The ones in charge
"Once more we become part of it all,
part of the yearning to get away, to be free enough
to get caught again and again."
– The Entropic Rose by John W Sexton
Since the turn of the millennium
we've been fare of the brain eaters,
willing, mostly, connoisseurs of their tickling
at the edge of consciousness. Not one in a hundred
know what it is to be soothed any more.
Our closets bring us our share of shame.
The holidays are their favourites, consuming
one long weekend without stopping.
We stuff our host bodies like larders
of the rich against future hardships
which has already tallied us as clients.
As we tap at our devices each one is rapt
hearing the voice of its fellow.
You can tell by the slight motion of the eyes.
The oceans are filling with their waste products.
The skies carry an aroma that makes them swell
rigid within their hosts, paneling our blood vessels
and other tissues as monuments to their tenacity.
They are why your own words sound like lies,
unfamiliar words from an unrecognizable month.
To be livestock to them is the fulfillment we own.
Don't believe the books that tell you otherwise.
Modelled not in flesh
Aren't all of these before us creatures with lost souls,
the breath of life having leaked back out the nostrils,
mere protoplasm shaped into boneless rib cleaved
to spineless spine surmounted by a symbolic skull?
Truly nothing can be more unlikely, more ungainly.
The sparkle in the eyes is only a trick of the light.
And I point this out as no fault of the creature's own,
whose limitations are only the result of some misfortune.
Yet it dances to some beat, capers in harsh sunlight,
its palate unable to tell a lifesaving cure from poison.
It wanders by land and sea more lost than not,
only lately stumbling across the notion of redemption,
having conceived of countless unseen beings instead
delivering curses or, very rarely, unearned blessings.
The Slap-Face Waltz
My love!
Let us laugh at
mortality the way
we have laughed at the crumbling of
nations.
We knew
it was foolish,
a doll party with wee
china cups, with winds whipping gale
force four.
The smoke
from books burning
in what they called cities
was so long ago. We both know
they're gone.
Machines
have gone away
but the two of us stayed.
We can play music as loud as
we like.
I said
once there would be
time enough for our needs.
Now all we want fits inside a
tin urn.
Locked down on Iapetus
A megasecond after you up and left
methane bells echo off the rille,
the ones cast from railgun tailings.
The teleoperated hauler crunches
water ice pebbles on its track
and I feel a deep violet rising
that smells like your perfume.
Yeah, I sniffed your old suit
before Reclamation dropped in.
If I make double share this round
I might splurge on bandwidth
just to see your face again.
Eris, the Forgotten One
Do you know who lived on the globe that became
a field of rubble that circles the Sun?
None of them are suffering any more
and their bodies, some of them, fell as rain
on that strange water planet with a moon.
Don't ask how it is we know these things.
Past lives aren't better than potential ones.
To say so's a source of discord, they warn.
There are worse things than to be obliterated.
Ask any victim left far from a cherished home.
As pain disobeys the inverse square law
intensifying as it is pulled across space.
But forgetting multiplies any loss
the way planet five became thousands.
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