There was nothing left of the world

There was nothing left of the world. Or only the dreadful was left, only what we could not live with was left.

Streams and streams and streaming networks of the dreadful, stuffed into our eyes, our ears, every socket stuffed full of dreadful stuff.

Our dreams and screams were muted, and that was only half the horror. That we started to feel horror less was the most horrifying thing.

Everyone locked themselves in little rooms, and even believed that little rooms were worlds, that a little room was the world itself.

Or believed that they were justified in hoping that this room would one day contain all, and thereby become the standard and measure for the rest.

While life beyond these walls with their elaborate and convincing paintings of windows on their faces still groans and fails to recognize us.

Fails to see whether we are still begotten by life. Fails to see whether we are all living or whether we are all playacting and making excuses.

Breath reminds us. And water can remind us. But even these are bottled and will be bottled, even these are occasions to forget who we are.

Life's gruesomeness is not something you want to admit to yourself as it is. Because now there is so much stupid and cruel nonsense mixed with it.

The gruesomeness is so terribly familiar and so unspeakably unnecessary that you have to laugh at it sometimes so as not to die from it.

So as not to remove yourself from life for its sake! Until some sun or some moon or some other orb pulls you our of your torpor and back to the game.

For it is so much a game now that we are willing to believe that it is a simulation. It is so much a game now that the cave looks doubly convincing.

Now another snake shall come upon our digital bodies as we are eating digital fruits, and exactly what he will say to us we cannot yet know.

For the fruit is different now, and the taste of the fruit, and the rotting of the fruit. How long it takes, whether it would make alcohol.

The shame would be different too, glittering garments of shame adorned by a fantastic shamelessness. The god would come down differently too.

Maybe this time they would be cast into paradise rather than out of it. Maybe this time it is a brother and a sister, or a sister and a sister.

Then the floods are bugs and the bugs are droughts, the old man this time never thinks to sacrifice his beloved and miraculous son.

The bush is a boulder on a hill, the pharoahs have expanded their empire much further north, the escape from the desert comes with an awkward ease.

Then the algorithm needs a way to speak and commune with itself, it gives birth to a version of itself meant to save itself from itself.

Meant to save us from it! But we laugh at it, for it is only a simulation in any case, it is only some more needless repetition on the inside of what was outside.

Outside is disaster, and we could not be saved there. That is, while we roamed outside there in the openness, around flowers and bees and real living sons.

I would like to thank Amethyst Lamb for inspiring me to share this poem with the world today. Amethyst Lamb’s own verses have rounded out my sight of certain things.

We should not only speak for the speechless, but should sometimes, perhaps as often as we can, allow our words themselves to become speechless.