I am fishcaught
mouthhooked
(I should have learned to keep mine shut)
on the barbed bits of you
that have always,
always
lured me.
Now I gasp,
out of of breath,
suffocating in your grasp.
Only I couldn’t bear it
if you let me go.
You caught me —
now it’s your responsibility
to hold on,
until it’s over,
one way
or another.
I’ll learn to walk on land,
or I’ll lay down
and die on it.
Just so long as I’m near you,
I don’t mind.
I Don’t Mind
Disconnection No. 10 – Impossible Blue
This is Part 10 of a Serial called Disconnection.
* * *
Dreams were remembered by Autorun, catalogued for viewing the next day, but most people couldn’t follow the shifting tide of input while awake. Nothing made sense, and it was much shorter — less a movie, more like a series of disconnected absurdist trailers.
She always watched hers, anyway.
When she dreamed while the digital thing rewrote her flesh, she imagined she could taste blue fire, and that she was back at her first sync point, in the chair, connected, waiting, and that Prime had never come — that she had imagined it all. That her protocols were refused, and she never felt that first, giddy rush of sensation, of full-body communication.
Waking from that nightmare was a relief, even if she was still laying pinned beneath the dead bodies of her compatriots.
She woke to an overlay in impossible blue. She blinked her left eye a few times, heard servos and a few clicks, but felt no pain.
A cursor blinked in her field of vision, pulsing in time to the beat of her heart.
Then, words:
AR>? You're awake.
“Oh, fuck me,” she whispered.
AR>? You do not need to speak aloud.
Really? she thought, frowning enough that she finally felt the faint pull where the implant had embedded itself.
AR>? Really.
Oh. Fuck.
* * *
Posted in Disconnection, Fiction, Flash
Tagged AI, Autorun, connected, connection, cyberpunk, disconnected, Disconnection, dystopia, fiction, future, implant, Prime, serial, writing
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Honesty
I am terrible at promises.
I am a liar and a fool.
I am weak and I am maddening.
I am fearful and I am broken.
I am hopeless and I am miserable.
I think of myself as unloved, unlovable, unknowable.
If you really knew me…
If you knew the real me…
If I could be honest…
But no one wants that.
No one wants honesty.
They want the neat little package.
They don’t want messy.
They don’t want miserable.
They don’t want sad.
They don’t want broken.
This isn’t Hollywood,
and I’m not your
manicpixiedreamgirl.
Nobody wants something
already broken.
There isn’t enough glue
to mend this.
Maybe I should keep
breaking myself
until I’m only dust
and then I can either
blow away
or
make myself
into something entirely new.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged anger, depression, fear, hope, identity, love, madness, poem, poems, poetry, relationships, self esteem, writing
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After I Drowned
When I came back up
I was dead.
I’m still dead.
I’m not here.
My eyes are water blue,
and my lungs
are full of salt.
I want to burn something
into my skin
to prove I exist.
I want to etch something
along my bones
to prove it hurts.
I want to fold you up
in my arms
and make a cage of myself
so you can’t leave me.
Don’t leave me here
to sink again.
Don’t leave me here
to fall.
I thought I was immortal.
The husk of me
is all that’s left.
I don’t know
when it happened.
I’m talking to empty air.
You’re already gone.
One of us is a ghost;
the other one
is just dead.
Posted in Poetry
Tagged blue, death, depression, family, hope, loneliness, love, misery, poem, poems, poetry, rage, relationships, suicide, writing
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The Autumn Queen No. 24 – Short, Swift, and Without Hesitation
This is #24 of The Autumn Queen. To start at the beginning, go here.
* * *
“How?” I cried. “How can this be?” I offered up my hands to Elias, trembling, awed and terrified. “Have you been reborn?” I breathed. “My brother, you–”
“Shhh,” he whispered, shaking his head. He offered out his hand, and I took it without hesitation. He drew me close, and walked me to the center of the dais, then bid me look up. “There,” he said quietly. “There is the sky, Elodie.”
I could not feel a thing but gratitude as I lifted my eyes. I smiled up at the moon’s home, and felt tears running down my cheeks. “Thank you,” I whispered, turning to look at him. “Thank y–”
The mark at the back of his neck, the tattoo that he bore from the moments after his birth… The tattoo that should have matched mine…
…Didn’t.
I was so confused, so caught in the sudden realization of the betrayal I nearly didn’t see the knife. When I turned away, shifted to put my hands to my face, to shove my fist in my mouth to drown the cry that wanted to bubble up from somewhere in the ragged middle of me, I saw the blade.
I met the eyes of the madman who had been my brother’s undoing.
My dance with Kellis was short, swift, and without hesitation.
I loved him, but not as much as I had loved my brother, and when he fell, and the guards and Her Majesty rose as one, I leapt from his body to that of the Prince, and wrapped myself around him, putting the knife to his slim throat. “AWAY!” My voice rose in fury and desperation. “I will not falter!”
The Prince in my arms did not fight or tremble; he stayed quite still.
“You would not dare,” Her Majesty hissed. “He is all you have left of your brother.”
“He is all you have left of my brother,” I snapped back. “But he is also half made of you, and our land does not need one fibre more of you. Not one more breath. You let me pass. You will let me pass, with money, with food, with clothes, with a horse, and when I am well and away and clear of the borders, I will release him.”
“You have broken promises before, Elodie,” she said unhappily.
“I will swear it on Elias’s name,” I said easily enough, shaking as I held to the young man tightly. “I do not wish ill of his son, but I will win this fight.”
She saw what was either determination or desperation in my expression, and bid the guards bring me what I’d asked for. While half of them did that, the other half picked up and carried away Kellis’s body. I saw, with a pang of regret, the way his boyish face finally looked peaceful — he seemed more himself in death than he did when I saw him for such brief moments in the last twenty years.
The Autumn Queen watched him go, and turned to look at me, venom in her green eyes. “I do not know what you think has happened here, but you haven’t won anything,” she said icily. “Not from me.”
I did not answer her; my brother’s son and I mounted the swift horse I had been given and rode away.
I did not look back.
* * *
Posted in Template, The Autumn Queen
Tagged death, elodie, escape, fiction, Kellis, love, serial, the autumn queen, the prince, writing
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