It twists and grows — my Möbius strip of pain.
Impossibly, indecisively — endlessly imprecise.
Buzzing, humming — singing rain through my brain,
Outside presses, flattening like a vice.
I want to reach, rage, rip through this pain.
It's too much, it's too much — there's little to gain.
Calm the hell down — they'll think you're insane.
…
The nicest ones so often had nothing to be nice about…
or did I need them hollow to make sense of my own kindness?
Too many of the smartest doubted themselves to death.
(I'm counting. I'm always counting.)
The beautiful knew it was not the same inside…
and still it twists, buzzing impossibly.
The cynics were romantics born too late.
Or: I need romance dead to justify my distance.
The media framed truth in angles that sold best.
The helpers fixed others to avoid themselves…
and still it turns, humming indecisively.
Too many therapists drank what they prescribed.
(Am I prescribing this? Making them drink?)
The faithful prayed to drown out the silence.
The silence I'm creating? The silence I'm hearing?
and still it turns, humming imprecisely.
The teachers watched their students' dreams die on schedule.
I watched them watching.
I'm watching myself watch.
The cops still needed someone beneath them.
The loud ones screamed over their emptiness. I should have told them…
I never said anything.
The dying rotted in care homes, staff glued to screens.
I was there. I saw the screens.
I counted the minutes between check-ins.
The survivors are quietly tending the debris left by the rest.
Maybe they're just mirrors now.
and still it turns, humming endlessly.
…
Maybe the pain creates the patterns I pretend to find…
but I've watched, I've counted, the evidence compounds.
Once you see it — really see it — you can't go back.
That's the death. That's the afterward.
Born at the end of a millennium of something, the beginning of nothing.
I learned to see the patterns everyone pretends aren't there.
What walks now is aftermath,
a witness wearing skin as camouflage.
- UpsilonA