Had it not been
for the sheer inability of heterosexual men
to find their way into a woman's insides
without turning into hollowed-out echoes,
accountability might have been a non-negotiable
one couldn't barter away on the hopeful premise of sex,
and maybe, just maybe,
all those boys in men's cloaks
would have stopped sounding the same.
Tapeworms are rather fascinating
for existences inhabiting
the whereabouts of your asshole.
They prefer their fodder predigested;
digestion requires gall,
and pretense makes for poor enzymes.
They call themselves witches,
rather proudly.
Mind control is the only magic a parasite can afford;
they kill the entrails that keep them alive,
fornicate over corpses,
then mistake the rot for conquest.
Necrophiles, quite literally.
Tapeworms like to imagine themselves as magic,
until they trickle down,
gather,
and become
what they always were:
pieces of shit.
Sometimes, they call themselves people.
Imagine
coming second five years ago
in one of countless competitions
and then making silver your surname.
Imagine
turning trauma into diplomatic immunity
and neurodivergence into a passport
nobody is allowed to inspect.
Imagine
appointing yourself priestess of righteousness,
then using mortality as an excuse
to bully those who refuse your definitions.
Imagine an abyss so shallow
you need metaphors to fill a stanza.
Then imagine the same people
arriving with spades and sledgehammers,
calling demolition healing,
calling slander solidarity,
calling crimes a revolution.
An army of them
to dismantle what one person built alone.
How flattering.
The only caveat?
A crime is a crime is a crime,
no matter how many adjectives and opinions you dress it in.
And illusioned imbeciles make excellent puppets
when the circus finally reaches the courtroom.
Imagine building a halo
from the outline of convictions
and calling the shape martyrdom.
I'd like to see them try.
Not because the monument cannot be demolished.
Because some people
mistake the noise of hammers
for the sound of history changing.
Imagine that.
The moon has bruises.
We call them craters
because nobody remembers
when any of it happened.
In the kitchen,
we have better names
for other kinds of damage.
A tomato is cut open and called preparation.
A fish is gutted and called dinner.
An onion is peeled until it cries,
and nobody asks what happened to it.
The body is less forgiving.
Strike it once and it keeps the evidence.
Red.
Then purple.
Then yellow.
A bruise is inconvenient
because it refuses to become history quickly.
So we cover it.
The moon had billions of years.
Time did to its wounds what time does best;
it made them acceptable.
And the idiocy of intellect called them beautifully flawed.
Now we put photographs of its scars on walls.
We write love poems about them.
We call the whole thing romantic.
Perhaps that is all beauty is:
damage
that has survived long enough
for us to forget it was damage.
A crater instead of a wound.
Dinner instead of a dead thing.
A sunset instead of a burning sky.
And a bruise, still a bruise,
because
some wounds haven't had the decency to become beautiful yet.
Some people read my words
as though they were windows,
leaning closer
to see the man behind them.
Poor things.
They don't know words aren't windows.
They don't know words are but wells.
You can lower your whole life
into them
and still bring nothing back
but darkness.
Besides,
if words meant
what we think they mean,
lies wouldn't be a commodity.
Gods would be
exactly as their scriptures
describe them.
Governments would be
exactly as their constitutions
promise them.
And every folklore
peddled as a love story
would be admissible
as evidence.
But words have always known
how to wear a face
that isn't theirs.
So read me.
Underline me.
Annotate the margins.
Build a man
out of my metaphors
and call him me.
Just remember:
you are standing
at the edge of an abyss,
and whatever you think
you see down there
is nothing more than an optical illusion.
It doesn't rain for two weeks,
and the snakes think it's summer.
They have no idea
the sky is only waiting
to break itself open;
rain,
then hail,
and they'll be out on the streets,
with too many boots
and too little earth
between their fangs and their graves.
There's light at the end of the tunnel.
There absolutely is.
That light, though,
isn't a search party,
the sun,
the flame of a candle,
or the enlightenment of a firefly;
it is the headlight
of a derailed freight train
with failed brakes.
It isn't coming to save you.
It's coming to go straight through you.
