(50 of these. Damn.)
I used to take pictures. Until they
made experiences too real to bear.
“Sleight of hand is something anyone
can do. There is no magic in being a conjurer - often the opposite,
in fact. Most conjurers are just people without the talent to be
performers. You want real magic, watch people work sleight of mind on
themselves.”
We were afraid. Our fear gave birth to
the gods that ruled us once they grew too powerful to be demons. They
rule us far more kindly than we ever treated them. And we wait, in
our terror, for them to become the monsters we were to them.
This is the post your mother warned you
about.
We live in the cyborg age: when I wiped
my harddrive, I lost every means I had to contact you.
“You keep asking me to tell you the
truth. But the only truth I know is that all truths are partial at
best.”
I wrote another story about you,
changing every detail I could so that you might not know how much I’m
trying to say.
It was called ‘The Last of the First
Goombah Panty Raiders, book 1: The Torment of the Galactic Cheese
Muffins volume 2 - Love’s Windswept Moor and the Kingdom of
Mal'Kuth’s Eternal War Against the Armies of High Lord Chaos XIII
Jr.. Subtitled: a novella.’
They finished making their costumes,
the work of months to tan the skins, a year of watching videos on
YouTube to prepare. This time, they felt they might pass as human.
I changed the difficulty setting on my
life. Went from Medium down to Easy, and I think that’s why we can
no longer be together.
VOTE HARPER … because the world needs
more music
VOTE MAY … because it was a better
month than October
VOTE TRUDEAU … because Canada needs
political dynasties too
VOTE MUCLAIR … because if it sounds
like nuclear it might just bomb
He used to hand strangers notes on
which he’d written: ‘I love you’, 'Have a nice day :)’ and
the like until he handed one to a bank teller who hit an alarm at
seeing the piece of paper being handed over. He spent six nights in
jail, and each took away a word he used to write down.
He tried to wake up in the dream, to
shift location, to sleep or be elsewhere but not a single thing
worked. The room remained, his family waiting on the other side of
the table remained, seeking in dreams a truth they’d never tried to
find in the waking world.
You discover all your crimes on
twitter, each hidden within trending hashtags. And you know, deep
inside, that you can’t be the only one to have made these
connections.
They say we all see things that we
cannot unsee, but it is far harder to learn what one cannot unlearn,
to sit on knowledge that festers and one cannot share without making
the world a poorer place for the knowing....
We live in the cyborg age: when I wiped
my hard drive, I lost every means I had to contact you.
These are not the posts our mothers
warned us about.
“The return exchange dance is NOT any
kind of Native American dance. Even if you are starting to feel as
though you’re cursed.”
The zombies tore off their own arms to
give them to the homeless, unaware that they had been asked to bring
alms instead.
The gifts were accepted.
You know a story went odd when a
character explains white privilege via neutering dogs.
“I’m not scared of being a monster.
I’m scared of what comes after, what happens if being a monster
isn’t enough anymore.”
Sometimes, she said, silence can be an
act of creation.
And I never understood, not until it
was too late.
I voted according to my conscience, he
explained, and staggered back to the toilet to throw up again.
One of the mysteries of the era is the
weakness of Great Prophet of our times. For all his terrible
prognosticative power, the towering Nixon - who strode the 20th
century like the broken gods of old, spoke only one great truth amid
his cunning sea of lies:
"Tonight we'll dispense with the
formalities. I'd like to toast the future prime minister of Canada:
to Justin Pierre Trudeau," Richard Nixon said at a gala buffet
in April 1972 during a state visit to Ottawa when Trudeau was just
four months old.
But his power seems to have crescendoed
then and deserted him thereafter, for it did not foresee his own
downfall. Those who study such moments of Grace wondered what it
meant for lowly Canada, and what terrible things might come to pass
under a future set in stone.
Every day is just like every other one.
Except when it isn’t.
I have been trying to write you a love letter
In full knowledge of the heat death of the universe
Every boy wants to be their father, at
least until they see the sides of him which are more than that.
“I lied,” the Devil said in quiet
fury. “Everyone knows that about me. Everyone knows I lie!”
“You said you loved me.”
“And you should have known I was
lying. Only you didn’t, so all of this is your fault. All of it,”
and the Devil walked away.
And I deleted every selfie I’d taken
of the both of us from my phone, but it didn’t stop the pain at
all.
I love you in the way the NRA protect
their interests above sanity.
I don’t know if this should scare
you.
Probably.
I was trying to mainline poetry as if
it was caffeine but I was left wide awake at 2 a.m. sobbing over
lives I had never lived, experiences as knife blades of torrid prose
and I stayed up for the dawn with wide and shuddering eyes.
It was not like what the poets had
written at all.
"I love you lagom," he said,
and for years she wondered if she'd misheard until she learned
otherwise.
It’s not a proper world if it’s one
where heroes die.
It’s only been a
year but I’m scared of meeting you again. You said, “we can still
be friends” as if we could go back to being that small. As though
we could just take back the soft secrets, as if we could pretend the
private jokes that were just us didn’t exist anymore at all.
The note you handed me said I was
layogenic and when I checked my phone to learn its meaning you
sprinted to the window and climbed out the fire escape. You’d said
you could love a hunchback, but the truth was something else. Then
you fled.
I tried to explain, but my conjoined
twin just giggled in savage glee.
They finished making their costumes,
the work of months to tan the skins, a year of watching videos on
YouTube to prepare. This time, they felt they might pass as human.
On Halloween eve, there is a 30%
increase in vehicles that only look like taxis. And almost all of
them are hungry.
(It will be left as an exercise to the
discerning reader to determine how much of this increase is linked to
uber.)
You keep asking me what being dead is
like, as though I would have haunted you if I had a choice in the
matter.
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