Solicited Suicide

A portion of the powder to fill up the cracks
In your vast, empty space of a self –
You call it freedom
I call it something else

It’s form over substance, form over substance
each and every time in this town,
in this country of loves and sweethearts
Running around in sweatpants
Staring blankly at cashiers ringing them up
for sausage rolls and Irn-Bru.

Tell me, love, where have I heard this conversation
One million times before?
Or where have I seen your face
On every corner I turn on my way to the nearest deli?

Or where have I heard your name and
seen your life played out in
Every British soap I’ve ever watched?
You’re a throwaway, one in a dozen,
A plastic mold of a person filled with
The zeitgeist of a dead present made up of
nowt but the debris of time;
Segments of memory – sentences uttered by the ones before us,
Pictures taken and scenes filmed and
Conversations written in a present
Yet to suffocate under the dead weight
Of endless, empty, forever multiplying matter.

Seconds tick by and drown out time itself
As I sit on a plastic chair and decay in silence –
Cell by cell I rot away
Because at least in death we’re still originals.
No one’s wasted away quite like this before
And yet everyone has in some ways, I think.

Am I just another simulation?
An evil of an era past the end of history?
Am I just an echo of sentences uttered
in another place, another time, by another ‘me‘?
Am I just a memory replayed in the rerun
of the same drama that molds the many threads
of life into a single Narrative?

Am I just a decaying cell falling off the face of the Earth
once I grow tired and let go of the same routine

Replaced by a thousand others

Nothing has changed

JBV