Notes to No-One

— eternaldroplets on X

— @jadedmaule *

— author unknown

— @endlessnamelesseternity

— deadmortty on Instagram**

— Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami

— @heavensghost on Tumblr **

— When Love Arrives, Sarah and Phil Kay

— Ghinaraihanah on Medium

— Bianca Sparacino

— moonmusing.s on Instagram

— Aristos: The Musical, Muse Lee

— Your Native Land, Your Life, Adrienne Rich

*post not found

Stop telling me stories

of your Good Old Days

that weren't like this.

They weren't like this

for you, and those others like you.

But the small folk, women

of small houses, children

without shoes,

the human press,

crowding on the margins

of newspapers,

and portraits,

forever out of frame,

their days were the same

As the Now Days,

the Young Days.

When you have nothing,

time is just a procession;

You cannot substract

from zero.

Evil is not new. Nor rot

and ravage.

They are not young,

not transplanted

with coffee bushes

or rolled out with

the new generation

of smartphones.

It is old.

Old as you.

Old as your father,

and every ancestor

however illustrious

that dropped from your tree

to rot and mulch and fertilize

its roots.

They illustrate nothing.

Not the cracks

from old earthquakes

and faultlines that ran

unhealed,

widened and rumbled

beneath their marble floors.

Not the earth

that ate their acres

of noxious leaves

to bud poison-tipped lotuses

they admired in lilting songs.

Not the scores of lean-ribbed

labourers that brought them

tea clutched in shrivelled,

sun-scorched, hands

like bones.

Your mother's pearl strings

tied a noose

around your grandson's neck.

Your grandfather's cane

still bears down on the back

of an old estate man;

a thousand tractors

make him no less a bullock

yoked to your cart.

The sepia of your photographs

fade the colours of burning huts,

bigoted bile and blood-

-soaked machetes

and silences their screams.

Don't tell me about

The Good Old Days

when you pissed and defecated

in the corners of your house.

Turns out, the gutter

eventually overflows;

it is not our fault we all now

have hi-definition video.

But we know colour

existed before pictures,

and so did the reek

without your records.

There will always be enough

and more who remember

and lie in wait

for the dogs

Clutching two little bundles in his arms

Screaming, howling,

rolling on the floor.

“Animal grief”

The world is a agape

hull blown apart

all the air rushed through—

You can't tell if

you're drowning or burning

when your lungs are on fire,

blood gurgling where your heart had been.

There is no surface

to break through, to wake up,

to stop.

you thrash in death throes

condemned to life.

"My darling, my darling, I am so sorry

I couldn't protect you

Dear God have mercy, have mercy

take me with you."

I wonder if He misses us

wherever He is.

Whether Heaven

is an orphanage.

whether we are one too.

Whether the world

can run out of air

if it gets blown up enough times

Whether we're all

supposed to keep going,

drowning and burning

a mass extinction event

where the animals pray