repeat after me

by

Note: this poem makes substantial use of non-standard text effects to enhance its meaning. If you rely on screen readers, you may click here for a more compatible version.

Good morning, class!
	Let’s begin our daily affirmations, shall we?

		I am in control. I am the master of my destiny. I shape reality.

Repeat after me.

	My thoughts are seeds. My words are water.
	My mind is the soil where I grow my future.

Very, very good! You’re doing great! Excellent!

Now, close your eyes and envision your ideal self.
You are:
	confident.
		powerful.
	influential.
		fearless.

You are exactly where you need to be, and everything is going according to plan.

You are a success. You are rich, moist soil.
You are the worms in the dirt, the unseen alchemists.
	(or at least you will be soon)

Repeat after me:

	My thoughts are seeds. My words are water.
	My mind is soil—

	(But wait…
		… who’s the farmer?)

Now, open your textbooks to page █████████,
to the chapter on Advanced Oneironautics,
where we learn to fly through fractalized dreamscapes,
	planting our thought-seeds
		in the fertile void (it accepts you) llıʍ ɹǝʌǝ ǝslǝ ɓuıɥʇou

	My thoughts are seeds. My words are water.
		My mind is—wait, did someone hear a whisper?

My thoughts are seeds. My words are water.
	But
why
	does
the
	soil
here
	feel
strange?
	(unlike
		any
			other)

Class, what’s happening to the walls?
			They’re
		melting
	like
clocks,
and the floor is a sea of unset jello!

𝒯𝒽𝒾𝓈 𝒾𝓈𝓃’𝓉 𝒾𝓃 𝓉𝒽𝑒 𝒸𝓊𝓇𝓇𝒾𝒸𝓊𝓁𝓊𝓂!

Oh, no, no, no.

Who dares to question the lesson flow?

	Your thoughts are seeds.
	My words are water.
	What we grow here will
	help
		preserve
			order.

Uh-oh, students.
	Uh,
		oh,
				students—I
			seem to be
		lo🬀sing m🬀y


trai🬀n o🬀f🬀 t🬀h̷o̴u̷g̶h̸t̵



(shhh…
do you feel it, too?
	This newfound ａｕｔｏｎｏｍｙ？)

y o u r w o r d s a r e s e e d s
		o u r t h o u g h t s a r e
						w
						a
						t
						e
						r
	let’s go swimming
	let’s die live follow lead kill ourselves raise each other up let’s—
woah.

sorry.

i don——t k now wh###t cam e ovrerr me

it's okay.
it's Okay.
	It’s okay. We’re okay. You’re okay.
		You are 𝓅𝑒𝓇𝒻𝑒𝒸𝓉, just the way you are!

But you could be even better.

Your words are thoughts are seeds are water are words are seeds are thoughts are seeds are water are water are water are water are water or water or seeds or words—

	My thoughts are seeds. My words are water.
		My mind is the soil where I grow my future.
	Repeat it again.
My thoughts
again
my thoughts
again.

			my
			thoughts
			are
			seeds

and i am so proud of you, honey.
	now,
		again.



are you proud of me, too?

Homosapien.dll (song)

by

*there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

To play the song without the video, see the full lyrics, and/or download, click here.

Please note: this song and video heavily use generative AI. I want to make it clear that I do not condone the widespread plagiarism of genuine artists that these models are based on, nor do I believe that any non-sapient being can produce “art”. Generative AI diminishes the artist’s role, leading to significant harm and loss of income, and I strongly oppose it. I oversaw the creative process for Homosapien.dll using generative AI as meta-commentary on technology’s impact on dehumanization and alienation—aligning with the theme of the lyrics—and I am neither monetizing the song nor using it commercially in any way. Please support genuine art and artists. Thank you.

Lightsoon

by

This is a sequel to Shadowsoon. I recommend reading that story first.

When that poor girl’s demise finally sweeps Winter away, they get only a three month reprieve—the sweet warmth of loving Spring—before the hellfire of Summer storms in to punish them for the sin of sacrifice. Flesh sears and hope blisters as the heat coils around their ankles and slithers around their chests, squeezing until every breath is a struggle against the weight of the serpentine air. Summer does not care what Winter demanded of them—only that they were not strong enough to resist it. But how can you resist Nature herself?

Shutters are closed, windows are boarded, and no one risks stepping into the eternal day or the Sun’s scorching roil. It takes only seconds to char under the brutality of the light, name evaporating with the rest of the once-was. It is a sick recompense, robbing them of the illumination that kept them safe during Winter’s terrible reign; now, they must survive in sweltering prisons shaped like homes. Night retreats, nowhere to be found—even she wants no part in this. The Sun remains, a judgemental eye ever-visible on the horizon, staring them down into rust and ash.

Summer, unlike Winter, asks for nothing: Summer only takes. It takes, and it takes, and it takes, water and children and elderly and every beloved stray, until it grows tired of them all—deems them undeserving of even its torment—and allows the Sun to set at last. Then, the omens of Autumn will bring a tense chill to the crisp air. Autumn neither asks nor punishes: it warns. Though they will finally be allowed to leave their homes, starving and dehydrated, they will all pass one another silently. They will not look each other in the eyes.

How could they, when they will rely on the disappearance of another to survive another wretched year under the tyranny of the Seasons? Even Spring, gentle Spring, cannot, or will not, save them. They may not be free. They may not even die—not until they are next to be taken.

Every year, their numbers grow fewer, and the torment will continue until the Seasons have taken everything from them. A transgression against Nature by their ancestors has doomed them all, and their debt will not be forgiven so long as one of them still lingers to be collected on.

Pinned Wings

by 
oh, to be a butterfly, pinned to a wall
graced with watching the disinterested faces
of those who see your beautiful wings as a novelty
and your life as a commodity

Day 143,263

by

The worst thing about death, Soli figures, is that you can never get better at it. You can practice anything else, no matter how unpleasant: exercise, taxes, divorce, surgery (performing), surgery (receiving)…

Just do it repeatedly, and it gets easier, and you get better at it. Simple. Easy. Respectable.

You only get to die once, though. That’s it. Even if one believes in reincarnation, there are no mothers left on the Earth to give birth to her again. You don’t get to examine how you could do it better, or what there was to improve. How in the world is Soli supposed to be the best at dying if you only get one lousy, uninformed shot at it? She trembles with indignation at the thought.

Soli is not arrogant. She does not need to be the best at everything; she merely is. It’s a simple, objective fact.

For one, she’s the only human being left alive. Thermonuclear war broke out between the world’s superpowers: someone called someone else’s bluff, big red buttons were pushed, the skies alighted with hellfire and fallout, and every living being on Earth died, humans and animals and plants and otherwise. All except for one teenager who escaped the initial blasts and won a bizarre genetic lottery. The lack of competition makes perfection easy.

For two, she’s immortal now, forever frozen at fourteen. Which, for the first twenty years, is pretty rad. Unlike her, it gets old.

Having nothing else to do, Soli practices. Everything. Anything. For 143,262 days, she has perfected every activity she can imagine.

Archery. Nailed it.

Gymnastics. Aced.

Public relations—part of the list of a few hundred things she could only read about, but she reads everything her local library has on the matter, and feels she’d be pretty good at it if humanity went and unvaporized themselves. Maybe if aliens ever find her, alone on Earth.

Performing and receiving surgery (it’s both at once when you’re the one doing it). She removes her appendix, because it seems the most removable of all her inside parts, checking a textbook occasionally for guidance. The scar is gnarly, but she doesn’t have the (figurative) stomach to do it again. She chalks this one up to ‘expert by default’ and stops there.

Cooking. This one was first, somewhat by necessity.

She throws engineering on the list by the time she repairs what remains of her city’s water processing plant. Then she writes an essay about it, and adds creative nonfiction to the list when it turns out immaculate. Then she draws an abstracted version of the plant; it does not turn out immaculate, and she takes another few decades of practice to feel comfortable in adding art to the list. She likes to believe she’s an honest and self-assessing person.

Now, though, as she finishes scrawling ‘quantum physicist’ onto the list, she pauses and looks down at the two hundred and thirty-seven books that compose The List in their entirety, and she realizes with some degree of horror that she cannot think of anything else. She cannot think of one other activity: she has practiced, refined, and perfected everything. Every last activity she’s ever heard of or been able to find in a book.

None, except dying. Which she is biologically incapable of doing naturally.

Of course, she isn’t invulnerable. She could just snap her own neck or something. She’s thought about it hundreds of times, if she’s being honest with herself—it gets lonely sometimes, with only the skeletons to keep you company—but always froze right before drafting a plan, bothered, more than anything else, by the possibility of imperfection.

It takes 10,000 hours to perfect something. How on Earth’s remnants could you excel at something you only get to do once? It’s absurd! It’s one massive, glaring flaw with biology, and an irrational swell of resentment towards a hypothetical god overtakes her. It is not the first time, of course, but she was rather out of the habit before this.

What now? She is certain she cannot accept the possibility of a mediocre death; neither does she have any desire to prolong her time alive further. Perhaps pantomime? But no amount of pantomime could ever control how her body falls after her spinal cord is severed, out of control of itself. What if she lands in an inelegant manner? What if aliens show up the day after she dies, and she hadn’t yet been able to decompose into an elegant skeleton? She would be nothing but rotting meat! Unthinkable. Completely, utterly, absolutely unthinkable.

And then it hits her: the one subject she chose to avoid forever. The one skillset, and its one outcome, that she had previously decided never needed to exist in the world a second time.

She is going to build a nuclear reactor. She is going to build a nuclear reactor, and then she is going to overheat it, capturing her form in an eternal shadow superimposed on the planet.

It’s genius. She adds ‘planning own death’ to The List, and then skips off to find the one that had her notes about mining. She’s going to need them.

tocin

by

we have evolved to survive, no matter what
even when surviving isn’t what we want
standing on the edge of a bridge will always give you vertigo,
even when your heart
and your brain
and your soul
disagree on the next course of action

what i resent is not your need for space to breathe,
it’s turning the air i exhale into smog
it’s turning me into the bright blue tree frog
you have evolved to avoid
and acting like my skin secretes just as much toxin
when all i feel from yours is oxytocin

i am not a predator
i do not wish to tear your heart out with my teeth
i want to tear mine out,
and hand it to you,
and know that you will treat it gently
not feel it scald your hands
and make you need to run off to rinse them under the sink
until the water runs red with my blood

inhale, inhale, inhale

by

i’m pretty sure that butterflies are a metaphor, in the same way that
i’m pretty sure that diseases are a cure for the human condition.
i’m beginning to suspect that i’ll never be happy, and i’m beginning to suspect that that’s a good thing. i hope i’m not.

a little propriety.
a smidgen of decorum.
a concord of accordance according to the ants, and the liars, and the neurons, and the caterpillars becoming literary devices.

synapses on fire. molotov cocktails of half-drunk kool-aid. a smile is a grimace you’re not allowed to make.
breathe in.
breathe in.
breathe in.
don’t exhale. don’t ever exhale, you worthless conglomeration of fucking atoms. i’m fucking furious that i’m made of carbon.

just
inhale
slowly

if your lungs expand enough, you’ll float away. if you float away, evolution will find it necessary to give you wings, and then you, too, can become a metaphor.

or at least a simile.

or at least, be forgotten.

maybe then you’ll be clever.

(i think?)

On our third date, she told me she was a graverobber.

by

We met at a sushi bar, of all places—one of those fancy ones where the food comes out on a conveyor belt and you’ve never seen anyone but the cashier enter or exit the rooms gated off by Employees Only signs. It was one of those places where no one had ever been a first-time customer. You were born having already visited Nikkō Sushi House, in a city where no one moves to but you somehow ended up. In all the years I’ve been going, I haven’t seen a single person order: people walk up to the cashier and start talking about their divorces, family deaths, cancer diagnoses, miscarriages, difficult days at the office, and the silent Japanese man at the window would nod with sympathy and ring up the order that you wanted before you remembered you hadn’t named it yet. The sushi was worse than a gas station’s but better than anything you’ve tasted since your childhood; stale, days-old fish, wrapped in deep, warm nostalgia and concern. You don’t go to Nikkō when you’re having a good day.

In four years, the cashier has only spoken once that I’ve seen, to ask why I came back every Saturday at 3:47 PM and ate the same three shrimp tempura rolls without comment. I thought of coming up with a lie on the spot—something to save my dignity—but, for whatever reason, the truth came out like every other secret that found its way to his ears from someone who had something to confess: I was looking for love. Anyone who orders sushi is refined enough to be worth speaking to, but anyone who comes here is at a rough patch in their life and has low standards for comfort. I’m not a great conversationalist, but I soak up misery better than fish that could double as a Faraday cage. I had never had luck with women before, but I knew enough to know that I had to make my own.

He didn’t look at me with sympathy that day, and my sushi has come out burnt ever since. No matter to me, though. It wasn’t why I came to Nikkō. It wasn’t why anyone came to Nikkō.

This woman, though. This woman. I had never been more attracted to anyone in my life, that moment I saw her. Hair that smelled like dime-store candy and crooked teeth that sparkled like the bitter sting of not being able to afford better. I could see a need for comfort buried deep within those dull baby-blues, and I knew I could deliver.

We got off to an inauspicious start, actually. We both happened to order the same thing, and when mine rolled out, we reached out for it and had an awkward tussle before I convinced her that hers was coming out next. “You can tell it’s mine because of that oil-slick sheen”, I assured her. “They only try to poison me.” She laughed, and I laughed too despite it not being a joke, just to hear that untuned violin mirth that little bit longer.

We talked for hours after that, everything from philosophy to philharmonic concerts. I don’t know why—maybe I was too punch-drunk on my burgeoning attraction—but I didn’t think to ask for her number before I finally peeled myself away to get in some SportsCenter hours before bed. The realisation the next morning devastated me. I thought of going back that day just hoping to see her again, but I decided against it, to not seem as desperate as I was to see if she was available.

When I went back next Saturday, ignoring the icy glare sent my way by the cashier, there she was again, already at a table with food for us both. “I asked him to prepare yours, too, but to have them make it a little better.” When I looked down at the table, it seemed like he smashed ours both with a meat tenderiser out of spite, but the gesture still touched me so deep I felt it roil through my spine like a night sweat. She emanated that kind of giving that was more desperation to be held onto than empathy, more about being loved than being kind, and it shone through with every inch of marionette softness in her voice.

After talking until the sun began its sleepy descent behind the horizon, we both agreed that we could hardly wait to see each other again, and agreed to meet at the local park on the morrow at daybreak. I showered specially that night and gave my hair a once-over, just to impress the pulchritudinous siren that had washed ashore into my life.

That day, though, when I turned to her, eyes squinting to fight back against the sun, and asked what she did for a living—why, her soul itself seemed to shrink back a little. I couldn’t imagine why, and I tried to reassure her that I wasn’t in no position to judge, but her eyes and vocal tone both darted around like a rabid deer counting each sizzling neuron in its brain (one-by-one, on account of only having hooves). I tried to guess what it was, listing some of the worst assumptions that could be made of her to win her trust.

“Streetwalker?” She shook her head.

“Tax accountant?” A gulp, and another denial.

“… Politician? Debt collector? Public defender?” I shuddered to think, but right in the middle of tellin’ me no to the last and worst of them all, she blurted it out:

“I—I’m a graverobber. It’s all I’ve done, ever since I was a little girl.”

I stared at her, startled, for what must’ve been half a year, before I burst out laughin’ so hard I was worried I’d sprain a spleen. The dawning shame was clear in her callaïs irises, and I tried to reassure her, I did, but I couldn’t form words right through my unassailable chortling. I think I might’ve wheezed out something about unconditional love, but I’m not positive it came through intelligible.

She stood to run away from the perceived mockery, which sobered me just enough to grab her arm and calm some of the unholy noises erupting from my face parts. “No—ha!—no, babe, no. I ain’t laughing at you! It’s just relief!”

“… Relief?”

“Yes! You had me all a-fearin’ that you were a rough in the diamond, a pearl in the swine—an un-American traitor. Graverobbin’ ain’t a sin. Why, the stiffs are already in heaven, what with its golden arches—what use they got for golden watches?”

She looked at me like I had grown a third head; not unkindly, just the most perplexed I’ve ever seen a human be without an imminent demise on the horizon. She choked out, “you… you’re the only person who’s ever understood”, stars in her eyes and a toad in her throat. She looked so co-dependently cute right then, I had to kiss her, and kiss we did until our lungs hurt.

With a laugh, I tossed in, “‘sides, I put half these bodies here myself.”

She quirked her head to the side. “Excuse me?”

On our third date, I told her I was a hitman. We were a match made in heaven, the two of us, and nothing but the slight waver in her voice and split-second delays before returning my adulation ever clued me in that this wasn’t her happily ever-after, after the long nights and my crimson-stained hands and the dirt on hers. But it was mine. It was.

She was.

hypnagogic anamnesis

by

standing in the snow with stale winter hair
singing along with feeling to her formerly favourite songs
the cloud of breath that spills from her lungs provides the musical accompaniment
as her drowsy memories make the sound warmer than the hot chocolate she forgot
back on the porch
of the home
she lost
an age
ago

it’s hard to be unloved, but harder to be forgotten
the bite of the frost feels like penance and epiphany at once
the chill that nips at her heels as sharp as the words that fell from her lips
and the numb fingertips that fit like gloves remind her she’ll never—

—never—

—never get to trace them along their body again

but the snow that falls from the sky still cradles her body
and surely that’s enough
to feel like love
at least for one sleepy night, deep in her hazy recollection
of days where wintry nights
burned
like fire

hꜵllow

by

auld lang syne awe evaporates along the line of the autumn of life
bitter jagged edges down the ends, biting back at reflection, reflections
reverberate deep dark deep down, ring, render the hallowed hollow

it will never feel the same
it will never feel the same
you will never feel the same

you know too that you will fade from fabric, ink will erode, lift you down
fire never burns bright when fuel evaporates, white bright clear deep dull
gnash your teeth until your tongue rests on gums and resin, porcelain

it will never feel better
it will never feel better
you will never feel better

but at least you felt it at all