Here's fiction rather than a poem:
Seer
Time is falling apart.
Something in the fabric of reality has come undone and is steadily unravelling as some galactic-sized two year old of a god plays with the loose thread.
These are not paranoid fantasties, or the musings of a semi-suicidal trendy adolescent.
I've seen it.
Not in a quick, sudden revelation, a life-changing epiphany, the uncovery of some arcane scientific formula to explain the inner-workings of the world, but rather a slow creeping feeling, a nagging in the back of my head that I managed to draw forward after months of careful thought.
Moments are slipping away. Moments are coming back at the wrong times.
I've seen it in the way night seems to turn to day too fast sometimes. I've seen it in the way that all five minutes are not created in equal increments, some stretch while others compress. I've seen it in the way old memories and faces re-surface at the wrong seemingly random times.
Time is vibrating like a rubber band, eroding like a weather-torn cliff, sending bits of itself flying in the wind only to flow back in a river-bed years or even centuries later.
I want to be one of those particles, flung into new dimensions where time spirals out of control, completely chaotic. I want to be tossed into a maelstrom of tommorows and yesterdays, able to live new worlds every second even as that term loses all meaning.
Impossible? I know better.
It happened to a friend of mine.
The police said murder between condolences to the family.
The police said knife wounds between sympathetic looks.
The police said drug-related between search warrants.
I laughed in their faces.
Drugs? Stabbings? Murder?
In my town?
Such a prospect was well outside the realm of even the most speculative fiction. There are undercurrents and undergrounds and then there are posers. In the land of suburbia, the posers ruled.
No, I knew the truth, even though I knew her family would think me crazy. She had left three dimensions behind for a whirlwind ride across the possibilites of a fourth.
Sure, her body came back badly scratched.
Sure, she had some strange chemicals in her system.
Sure, sure, sure.
People spend too much time living in the fincky details, trying to make puzzle pieces fit together, trying to shove square pegs in round holes because they know those round holes, those round holes are comfortable.
I think that it's a wonder she got away so light.
A few scratches. A few chemicals. A little death.
A petty, small price to pay for even a small glimpse at the wonders of eternity.
I'm sure that I seem nuts. Banking on abstract theories about entropy and rends in time, but I know something that they don't.
I saw her.
It was a second to me. A flashing ghostly image, see-through, faint, almost unnoticable, but I saw her. I saw the look in her eyes, and I knew. I knew that she had learned more about the world and humanity than anyone I had ever seen before. I knew the wisdom behind those eyes spanned centuries. I knew that for a moment, she was a god, if a scared and confused one, and what is death next to that?
A penny, a piece of lint, and even less.
And I do not mourn. I do not cry. Not just because of the beauty she held for a moment, but because I know that some part of her is still mingled up with the fabric of existence.
With every corner I turn, with every passing tick of a clock, I feel something changed, something new ever since her death. It lies in the cracks between ticks. In the seconds with my eyes held closed in thought. It's a tickling at the back of my spine, as if she was saying, "You were right."
Seer
Time is falling apart.
Something in the fabric of reality has come undone and is steadily unravelling as some galactic-sized two year old of a god plays with the loose thread.
These are not paranoid fantasties, or the musings of a semi-suicidal trendy adolescent.
I've seen it.
Not in a quick, sudden revelation, a life-changing epiphany, the uncovery of some arcane scientific formula to explain the inner-workings of the world, but rather a slow creeping feeling, a nagging in the back of my head that I managed to draw forward after months of careful thought.
Moments are slipping away. Moments are coming back at the wrong times.
I've seen it in the way night seems to turn to day too fast sometimes. I've seen it in the way that all five minutes are not created in equal increments, some stretch while others compress. I've seen it in the way old memories and faces re-surface at the wrong seemingly random times.
Time is vibrating like a rubber band, eroding like a weather-torn cliff, sending bits of itself flying in the wind only to flow back in a river-bed years or even centuries later.
I want to be one of those particles, flung into new dimensions where time spirals out of control, completely chaotic. I want to be tossed into a maelstrom of tommorows and yesterdays, able to live new worlds every second even as that term loses all meaning.
Impossible? I know better.
It happened to a friend of mine.
The police said murder between condolences to the family.
The police said knife wounds between sympathetic looks.
The police said drug-related between search warrants.
I laughed in their faces.
Drugs? Stabbings? Murder?
In my town?
Such a prospect was well outside the realm of even the most speculative fiction. There are undercurrents and undergrounds and then there are posers. In the land of suburbia, the posers ruled.
No, I knew the truth, even though I knew her family would think me crazy. She had left three dimensions behind for a whirlwind ride across the possibilites of a fourth.
Sure, her body came back badly scratched.
Sure, she had some strange chemicals in her system.
Sure, sure, sure.
People spend too much time living in the fincky details, trying to make puzzle pieces fit together, trying to shove square pegs in round holes because they know those round holes, those round holes are comfortable.
I think that it's a wonder she got away so light.
A few scratches. A few chemicals. A little death.
A petty, small price to pay for even a small glimpse at the wonders of eternity.
I'm sure that I seem nuts. Banking on abstract theories about entropy and rends in time, but I know something that they don't.
I saw her.
It was a second to me. A flashing ghostly image, see-through, faint, almost unnoticable, but I saw her. I saw the look in her eyes, and I knew. I knew that she had learned more about the world and humanity than anyone I had ever seen before. I knew the wisdom behind those eyes spanned centuries. I knew that for a moment, she was a god, if a scared and confused one, and what is death next to that?
A penny, a piece of lint, and even less.
And I do not mourn. I do not cry. Not just because of the beauty she held for a moment, but because I know that some part of her is still mingled up with the fabric of existence.
With every corner I turn, with every passing tick of a clock, I feel something changed, something new ever since her death. It lies in the cracks between ticks. In the seconds with my eyes held closed in thought. It's a tickling at the back of my spine, as if she was saying, "You were right."