The world is a silence, things sleeping
and things dead, and I should be a darkness dreaming but the thoughts
I cannot wander from fall deep inside to roam. And their barbs widen
pathways as each digs up old sores and I am too full of ghosts I
don’t know how to exorcise, the banishing a forgiving that I do not
deserve. And so awake I haunt them as they haunt me in turn and we
wait to learn which of us, things present or things past, is a better
monster yet by far.
You know a short story about a date
(and snowball fight) with Cthulhu has gone weird even by those
standards when the heart of the piece is Cthulhu being utterly
baffled by racism since humans should be scared of Him and not the
colour of His skin.
She discovered she was immortal the
hard way.
“I don’t care,” I whispered, “not
about this.” My voice was steady and cold, but my hands betrayed me
with their tremor.
I
think you are better at being me than I am.
We
go seeking answers but sometimes I am not sure we deserve even the
questions
“Goodbye,”
he said, and how she wished it was for the last time.
I
was scared of how dead your eyes looked until I realized you were
only reflecting mine.
I
thought I was the evil twin. Some things you never want to be wrong
about.
This
is a viral post. All hail the meme gods. Hashtag gif.
I
was scared of how dead your eyes looked until I realized you were
only reflecting mine.
We
all have our defences against the world. Only it turned out your
pills beat my willpower in the end.
They tried to explain that pain was a
present. A gift, a wonder, an offering from the universe, a balancing
of gifts and scales. But all he could do was scream in agony as the
witches smiled their delighted smiles and said, “You said the pain
of childbirth was a gift, little god. What do you think of it now?”
“Please,”
he begged on the altar, but their smiles didn’t waver at all.
“I’m
sorry but where I work isn’t who I am. Being a butcher doesn’t
make me a butcher of people. That’s just a coincidence.”
“You had me at hello.”
“I did not realize one word could
wound so deeply.”
“Not even love?”
“Especially not that one.”
It’s
not that you are a monster, more that your priorities are so
different than my own that it is hard not to see you as monstrous.
Once
upon a time there was a story that almost ended happily.
When
they arrested the mayor for his killing spree, he only released one
statement. “We will get tourists and that will stimulate the
economy,” he said as though it justified the murder of 33 people.
The predictive text on my phone keeps
saying that we should break up.
I think Siri is jealous.
Revenge
was so simple: a knife, a hammer, and more damage than a plastic
surgeon could ever fix.
What’s the use of magic if it cannot
make a happy ending? The lengths we go to achieve them stretch behind
us like shadows and everyone who knows what we are stares at us.
Waiting. Judging. Their silence a demand.
“I was tired.”
“Tired? Tired?! You slept through the
rapture!”
“I was very tired all right? Who was
raptured?”
“Dogs. It was mostly dogs.”
They say cameras steal a portion of
your soul, like mirrors do. But it has been so long since they began
saying that, so it cannot be strictly true: one cannot steal what no
longer exists.
All I wanted was to be the only status
update you’d like online.
But even love cannot compete with
memes.
I wish there was more than all the
things we’ve never been. I keep reaching for things I’m scared to
wait for, seeing broken glass inside every mirror. I am a wanting
when I should be a waiting, too scared for more. Too scared of being
afraid. I am here, we are now: I daren’t try for more.
In the future, imagine the AI version
of the NRA:
“AIs never hurt people; only
programmers hurt people!”
"If it was not hard, if there was
no cost to it, what power could it possibly have?"
“I wish I’d had the courage to get
into politics. Only courage isn’t the right word for it at all …”
The worlds greatest thief steals only
hearts.
The stars twinkle
in the sky because they too dream in their wild sleeping.
I was going to
write you a poem about broken things, forgetting that nothing is
broken at all. Waiting for your slivers of wholeness. Forgetting the
sky is full of colours we forget under the twilight and the dawning.
We forget the beauty of the ordinary – this is the lie that
rainbows teach.
I tried to find
some meaning of worth in my pain. When that failed, I realized your
pain could enlighten me more than my own.
Even your silences
are not gentle.
You told me you
held reason higher than logic but that explained nothing at all.
This used to be a
post. Before autocorrect darned us all.
Trying to find
words to fill the gaping maw of experiences.
She marked every post tbd but never
deleted a single one.
We speak of sound and fury as if our
words were not merely real.
“Mommy? Gramma says that by the time
you die, Heaven will be full!”
The irony of security procedures longer
than your flight.
A bus stop built better than the homes
around it.
The only foreign countries left are the
ones with no signs in English at all.
There is no non-fiction. It is only
that sometimes, just sometimes, we wrap our stories in thin skeins of
hollow facts we try to pretend are akin to art.
Every travel guide for every country
omits one small town from their guide. If you travel to every country
and visit each of those towns, you fly free for the rest of your
life.
“All I asked of the genie was for
some peace and quiet. I never expected world peace to happen as a
byproduct of that.”
No one was safe. Not after the
election. Not after the hackers made sure everyone knew who their
neighbours had really voted to be on the strata council.
This was going to be a post. Really.
Before it was deleted and you were left with nothing but this notice
that explains naught a thing at all.
People think it’s weird that I’m
putting up ‘Drying Paint’ signs even if they put up 'Wet Paint’
ones all the time!
- Jay
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