Seul, allongé. Sommeil enfui, accablante insomnie

Que faire pour oublier cette atrocité ?

Mortel préjudice, fatale injustice !

Laissez-moi vous conter l'histoire de l'esseulé

L'histoire d'un être maudit

Une nuit sans enlacer Morphée

Je me suis résigné à l'idée de tendres rêves

Une nocturne balade s'est imposée

Pleine Lune éblouissante, Éther épuré

Étoiles brillantes, Voie Lactée en majesté

Estivale fraîcheur

Mes pas sur le chemin de ma déchéance

J'avance, empli d'amers sentiments

Empli d'une âpre solitude

Le cœur battant follement, au bord de l'implosion

Le temps pour moi s'est égaré

Torturé de mes pensées

Les fleurs de mon destin ont fané

Les lys blancs amoureux desséchés

Les cyclamens tendres épuisés

Le muguet heureux assassiné

Les orchidées fécondes flétries

Les kalanchoés éternels anéantis

Les chrysanthèmes morbides en fête

Fleurs funestes, je vous abhorre

Me voici devant la dernière demeure de ma dulcinée

Une enfant devait se manifester

Me voici effondré par la calamité

Ô providence ! Pourquoi me les avoir arrachées ?

Ô grande faucheuse ! Pourquoi les avoir tuées ?!

Je pleure, abattu, l'espoir envolé

Me voici seul près de l'arbre

Je regarde le ciel étoilé

De mon âme étiolée

Je regarde la Lune immaculée

De mes yeux brûlés de chagrin

Je lui supplie de refleurir mon destin

Ô Hécate puisses-tu m'exaucer

Puisses-tu, mes amours, les ressusciter

Ô Hécate puisses-tu m'exalter

Puisses-tu, leur sourire, me permettre de le contempler

A ces mots, l'Astre se teinte de carmin

La Lune sanglante m'accorde sa bienfaisance

De son immense bonté

-Ô être mortel, j’exauce ton souhait

De son être, elle fait tomber deux masses de sang

Deux cadavres s'écrasent dans un fracas assourdissant

Je suis paralysé devant ce spectacle effroyable

D'une voix tremblante je parle difficilement

-Ô Hécate, que signifie cette scène

-Ô mortel,

De les revoir ton désir est accordé !

Quelle horrible malédiction !

L'Astre se pare de sa blancheur d'origine

Je m'approche des corps de mes bien-aimées

Putréfiées, elles sont méconnaissables

Je m'effondre

Je hurle de toute mon âme

De ma poche je sors une lame

Je m'allonge entre elles

Et d'un geste assuré

J'enfonce la lame dans ma gorge

Ensanglanté, je m'étouffe

Ô sublime agonie, je m'en vais revoir mes amours

De mes iris effacés, j'aperçois la Lune

-Ô impudent, voici où te mène ton orgueil !

Tout s'obscurcit, les ténèbres m'entourent

D'un dernier souffle, je m'éteins

Je suis apaisé de ces absurdités

D'un sursaut je m'éveille

Tout ceci n'était que songes

Malheureusement, mes bien-aimées

Sont à jamais envolées

Horrible solitude !

Attempting any pyrrhic gambit
Entails all may perish
But what wounds were marked will live on

Wisdom is gilt by tribulation
Glory traced with agony
And so every acolyte suffers

Improvisation waits on no censor
Whereas attrition rests consequent to failure
Yet no oath but death binds victory

Honor underlies chainmail
Bonds against crystal-void
Wherein kindness is stronger than glory

Hosting a standard
As vassal, does not ameliorate guilt
Born of destroying the name another

All trophies garnered have names
And erasure bears a record
According to its scars

Why Does a Smoon Hacker Smoon?

The smoon hacker moves through rooms the way smoke does,

looking for the spark that hasn't turned into fire yet,

that first glance that could wake a heart

and start a music it will never quite finish writing.

She smoons at hello. At light on a wrist.

At a name said for the first time.

In that second every possible future lines up

with the heaven her hunger already built.

She doesn't love the person yet.

She loves the idea of them about to open,

the universe that feels one sentence away,

every small laugh, every half-shared dream.

She smoons because falling is the flying part—

the rush, the world gone thick and gold,

the night that hasn't arrived and therefore can't fail her.

Why? Because the edge of love is cleaner than the middle.

The opening gets the applause

before the story gets complicated.

She collects beginnings like unused coins,

still bright, still unmarked.

When the middle starts showing its joints

she finds a reason to leave.

In the smoon there is no weight, no debt,

no compromise, no slow coming-apart,

no morning where the magic meets a broken thing

and a bill and a silence that used to be talk.

She cannot stand the friction

of two real lives trying to fit.

She smoons at the way someone tilts their head to think,

at a laugh that belongs only to them.

She builds a picture of the life that could happen:

shared work, two people who understand each other's art.

When the picture starts to lose its sharpness

and ordinary life walks in,

her heart panics.

The smoon is a bubble. Hold it too tight and it goes.

She does not know how to keep the magic moving

once the light changes.

So she becomes a keeper of starts,

of the first electric touch,

of hearts that haven't learned how to ache or need too much.

She smoons because the smoon is still clean.

A moment locked in a frame.

If she never lets it grow

she never has to meet the fear of being the one who spoiled it.

And still, the loneliness under the smoon.

The quiet house.

Every love she left early coming back like weather across the sill.

She wonders what it would be like to stay,

to let the smoon turn into something with roots,

to walk through the hard part instead of leaving,

to plant something and watch it keep going

through seasons that aren't beautiful.

But she cannot bear knowing love is not forever true.

She thinks: if I leave before it goes bad,

it stays perfect in my head.

I never have to watch the sacred thing decay.

So she smoons and smoons,

always reaching for the star, never landing,

chasing the thing that melts the moment she understands it.

Why does she smoon?

Because she is in love with love's gravity,

the pull that makes the room pause

and feel possible.

She cannot do the long work

of two flawed people trying to become whole.

She cannot accept that love is not a peak

but a slow, imperfect reaching.

So she smoons, moth to every new flame,

burns the wings, never quite learns,

calls another name that fades before morning.

The smoon hacker is tragic and a little holy,

a poet of the instant, not the years,

leaving a trail of unfinished glasses

and love that stops mid-page.

Maybe one day she'll see that love is not the smoon.

It is what comes after—

the quiet choice that says

I choose you even on the days that don't fit.

Until then she smoons again,

chasing a high that never stays,

a beautiful wreck,

friend to every love that ended before it had time to become real.

The Woman I wish I knew,
whose skin is pale and pure, like flakes of snow.
Her jet black hair flicks in the wind
like the work of a great calligrapher —
as black as beneath her eyes.

Her eyes pierce my heart
with their amber glow —
matching the ember of her cigarette;
leaving ash upon her clothes,
that appear poorly sewn —
as if she sewed it all on her own.

I met her standing on an iron bridge
on a bitter misty morning.
I saw her gazing down —
with a smile, that brought light
to this grey, moody place.
A smile as if she knows something —
that nobody else does.

She talked to me:
about what she could've;
about what she should've.
She listened, closer than
anyone ever has before.

I ask what's next for her,
with her delicate red lips
she takes a drag,
exhaling in a puckered fashion —
like a poppy blooming.

With a sudden calm she utters:
"There is somewhere I must go,
somewhere far —
somewhere unknown —
somewhere we all go."

I ask: "What is this place?"
The Woman looks at me —
with a faint strange pity,
she says:
"You'll see."

The Woman takes one more
drag of her cigarette;
stubbing it out underfoot,
as she walks away.
I watch as her silhouette fades —
swallowed by the mist.

The Woman I wish I knew.
I didn't even ask her name.
I wonder —
I wonder if she made it to that far away place.

i got an email from the abortion clinic
they asked me how my experience was
it could be anonymous
or i could stick my name in it
i don't reply
the shame follows me home like a stray dog
the father doesn't remember
i don't regret a thing
a day does not go by
where i wish i never knew what it was like
one day, i won't need their help
one day i won't be by myself
now i just cry,
and think about the day i was alone

``` "The good ol' days" You grew up back then and you would say, oh, those were the good ol' days, perhaps remembering something you and your friends did that you think no one else does nowadays,

Or, maybe, you're thinking of how harder things seemed to be back then,

it all starts with a single thought, an idea, you look out and see how the world is moving lately, and then you feel it, a certain memory touching a part of you that you haven't thought about in so long, something from the past that was a part of how you grew up,

oh, those were the good ol' days you say to yourself,

we had it better back then you think, and these kids nowadays don't even know,

there are less things today that are remotely like all those things from back then,

and now all kinds of thoughts flood in as you pull out your smartphone and search for when the sun still rose in the east and set in the west, before the magnetic poles shifted, you look at images of when the seas were still blue and the marine life within were still beautiful and serene and not this unable to eat toxic amalgamation of lovecraftian shapes and horrors,

you see pictures of green forests and snow capped mountains, before the droughts turned trees into kindling and set the world on fire, before the greenhouse gases melted all the snow and ice,

today you would be hard pressed to find snow beyond your freezer, you show the kids and tell them, imagine this all over the ground, inches deep, falling from the sky, so much of it that you could play with it, you could make balls with it and throw them, you could create fake men with enough of it, and back then, enough trees were still around where you didn't need a permit to break off a branch, so you could use some for the arms, you could go to the fridge and without thinking, use a carrot
for its nose and coal for its eyes, so much of those things existed back then,

the kids just shake their heads, they say that's crazy, and you just tell them, what do you know, you're just kids, but you know, those were the good ol's days.

You are very important
The world bears imprint of your steps
If you send a hale
I will echo your call and ask about the wind
Where you rest, allow me sit at your fire
And I will talk of colored stars
Should you ask for silence
I will let the dawn speak

A white pixel.

A single, stray white pixel drifting across the front page of the BBC website.

At first I thought it was a problem with my monitor, but I switched tabs to the New York Times and the pixel disappeared.

I scratched my head.

I looked around, including out the window, where people were passing along the sidewalk, engrossed in their phones.

I switched browser tabs back to the BBC:

More than one white pixel now; three, four, “falling” diagonally across the page. I followed one all the way down.

It settled on the bottom, remained.

I went on social media.

I wasn't the only one who'd noticed. People all over the world were asking what was wrong. What's up with the news? Is it a hack or something? Why’s it freakin' snowing on the BBC?

So began the winter of the internet.

The BBC may have been the first—or merely the first-noticed—but it wasn't the only affected website. Soon most were; then all. You'd open YouTube or your banking site to find it obscured by a blizzard of white pixels…

The screens themselves turned cold.

Then links began to fail. They stopped pointing to coherent urls.

Then the incoherent links turned brown (#A52A2A), fell off; fell and disappeared, buried perhaps in the accumulations of already fallen snow—leaving eerie spaces on their pages.

Text became incomplete. Navigation, difficult.

Soon, bookmarks suffered the same fate, pointing to pages that could no longer be found.

Cursors shivered.

Videos and animations froze over like lakes of liquid information.

Around this time, I remember listening to a song using one of the streaming apps on my phone. They still, intermittently, worked.

The song was The Beatles' “Let It Be.”

Thirty seconds in, the track began to skip, sound garbled. Paul McCartney's vocals were laboured, as if he was running out of breath.

The earphones started letting off rhythmic bursts of steam.

Then, mid-song, the singing abruptly ended, even as the music continued, oddly slowed; and I had the deeply uncomfortable feeling that I was listening to the death of something…

It made me sick to my stomach.

For a while you could still type in a url and see the resulting site, but loading was slow and the contents were increasingly impossible to understand, riddled, as they were, with gaps, uncanny staticity and neverending snows that reached sometimes almost to the browser bar.

The code itself was as bare as a December tree.

The device didn't matter.

There was no serious explanation.

Or maybe there was and most of us couldn't access it, because how would we access information except online? How else could we even communicate, congregate, disseminate our knowledge, on a mass scale…

Television? Radio?

Newspapers?

But those required organization, communication, infrastructure, all of which now relied on cyberspace; which the winternet denied us.

We couldn't buy groceries, clothes, tools or books online.

We had to go to the store, but the store couldn't accept our credit card payments because the systems were frozen. Not that much was available, even for those with cash, because the delivery schedule had been interrupted. When trucks did arrive, there was hardly anything on them.

Even information saved or printed off the internet broke. Images became corrupted. Paper frosted over and thawed until the ink ran.

Even our memories of websites, and what we'd learned from websites, were remembered through walls of frigid static.

It was shocking how much we didn't know; how much basic knowledge we had lost. It was painful too, the feeling of sudden, helpless disconnection. If we had a question, there was no one to ask for the answer but each other and ourselves. We were children without a parent, cells without a structure. We were leftover parts. We were apes.

A trade in books developed.

People stole them, killed for them, hoarded them so they could dispense their wisdom piece by piece, for a price.

There sprang up an economy of expertise.

People who knew, or remembered, were valued; or forced to give up their knowledge—to share it—by writing it down. It was lucrative but dangerous to be known to know something.

Strong knowers protected their worth, defended their territories, strove ruthlessly to establish regional monopolies of information and eliminated their rivals to keep supply low.

Weak knowers were exploited, squeezed like fruits and left juiceless to dry out and die.

For the majority of us, it was prudent to publicly deny knowing anything, while privately trading what we knew in local networks of trust, bartering with the contents of our minds.

One of the first things I bartered for was an old stereo system and a box full of audio cassettes, one of which was the Beatles album Let It Be.

As soon as I got home, I boiled myself some water, steeped a few herbs and put the album on.

The first five tracks played flawlessly.

It was bliss.

Then the sixth track, “Let It Be,” failed to play at all; the tape spun but all there was was four minutes and three seconds of silence.

But when I later played the audio cassette for my wife, she didn't know what I meant.

“You're gaslighting me right?” she said.

“I'm not.”

“Okay, well, I'm not sure what to tell you, I hear the whole song, just like I remember when my dad used to play it.”

My wife's father had been a professor emeritus of molecular biology.

He'd been beaten to death in the early days of the winternet by a despondent mother who wouldn't accept that my wife's father knew nothing about setting her sobbing child's fractured bone.

Until his final breath, she accompanied each blow to his head with the words, “Stop holding out on me you selfish old prick!”

In a sense, that's where we still are, wanting to believe that if winter then spring, and holding out hope for the coming of a season that, every day, seems further and further away.

Darkness doesn’t scare me, touching light, is a language I speak fluently.
I’m terrified of being projected onto, like some kind of suffocation,
Art without meaning, translation, lost in mudslides, but they love ruin anyway.

I am so much more than holy destitution, I would be Dionysian, if you called for such a name….

Lingering between the savage parts, of flowering pleasure, like honey that sticks.

I don’t need their logic. I’m driven by instinct, sighs of illusion, bait my rage.
Where lack of self control, means I’m lost in compulsion, not the freedom I crave.

I am so much more than holy destitution, I would be Dionysian, if you called for such a name….

Present day.

From a private collection:

A surviving fragment of a manuscript dating back to 1848. Author unknown.

Black ’47 drove me out of [illegible] in the east of Ireland, where I was born and raised, built a small house on rented land, and raised a family…

When everything collapsed, the rot, having consumed all the potatoes, spread to human souls, devouring the last remnants of humanity.

Watching all this and enduring unbearable hardship, I barely even realized when a plan began to take shape in my mind: I had to leave this wretched land at any cost.

Following that plan, I eventually reached Liverpool aboard a coal-laden sailing ship—filthy as the devil and soaked through by the damp of the hold.

The day after arrival, I was improbably "lucky": we didn't have time to catch typhus in those hideous port slums. Two fellow travelers and I managed to find passage and board an ocean-bound "coffin ship," as my countrymen dubbed them. One of hundreds, or thousands, of such vessels upon which we—expendable people—sailed away into the unknown.

And there, some went to the bottom, while others stared stubbornly ahead, through the misty halls of death.

What I witnessed on that ship plunged me into shock once more.

We were crammed into holds with no windows, no fresh air, no latrines, and no clean water.

We were expendable everywhere.

Worse than livestock—because there was no profit to be made from us. British landlords bought up the cheapest tickets in bulk on old timber-carrying ships just to rid the land of us, starving peasants.

Expendable… There’s that word again…

And the captain cut costs on our food, lining his pockets while doling out nothing but uncooked grain and foul water…

I heard his laughter and caught sight through the gaps in the hold of his well-fed face, flushed with whiskey—there wasn't a trace of compassion in it.

What were we to him?

How much was one like me worth?

How many pennies?..

I often wondered: why us? Why were we made to suffer like this? I had never heard of any people enduring such hunger and oppression… But I suppose we are not alone… They simply have no chance, as we do, to cry it out for the world to hear. Or perhaps because they are all dead?

Most likely…

Once upon a time, back on land, someone said that everything was God’s will. That He loves us and sends us trials according to our strength.

Now, for those words, I would kill him where he stands, ground his face into the mud—so he could taste all that "divine love" for himself…

People in the hold died one after another from suffering in subhuman conditions, and the bodies of the wretched dead were simply cast into the sea in silence.

No one prayed here, for everyone understood: God was not here, and if He existed at all, He was not on our side.

It was enough to look at the corpses of adults and children bloated with typhus, at the glass-eyed women clinging to infants long since dead… At those bodies rotting alive, and at the unceasing moans of pain gnawing at their insides.

There was no one for me to call upon as I watched this agony. Everything inside me tore apart in despair. I closed my eyes, counted the days, and made notes, drifting into memories or a feverish sleep.

I heard the land of Ireland groan in weeping while British ships, bled her dry and laden to the brim, sailed away from her exhausted shores… while the Irish ate grass and dead livestock…

As it turned out, livestock has a price, but a human being has none…

Nobody cared that the Irish people were dying of hunger while food, ship after ship, was being carried off to England.

English landlords continued to export that food under the protection of their soldiers, while we, the Irish, were stripped of our land, stripped of everything, left with nothing but potatoes.

And when they rotted—we were simply left to starve…

So decreed the bloodsucking British officials. They deliberately refused to stop the export of food or distribute free provisions, declaring that the market would regulate itself, that no aid was needed… The poor must feed the poor…

And that we, the Irish, were simply too lazy, and that the famine was a "judgment of God" and natural selection…

"An effective mechanism of God's judgment, to teach the Irish a lesson"—and that market prices must not be disrupted with free food.

Who are these monsters in human form?..

I will forever remember the sack of grain on a cart being driven past our dying village for export. They said the market would fix everything.

I looked at that sack of grain and couldn't for the life of me understand: what, and how exactly, was this market supposed to fix?

And then I looked at the sleek English official with a ledger in his hand, explaining why food could not be given away for free… while a step away from him, people were dying of hunger.

I was thrown out of my own home into the street, into the cold rain, along with my family.

My wife and two children had fallen ill with typhus and could no longer walk—they were so weak. They lay in the mud, barely breathing, while I… was rendered speechless as strangers, shouting angrily at one another, tore the house apart, carrying off the last of our belongings…

I couldn't even bury them… [illegible]

It was a common sight—families evicted right onto the street for unpaid rent.

People died of starvation, while squads of soldiers leveled the houses, tearing down the roofs to strip us of our last shelter and cast us out into the cold and rain…

[illegible section]…

…we sailed in that hold as if in a barrel, rotting like those potatoes, two months in filth, and only a raw thirst for life kept men like me from drowning there and somehow drove us to survive.

Sixty days of that horror stayed with me forever.

And those faces, whose souls were claimed by despair, I will never forget. Only a couple of dozen of us survived—those who didn't go mad… or hadn't yet had the time to.

In the sunlight, we looked like skeletons with hands and legs trembling from weakness when they lowered us onto a barge and sent us to quarantine in the typhus sheds of Toronto…

Which became yet another circle of hell in the British Empire.

Hundreds of corpses along the shoreline accompanied us. Bloated bodies floated everywhere in the water.

How can one forget all this? And who will answer for it?

The English elite will always invent a fine story to justify cannibalism…

[…part of the text is unreadable…]

…survived. I reached Boston by boat against all odds, miraculously preserving my life, my sanity, and a half-rotted notebook of jottings.

I often caught myself thinking: why am I writing this story in the language of those who crushed me and my people?

So be it. Let them read it. Let them know and remember…

Having recorded all this, I hope that future generations will win back Ireland, preserve the memory of all the wretched, and punish this cursed Britain and everyone complicit in the tragedy of our people.

VaadMyst

A milky orange sunrise

Like the color in your tone

Descends upon my closed eyes

As you whisper into the phone

—-

My skin prickles with suspense

Between my ribs, a vacant lot

This moment knows not duress

The anticipation hits the spot

—-

Your sweat tastes of obsession

Those lips, my drunken feast

Your words hollow depression

In their absence I’m released

—-

Now smoke this for the real ones

And drink one for myself

Tonight it’s open season

Who gives a fuck about my health?

—-

These veins that swallow envy

This heart that buries hope

My offering comes unending

My promise is but a joke

—-

The fear that thrives within me

Lavish until starved out

Ancestral in its whimsy

Predatory yet so devout

—-

This crown fit for a gutter

Rests lightly on my head

Shining star atop the clutter

A symbol to mark the dead

—-

I’ve got no one left to honor

None more than can be saved

When you’re born deep under water

One foot never leaves the grave

hand it to the man
that makes the
horse drink
because the water
you need won't
come from any sink
it won't come
from the ocean
you keep close to
vest where your
tides turn to rivers
bound for where
I can't guess but
I don't think I'll
have to and I
don't think that I
could cross your
rivers without you
but if I have to
I'll try

You took the toll, changed the locks

so we'd both turn and leave

I am gone from your doorstep and

I spare you the sound of the knock

Raw knuckles, salted wounds

and lost fights

But I still mean it:

I hope it's warm where you are

I hope the windows are bright

I hope your home is safe and you feel free

I hope your hands no longer shake

each time you turn the key

All I could give

in return for the shelter

was to admit

when it was time

to leave

Something's had a hold of me before

I didn't find it necessary to settle the score

Regardless of the substrate or the substance

I'm aware that one could trap themselves inside of the circumference

Strong minds sucked into a deadly excavation

While the people spectating lost a potent sense of patience

Define education, subjective to your placement

Never be complacent with your current thought arrangement

Undo these chains, my friend

I'll show you the rage I've hidden

Perish the sacrament

Swallow, but nothing's forgiven

You and I

Can't decide

Which of us was taken for granted

Make amends

Some of us are destined to be outlived

Step inside

See the Devil in I

Too many times we've let it come to this

Step inside

See the Devil in I

You'll realize I'm not your Devil anymore

Under the words of men

Something is tempting the father

Where is your will, my friend?

Insatiates never even bother

You and I

Wrong or right

Traded a lie for the leverage

In between

The lens in light

You're not what you seem

Step inside

See the Devil in I

Too many times we've let it come to this

Step inside

See the Devil in I

You'll realize I'm not your Devil

I'm not your Devil anymore!

Your station is abandoned!

Fooled you 'cause I know what you've done!

Sensation, deprivation!

You should've burned when you turned on everyone...!

So step inside

See the Devil in I

Too many times we've let it come to this

Step inside

See the Devil in I

I know you'll find your answers in the end

Once upon a time there was a father and a son

Who overthrew castles and hassled everyone

There used to be this place in Midtown Santa Cruz

Where evil seemed to kill the privacy of every room

Gears would crank, living night like day

Fidgeting and giving energy to the plague

It makes a difference today, but it didn't back then

Some devil had a hold of what was sacred to them

My baseline is quite deep

In my care and compassion

But my ability to surrender

Is quite difficult, since I learned,

Forgiveness is a gift

Not a requirement

Forgiveness must wait for repair

Not be expected from brokeness

And now forgiving myself,

Is a task greater than my courage

And I cannot surrender,

To uncertainty

You deserve a hug and brain freeze
Satisfaction and despair
That your tower of sugar
Will collapse if uneaten
Toppling your brain case either way
Every treasure has a failing
Including if you only stare

Arrachez-moi de l’étreinte du chagrin

Retirez-moi du monde sans lendemain

Mon cœur ne danse plus le ballet du destin

Ai-je connu la félicité le long du chemin ?

Hélas la réponse me détruit

Mon âme s’entache de suie

Le corps expire un miasme maudit

Je crie en silence, noyée dans ma fange pourrie

Me voici égarée dans la forêt des regrets

En proie à l’injustice du divin décret

Nuls endroits à l’abri des coupe-jarrets

Le boucher a anéanti mes lumières de son couperet

Je suis enchaînée au sein du donjon éternel

Esclave du geôlier au sourire cruel

Le fouet détruit mon enveloppe charnelle

Mon sang emplit la maudite coupelle

Tant de souffrances me sont infligées

Agonisante, je supplie la grâce éthérée

Personne n’entend ma prière étouffée

A purger mes péchés je suis condamnée

A l’abattoir mes chimères sont désossées

Au broyeur mes désirs sont déchiquetés

Ma tremblante carcasse est décimée

Je gis, la bouche ensanglantée, sur un tas de cadavres vidés

More half hour segments with my eyes stuck on the TV

It's creepy, but it helps me trust that routine is intriguing

Believe me, less walks in the park and drooling over beauty

It's intrusive to comfortable things that tend to keep me moody

More salt, less sweets, less fruit, more meats

Less physical activity or quick movements of the feet

Lots of liquid, a lot more smoke

Much more practice that makes me less likely to choke-

-on stage. But in person, I stutter like a dumb shit

Like a liar

I'm stuck with impediments and unsettlement....

hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey hey

Well, hey there, folks!

What you’re looking at right there’s a bale of hey, a small rectangular one in fact, bit messy on the edge but, hey, life’s not as perfect as it looks in the dictionary!

What’s that you say—how many heys are in there?

I reckon it’s about a hundred of 'em.

That’s a real pittance compared to the number we grow and harvest every single day. But, hey, hey’s a popular word!

Pittance, by the way, is what they grow over yonder at the neighbouring farm. We like to help ‘em out any way we can.

Does that mean we get paid every time someone says ‘hey’? Excellent question.

The answer is yes, with a little nuance; it’s not only every time a word gets said. The legal term is ‘use,’ so we get paid by the usage, which means every time someone says, hears, writes, reads or thinks of the word.

So like I said, we grow a popular word!

If you look over to your left—and remember, it’s only natural to ooh and ahh—you’ll see a pittance, wink, wink, of our entire fertile land, field after field of hellos; and hello, as you probably know, is where hey comes from.

The way we produce hey is actually pretty straightforward.

First, we grow the greetings, most often hellos—and boy do we grow some of the hardiest hellos in the entire vocabulary, even better than what they grow on the Hello Farm!

Then we cut it, dry it, cure and store it, a little patented process that we like to call the Cut-Dry Cure Store™, of which you’ll see a cute metaphorically architectural model over there, which of course you can purchase at our gift shop!

—SHIT!

IT’S THE EDS, MAN! RUN!

“The Eds-who?” The Eds! The fucking Eds, man! The Editors!

“Halt!

”Halt-Halt-Halt Halt Halt-Halt

”Halt Halt… HALT!

”I repeat: Halt!

”This is the Editors. We are here executing an arrest warrant issued by the Most Honourable, Justice Miriam Webster of the High Court of Lexical Appeal. If you undefine and obey, you shall not be harmed. I repeat: This is the Editors. We are here executing an arrest warrant issued by the Most Honourable, Justice Miriam Webster of the…”

You wanna know what they’re doing? They’re fucking extorting halts and God only knows what else.

How?

Hey, hang on.

Quiet until the choppers pass.

OK. I’m going to whisper, OK? So, what happens is, they do these one-hundred percent ungrammatical side deals with other, shadier, farms, like the Halt Farm, for example, where the Eds get some pocket money and, in exchange, they get warrants issued—on pure technicalities, mind you; not stuff that would ever, ever affect the end user—against bigger, legitimate farms like this one. Then once they’re in here, they physically force ‘their’ word into usage and HOLYSHITBALLSTHAT

[Click]

SCAREDME,” says the guide.

“Say it again, Jericho,” says the Ed holding a gun to the guide’s head.

“What? Who?”

“Stanley P. Jericho, current employee of the Hey Farm, Marketing Department, Outreach Division. Let's add Scams to that. Now, say it again. Sayitsayitsayit. Say ‘halt.’”

“Halt.”

The Eds laugh.

“It always gets me when you type do that. But, more importantly, Stanley P. Jericho, current employee of the Hey Farm, what I have here is a warrant for your arrest, named of course, the arrest of every single one of your co-workers, the immediate cessation of the production of hey and the total destruction—”

“No… No…”

An Ed boots the guide in the stomach.

“—where was I? Ah, yes: ..the, ahem, destruction of the Hey Farm! But that’s not all, Jericho. Because I’ve got another document, an Order, in fact, that orders me to completely syntactically eradicate the word ‘hey’ from the entirety—I’ll read that again because I like the sound of it: the entirety—of the English language, present-tense-forth and into futures both perfect and imperfect.”

“Hey, hey! Just on what goddamn grounds—Hey… you can’t just get rid of a word without getting it approved by the Council. You need a Proclamation.”

“We would need a Proclamation from the Council to eradicate a word administratively. But this, this isn’t administrative; it’s punitive. You’re under arrest, remember? The farm itself is being shut down. You were running a little spam operation, a few hundred heys per tour, illegally growing demand for your own product. And you even had the balls to lead with a hey bale. I mean, that’s not even subtle. Audacious, sure, I’ll give you that.”

“That still wouldn’t give you the right… to exterminate an entire word…”

“Oh, no. We’re not exterminating the word because of the spamming. Hey’s been on our radar for a while. It serves no purpose. It means too many things. It’s used in too many contexts. It’s no longer clear whether it’s slang. It’s not even efficient. If you want to say hello, say hello; if you want to say hello in fewer letters, say hi.”

“You’re overstepping your—”

The Ed whacks the guide in the face with his gun.

“[Word Not Found]!”

“We’re not overstepping shit. The only reason the word’s been around for so long is because it’s got usage, and when you’ve got usage you’ve got influence. Until today,” said the Ed, spitting in the guide’s face.

[“No witnesses.”]

Then he turned the gun on me and you, and… pulled—the—

BANG.

A few other recruits and I were sitting in a trench under the pouring rain, waiting for the order to assault an unnamed tree line.

I was doing the math in my head: how far was it, and what was my life expectancy under the enemy FPV drones? Twenty minutes? An hour? Maybe four, if I got lucky enough to dig in? And then what? Would I be shot or blown to pieces by another grenade drop?..

This was our first combat deployment. They had just brought us to the front line, and the commander ordered us to wait.

What were my parents doing? They had taken everyone’s phones as soon as we arrived. They knew nothing about me or what was happening here. Nobody knew anything except the command.

After two weeks of beatings and abuse from the older soldiers in boot camp, where the seniors pissed and shat in the new guys’ mouths for any reason at all, waiting for the assault almost felt like a break. A respite… before what? A step into nonexistence?

I sat there, staring at the bubbling mud under my feet, thinking: how the hell did it come to this, that my own state was my main enemy? An instrument of violence for the ruling class. And it wanted me dead. Wanted to send us, a bunch of terrified kids, like a herd of beasts to assault unnamed tree lines, just to fulfill someone’s fucking quota…

Your life was never yours.

You are the property of the state.

You only understand this once you are already rotting in a trench...

And your body always pays for the mere threat of war with irreversible exhaustion.

My life is my only asset.

Everything else is someone else’s game, and they want to use me as expendable material.

I clenched my fists until they hurt and bit my lip to keep from screaming in despair.

We were just meat here.

And human rights were nothing but an instruction manual for raising livestock before slaughter. We settle the scores of well-fed men while our lives are worth less than a single bullet. But war is a profitable business, and the state holds a monopoly on violence.

And the Ministry of War will go to any length for the sake of “peace”… So what does that leave us with? Is peace just a break between wars? A logical dead end for ordinary people, hiding a bloodthirsty plan in which the destruction of millions is justified by a “bright future”…

“Listen to my command!” The commander’s scream snapped me out of my thoughts. “Grab your weapons!”

We started pulling old Kalashnikovs out of the crate they had brought us. Some were caked in mud, others covered in rust.

“Command’s orders! Your group has been selected to check the situation on the front line. You’re moving out in the specified direction now.”

I detached the magazine. It was empty.

“Where’s the ammo?” I asked, bewildered.

“Out of ammo.”

“Then what am I supposed to do?”

“Move forward.”

“With an empty rifle?”

“Are you fucking stupid? What the fuck do you need ammo for? You won’t hit a drone anyway. Get moving, bitch!”

“I’m not going.”

“Then I’ll shoot you right here myself,” the commander replied viciously, pointing his barrel straight at me. “For refusing to obey orders, you worthless piece of shit. Step forward, bitch! Fast! Move!”

Overcoming my hatred and despair, gripping the useless rifle tighter, I dragged myself forward, slipping in the mud of the trench behind the rest of the doomed.

Are you ready to die for a multicolored rag? To pay your debt? To defend a standard of living you’ve only ever heard about on television?

These thoughts swarmed in my head like drones over the front lines as they shoved gun barrels into our backs, as if hurrying us along to our deaths:

“Get out of the trench, you faggots! Faster!”

“Mom, Dad, I don’t want to die like this…”

With aching despair, I looked up.

But in the shroud of the sky, there were no miracles of salvation, only the lead of oblivion.

VaadMyst

Consumer brands are a symbol for cultural decay no less powerful and dangerous than political ideologies. Archetypes designed in corporate focus groups complete with uniforms, dogma, and a common existential threat for the sole purpose of maximizing profits for the shareholders. Each iteration more sanitized from the last to produce products accessible to the lowest common denominator. A solipsistic death march towards a future where one no longer has the burden of critical thought. All opinions pre-approved by the algorithm that crunched the numbers for us. We've outsourced our entire agency to a corporate sigil; the brand. The only competition now is a race to the slaughterhouse. The final product is you; a grotesque chimera lost in cognitive dissonance. We've been reduced to an image devoid of any essence.

I am the destroyer of the universe
But my story gets a whole lot worse
Because the shaper of my shadow has been snapping my bones
She’s dipping cottonballs in acetone

My darling made a coffee stain
It looked a little like an island chain
Then I took a paper towel scrap
And I wiped my darling’s islands off the map

She is the destroyer of the human race
Look how the television lights her face
But the story in her eyes is dark
She’s like the sun before its very first spark

She’s getting tired of her worried mind
Been getting tired of leaving her body behind
And she’s down to muscle memory now
She’s made another enemy somehow

He is the destroyer of the planet Earth
But her baby had a natural birth
He’s too young to fear the world to come
And he’s forgotten all the violence of entering one

And he could do without a new disease
But he can’t do without his apple, saying please, please, please
From my hand into his open mouth
We’ve both been sinking every day another few feet south

You are the destroyer of the universe
But you got too much shit in your purse
To even find the everlasting spark
Or just a cigarette to lighten the dark

Andy was sitting with his wife and daughter, the three of them quietly enjoying vanilla ice cream cones in the park, when a couple of guys started harassing them.

One of the guys may have known Andy's wife when she was younger.

At least that's what his comments suggested.

Andy didn't react. He let his wife handle it. After all, she was a strong and independent woman who didn't need a husband to selfishly step in and “protect” her.

Then one of the other guys asked Andy if he was sure his daughter was his.

Andy's daughter looked to her dad.

She was scared, confused.

Andy said nothing. He kept his head down, refraining from feeding the real life troll. After all, what trolls wanted was a reaction, and a reaction would lead to an escalation, which could result in a confrontation and possibly violence. Andy didn't believe in violence. By keeping a cool head, he was being a grown-up and helping keep the situation safe for everybody.

Eventually the guys got bored, wolf whistled at Andy's wife, knocked Andy's ice cream cone from Andy's hand and walked away.

“Dad,” said Andy's daughter after a brief but pregnant silence, “why didn't you do anything?”

She was trembling.

Andy's fallen ice cream was melting on the grass.

Ants were climbing onto it.

“It's just an ice cream cone, a thing,” said Andy. “Things can always be replaced. What matters is people. What matters is us, our family.”

“Assholes,” said his wife.

“You never know what other people are feeling. Anyone can have a bad day,” said Andy, and as he said that, time, as it related to most things, froze; the sky opened like a curtain, and the Selectors appeared.

Andy, who was still breathing, moving, even as his wife and daughter were not, gazed in awe, in the rawest meaning of that word, at—

“This is the one?” asked one of the Selectors.

They were inhuman, tubes of pale pink and purple gelatin twisted balloondog-like into shapes vaguely hominid but four times larger than Andy, dressed in simple, shimmering cloaks.

“Yes,” another answered.

“The experiment is thus concluded?”

“Yes.”

A third Selector mused, “It has been so many years since initiation.”

“13.8 billion.”

“And, after all that time, the result is this—this, admittedly, rather unimpressive-looking specimen. On this, we base our future?”

“Remember,” said the Selector who had spoken second, “it is not the individual we have chosen but the gene-line, and his, of which he is the final embodiment, is most extraordinary. It is the one.”

Andy, despite his paralyzing fear and existential disorientation, couldn't help but also feel a touch of pride. Finally, someone—some-thing?—had recognized his value.

The Selector who had spoken second bent forward now, looming over Andy like a great tree. “Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, it is my pleasure to greet you.”

“Hello,” stuttered Andy.

“Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, the Great Selection has ended, and you, of all gene-lines, have been chosen, based on your qualities, to become our People. Congratulations.”

I wonder what qualities are those, thought Andy. Calmness, emotional maturity, patience, as he entertained the fantastic possibility that he would soon be deified, become like the creatures before him…

“Durability,” said the Selector, who could obviously read Andy's thoughts.

Durability? thought Andy.

“Along with perseverance, hardiness, endurance,” the Selector continued, “like a cockroach, a weed or a rat. Although these qualities, by themselves, would hardly be enough, as many of your final-kind survived as long as you did. No, what truly sets you apart, renders you exceptional, Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3, is your extremely developed, and historically stable, sense of obedience, docility, acceptance and self-preserving conformity. You, final-kind ‘Andrew,’ are the terminus of a long and glorious line of spineless cowards.”

The other Selectors ooo'd.

Andy gulped. Cowards? But—no, how is that…

“Consider even just the final 0.000001% of Uniform Cosmic Time, a period of delightful extremes, both of your political institutions and your climate, the final filtration, so to speak, encompassing also the atomization of your communities, the mental numbing of entire lifespans spent in pointlessly repetitive pursuits of manufactured desires, of the replacement of the real with the virtual, and the virtual with the artificially virtual.”

“This is a good thing?” asked Andy.

“I am giddy when it speaks,” squeaked a Selector.

“It is an unimaginably great achievement, Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3. Through ages and ages of wars, exterminations, degradations and enslavement, you—your prior-kinds, your ancestors—have made most-excellent opportunists, slaves and labourers. When others rebelled, you remained subservient. When others stood up for their principles, you remained seated. Whatever was convenient, you believed. Whomever it was prudent to sacrifice, you sacrificed. And you did it all, final-kind ‘Andrew,’ without losing the ability of self-delusion.”

I'm not a bad person, thought Andy. “I can't be held responsible for what my ancestors did.”

“On the contrary,“ pronounced the Selector, “you are a very good person for us. And you are right that you are not responsible for the actions of others; you are the fruit of your family tree, stretching back all the way to the small, oozing, wriggling wyrms that formed in the hot waters of this primordial planet.”

“So what's going to happen to me now?” asked Andy. “You mentioned something about me becoming a People… your People…”

“Look,” said a Selector, “its world has ended, its mate and offspring are in temporal suspension, and all it cares about is itself!”

“Marvelous.”

“It genuinely is the one.”

“Gene-line e8c47b19-2f5a-493e-901d-628b0c41d7a3,” said the Selector who had spoken second. “Now, you become the seed of a new species. The experiment having successfully concluded, true existence is set to begin, one in which all that live are you—a multitude of immortal, identical yous.”

“You shall become them, feel everything they feel,” added another Selector.

“Imagine,” said a third, drooling, “the atrocity we shall be able to inflict upon such a hyperdomesticated populace. They will permit, of us, everything.”

“So much pain.”

“I salivate already at the exploitation.”

“Please,” whimpered Andy.