to This poem.]

Of late I have been worrying about money.
where it comes from, where it goes --
I could rob a bank (that is where they keep it, after all)
but it would not pay for all the workers, the henchmen, the inventions.
(Even illegal aliens cost money, if only to feed;
especially the Martian sandworms.)

It comes, it goes. Things happen, or they do not.
I do terrible things, but I seldom make the news.
A stock crash is a crime, but white collar, hidden --
the problem with being a shadow player
is finding out the shadows are real.

Sometimes, in the mirror, I see myself in a prison uniform now.
I am not me, do not even look much like me, but it is I.
I am him, he is me. Who was I, before I was born? This stranger,
with my name if not my face, in the prison uniform
never removed, even when he is free.
Do I have a mind to lose? I am losing something.

The problem of brilliance is the fractures,
what happens when you think in ways people never have.
Not before you; polymathic wisdom meets reality
and says: you were you, before you were.
And, thus: you were in a prison, are in one still.

My own mind. The world. My hatred of Flux.
Prisons, all.

I am afraid of a word
I do not know the meaning of,
the taste of, the name of --
the edges, they tease at my mind,
void on either side.

I try to change; absurd, but so --
as if tomorrow I may never be, or be just
a man in grey suits seen in another life's mirrors.
Flux says the word: "Retcon," knowing it because
he is Flux, not because he understands. The universe
is a giving of gifts we never understand.

The word comes to me, as if
It was the Logos, "FIAT LUX"
but a dark counterpoint.
"A different light," I say, "for a newer world."
And, suddenly, nothing matters,
especially the things that do.
I suggest, into the brittleness of the old world,
we go get drunk together. Maybe fuck.

He agrees only to the drink.
I wonder how much he understands
that nothing matters anymore.