The Simulator

Something to think about.

This started as a suicide note 

but you found you had no one to write. 

So now it’s to everyone, no one. 

It’s words on paper, 

on a screen, 

wherever. 

Meaningless, 

empty, no purpose 

except to be read 

by no one. 

Maybe 

these words would go on 

to tell a true ghost story. 

One where the supernatural is almost believable, 

thumbing through the endlessly expanding wealth 

of human fallibility 

and lust for superstition. 

Thirteen chapters for fun 

and realistic measure; 

in the end the hero dies, choking on irony, 

consumed by the invisible monster 

trapped in every closet 

and lurking under the bed of every innocent child, 

maybe, 

or perhaps go on to compose 

a gut-tossing love story, 

breaking every tender heart, 

telling the sordid, tragic tales 

of loss, redemption, 

and happily-ever-after 

dish of nearly every Hollywood spree 

through the wild odyssey 

of amber romance and abrupt vomit, 

playing on the gullibility 

of millions of naïve, infinitely 

youthful teenagers 

and young adults 

blind to the inevitable realities 

of abuse and affairs and law suits and divorce. 

It's poor, hopeless poetry.

Run on sentences and fragments. 

Kicking the rules of language to the curb. 

Chicken scratch. 

Ink on paper, 

here is your heart, 

here is your beating, troubled heart. 

Here, you write, you’re sharing. 

You've walled the world in, 

and you hope 

it didn't bring a sledge hammer. 

You’re worried because you spread the disease 

of negativity 

and pessimism and 

wax eternally cynical. 

You’re worried you’re an inverted prism 

of misery, backwards talk, 

double speak, two faced, 

poisonous lovers spit and suck 

and sticky s**t 

that doesn't stink 

but stains and it never, ever ends. 

It’s an open, broken window 

forgotten in the wicked winter; 

there is a reason it’s cold in here, 

there is a reason your limbs are stiff. rigid,

brittle, rigor mortis. 

You want to write a sad, terrible siren song 

where the chorus yells how these words 

make the world fiction 

and this song is it's prison. 

Another escapist excuse; 

you want to forget, 

because it’s not like it’s going away.

Another climax for the theatrical addict. 

You’re avid, famished, 

desperate for the future. 

The future is where you live forever 

and know everything, 

create and destroy 

and devour and 

get bored quick. 

You pass the time with a vicious, 

silver needle for the mind. 

You shoot up glowing experiences 

of a bloody birth, 

fleeting childhood, confused adolescence, 

all the angst, anger, lust, sex, violence, war, 

disease, and 

death 

the world has ever harbored. 

You live to survive, 

you live to work. 

You hurt and you cry 

and you lose 

and you love 

and you kill 

and you take 

and you lust. 

You’re at once ignorant 

and awake to the 

awful truth: if you want to 

start over, 

all you have to do is kill yourself. 

Turn the heart off and 

disconnect the brain. 

You wake in the future, 

momentarily horrified, 

stunned in remembering 

what the f**k, 

where the f**k, 

how the f**k. 

The rush: 

life in a quantum syringe. 

An organic matrix. 

One billion quivering, 

throbbing, pulsing orgasms, 

adrenaline spikes, the apex of euphoria and terror, 

the drug of mortal sentience. 

This is consciousness. 

This is all there is 

and you hold it in your perfectly evolved hand, 

a steaming puddle of grotesque, 

beautiful knowledge. 

A yacht of the imagination, 

and it is just as real as you remember. 

You remember how 

only death makes life worth living. 

Only sitting, lying, contemplating 

on the edge of non-existence 

do you truly appreciate existence. 

And you cry, you sob.

Now you’re dead 

and you’re in the glorious, 

magnificent future 

where any defeated underdog 

can be dead and still laugh about it. 

Death is just waking up. 

Death is time travel. 

Death is the future and everyone is doing it.

The Simulator. 

Number one most common terminator: 

Biological Mortality. 

Disease, cancer, accidents, homicide, suicide. 

Time is no longer measured in years. 

No decades, millenniums or eons. 

Anymore you think, 

reckon, predict 

in the escalating score of lives. 

The number of consecutive terminal universes 

you bring into awareness. 

Every one a spreading saturation 

of organic quantum fluctuation constructs, 

all digital playgrounds, 

some finite spectral experience

of excessive failure and horrific sculptures 

of energy and indifferent evolution. 

Each dark body a unique soul; 

each an awkward, exalted puzzle, 

their lonely, violent secrets 

hiding in dreams and ideas that betray your creative libido. 

You could peel back 

the minds of every hostile brain 

and expose the throbbing and fleshy 

indian pink tendrils to the 

dense luminous colors they can’t even fathom. 

You could collapse 

the igneous mansions of coral cards 

they call unyielding knowledge and rocky reality. 

The terrible vehicle of being. 

You lie back 

eager, weak, and starved 

for another life. 

The future is lonely 

and boring and 

bursting with empty, abandoned, 

forsaken space. 

Birthing universes makes you tired, 

wears you out, 

and you just want to live and die again. 

You’re parched for blood and horror. 

So you drop your plans and 

boot The Simulator and think briefly 

how the 21st century 

is your favorite. 

A gleaming pinnacle 

of both gross comfort and Utopian suffering. 

Awful, arousing hordes 

of infinite stupidity 

and countless acres of sand and s**t and dirt 

and rich, reflective surfaces. 

Millions of mirrors for the longing. 

You wonder which you’ll be. 

You hope for another brilliant experience, 

maybe one where you grow wise in poverty, 

torn from the love of your life 

by war and famine and religion and chance. 

Maybe you’ll be the singing snake 

at the altar of a church 

where millions of innocent swine 

give their last bloody pennies up 

in hopes for a touch of your spotless, 

arsenic passion and eburnean heart. 

That blonde, rusted smile, 

held together by the ragged roots 

of a golden dandelion. 

Maybe you’ll be murdered or sacrificed, 

maybe you’ll be the sinewy martyr, 

the horned, barbed, keen 

electric indigo hammer 

and nail of God, 

on a spiraling psychedelic path 

to a lush jungle paradise 

of every imaginable ending. 

Your beloved specks on a flushed celadon canvas, 

a plethora of perfect pigments and parts. 

Life is poetry, a passage 

of burnt sienna problems 

and the atomic, 

fatal locus of 

every single bathos. 

You will always be a slave 

to the hateful overseer 

of Want and greed. 

Life is the gorgeous, 

satin music, 

haunting and howling 

the language of 

hidden signals and 

you will never escape.

Reviews

[Quoting Ravens]

Wow. I enjoyed the feel and flow of the words and the way it all escalated. Interesting format, too. Nicely done.