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the code only permits unicellular organisms: dinoflagellates, ciliophora, euglena, angelus.¹
title borrowed from track 16 of Liv.e’s 2023 album Girl In The Half Pearl, linked below.
oh, how i remember you, made of grain, gloved spine, skeleton. back when our conscience was but a facsimile of plastic, a nucleus of tenuous string, i would sit at your legs for hours and think of anyone you told me to. & i think of your notches, your sympathies knocked loose, still so fondly. "i recognized a swallowtail by the wing patterns you used to talk about." "all this time, and i'm still happy you got the job." "if you keep dodging left and hitting at the openings, you'll eventually get it." how easy and foreign it was to want your soft mutation, your bleached blue flight, the stunning squares crackling out of you like poorly sutured sunlight. how you'd beckon, split your lag into a smile and with every frame make us hope for returnreturnreturnreturn, more return each time. & i want to melt into that space eat myself into that else- where, still so much still so often. so then, you apparatus of flesh, you frigid, shock-shell membrane, this is how i live my days: i fold my cuticles onto themselves, sleep on an achebed. i fall in love with strangers' voices, shoo ghosts away from my bruises. i cook meals more pleasant than my stomach. and then i'll see it, on the edge of the lawn. the noon-bitten flies, the persistent desire. that something will sit here, return, eat from my hand and ask, "did you ever get it?"
1 angelus
2
this was originally meant to be a sweeter piece, but i actually have been feeling a lot of dread about being on the internet. i had no need of the awareness that there is such an abundance of callous people in the world, so entitled to dictating and regurgitating arbitrary rules about the life you must live, so enraptured by outrage, so indifferent to other people’s realities. truly the cruel angel’s thesis. that said, the sources that inspired this poem still move me and are hopefully reflective of the relationships i have tried to nurture online. i do hope we think of each other more fondly than all this. i hope we do enough to deserve it.
as one of the few responsibilities we have within both the virtual and real worlds we inhabit daily, it would mean a lot to me if you could share and donate to the following causes:
the following spreadsheet contains plenty of fundraisers and organizations focused on providing aid to multiple global causes:
I really love your poems! They are like beautiful riddles. The last line is my favorite because it reminds us that the virtual world can also be gentle and affect reality in a positive way.