Poetry & Spoken Word
bubble
On the screen of a three by four CRT TV salvaged from a bulk rubbish several years ago, images of an English-patched version of Sailor Moon: Another Story, an obscure Japanese-only release for the SNES from 1993, flash into a living room otherwise only illuminated by an original Mathmos lava lamp.
Lava lamps hold some significance to the owner of this particular rocket ship model because their father liked to recount how in 1969, when he watched the moon landing on TV, his grandmother was instead transfixed by the lava lamp his parents had gotten her a few hours ago.
The owner of the lava lamp has no idea whether that story is true, but treats it as if it was. They believe that people need personal myths and legends to experience purpose and meaning. They have been struggling with that lately.
S2 revolves around Sagittarius A*, taking only slightly longer than sixteen years to complete its usual orbit around the supermassive black hole. Its current position will be visible on Earth in 25.900 years. Even light needs to take its sweet time, burdened with the constrictions of a universe whose vastness is further underlined by having a speed limit.
Next to the controller of the SNES, the first volume of Tsuge Yoshiharu’s collected works translated into English, lies on the table, having just been finished by its buyer half an hour ago. While staring at the Sailor Senshi and trying to remember their characters from the anime, they still digest these fairly simple stories, unable to stop thinking about how much more accurate to the original the German translation of Tatsumi Yoshihiro’s works seemed compared to the English version, which had appeared to rather try to find the ‘meant’ behind the ‘said’ — not that a literal translation was automatically better or worse, but some pages had contradicted one another quite a bit. They are unsure which approach they prefer, and whether they should trust this first volume by the same publisher or not.
Suddenly, only a few hundred thousand kilometers away from S2, the quantum vacuum turns out to indeed be metastable, and a random quantum fluctuation tunnels a particle, it doesn’t matter which one, and it really wasn’t its fault, on its way into the true vacuum, finally ending the Higgs boson’s turmoil by finding a more stable configuration of the underlying quantum fields.
Entirely freaked out that their focus on Japanese media might, to an outside observer, make them seem like a weeb, the owner of the SNES, the lava lamp, and the first volume of the collected works of Tsuge Yoshiharu carefully decides on what music to listen to. A genre the Japanese seem quite uninterested in is Synthwave, and someone just posted on the FutureFunk subreddit that a niche publisher from New York celebrates their 100th release by selling their entire catalog for one dollar today — only today! — and so they shell out the money and proceed to only listen to the albums including really nasty hot pinks and dark purples on their covers (which is still most of them).
At the precise location where the Higgs field decays and stabilizes, the universe undergoes a phase transition, creating a cascade effect. A bubble forms, expanding in all directions with nearly the speed of light, and reaching S2 within two and a half seconds. S2 was an innocent bystander in this, but being the first celestial body to witness the re-write of the laws of nature, it really has nothing to complain about.
The room feels just as hot pink as the music thanks to its denizen ignoring increases in gas prices for the sake of not freezing during winter break. However, it is hard for them to not feel some guilt and shame upon receiving a short video via Telegram showing a bunch of people celebrating New Year’s Eve in Kyiv, Ukraine. The woman who sent it insists on not ever being showered with too much compassion, even when the alarms go off. But she still pities the recipient of her messages for hating their job, because she can relate.
The quantum fields that permeate spacetime rearrange and reach their ground state, instead of the strenuous pretend stability they have endured for thirteen billion years. If anyone were to observe this, they could hear a sound as if the fields were sighing in relief. In a short amount of time, the recently initiated phase transition has expanded enough to reach Sagittarius A*, and none of its properties are strong enough to ward off the intrusion of new laws, possibly robbing it of its truly awesome qualities forever. What stays behind after a black hole has been consumed by the biggest accident in the universe (so far)?
Speaking of their job, the recipient of the messages actually has some work to do; a recent illness set them back a few weeks and they really should work through approximately fifty e-mails and a few more tasks, but their winter depression has already allowed them to get out of bed today and making any more demands seems like overkill. It’s hard enough to want to stay alive some days, and those days are best filled with a Sailor Moon game. There might be some people whose e-mails the recipient would read immediately, but they are happy right now, and happy people don’t initiate text conversations over the holidays that go beyond the usual New Year’s greetings.
The fundamental forces, and with them all of physics, collapse. Gravity seems to be doing okay, but electromagnetism is quite shaken up, and both weak and strong force are too busy themselves to calm it down. No one knows what’s going on while the bubble surges at the borders of more and more celestial bodies even less involved in whatever was going on there a few moments ago than S2 was. The bubble is not considerate.
Their hands hurt. It’s their tendinitis acting up again. They haven’t written much except for filling their diary with concerning thoughts in the last week, so they suspect that the pain might be entirely psychosomatic. They distantly remember that they wanted to bake cookies this Christmas season, but the ingredients sit on the kitchen table unused. When going to the kitchen for a glass of water, they can hear their neighbor practicing on his danso, having finally gotten his hands on a book explaining the instrument in a language he understands. It still sounds shrill and exhausting, but there is cheerfulness in the air when he plays it.
After the initial blow, a final look at the location where it started — one should realize something isn’t quite right since ‘locations’ are still a thing around here — it turns out that to stabilize the Higgs it just had to lose a weekend diet’s worth of mass, barely a smidgen. The changed conditions of existence are almost undetectable. S2 orbits Sagittarius A* as if nothing happened. Truly, calling this a ‘new universe’ is akin to selling refurbished electronics as ‘factory-new’.
Their phone vibrates. A young woman sent an e-mail they accidentally read because it didn’t look like it might entail work just from the subject. The woman wants feedback on some of her work. She writes poems, in the kind of shibboleth-heavy badass boss bitch style that they see on social media when browsing around with their fake account, and they wonder how to give the young poet feedback without flat-out telling her that her texts sound like they were written by AI.
In 25.900 years, when the expansion reaches Earth, whoever is left on this planet will, without advance notice, witness everything basically staying the same. Water will take three zeptoseconds longer to boil in a vacuum, maybe. Still, on a long enough timeline, I mean, we’re all busy people, that might really pile up.midnight
It’s seven p.m. in Gunsan, but it could as well be midnight
For the sun has been gone for a while
And most of the shops
(safe for one selling anime display figurines in charmingly faded packaging and a karaoke bar that looks even more run-down than the one I hid myself in a corner in a few days ago, texting a faraway friend because I didn’t want to sing, back in Mangwon, for four hours)
Have been closed for the better part of an hour already
Regardless of the opening times stated on their somewhat dirty glass doors
It’s not a poverty-dirty, nor a negligence-dirty,
Just a dirty that appears when a place has been in existence for a while
And somewhat in use
A somewhat-dirty
Just about as somewhat-dirty as the karaoke bar in Mangwon
Howsoever
It’s seven p.m. in Gunsan, but it could as well be midnight,
For the streets are emptied of both citizens and tourists
And Y had promised me that people here would be staring at me
At my pale face
But with the streets being empty, that doesn’t happen
In fact, it didn’t even happen in the nearby villages
and it will not happen on Seonyudo, the tiny island we are about to visit tomorrow
(we’ll ride a ferry!)
Even though its streets are merely almost empty
And while Y seems, for the first time since I know her, proud of her fellow countrymen
Being happy that her predictions came not true
I am a bit
Somewhat
Disappointed
That is what happens when you prepare yourself to be looked at as
The Exotic One
You start to look forward to it
Because you’re pale
And you can exit this kind of situation whenever you like
In terms of being The Exotic One
You’re only a tourist
And now the places for this kind of tourism
Become rare
When not even the islanders of Seonyudo are willing to treat you like a foreigner
Howsoever
It’s seven p.m. in Gunsan, but it could as well be midnight,
And you and Y follow the sounds of a saxophone, preparing yourselves to find a bar as its source
But instead discover a lonesome sax player with an amplifier in a square nearby the harbor
(calling it a shore would have been more poetic, but there’s too much concrete and too many fishing boats and too little beach to warrant the term)
Playing old enka style favorites in the dark
(Y says it’s “something like enka”)
You and Y decide to stay in the shadows
(truly all is shadow by now, not counting some swan shaped neon lights nearby, their tagline spelling “I love Gunsan”, and indeed you do)
And watch
And you don’t dare to mention
That you’d like to watch for an hour or two
Y is a busy body
A body that never stops
And has no patience for things that just, kind of, happen
(she has endless patience for you, maybe because you never just happen)
So she keeps walking
While you turn your head to see
An older lady starting to dance in front of the sax player
And you’d really like to stay and watch and listen
To the swan song of Gunsan
But alas
You’ve always been afraid
And this occasion marks no difference
You are afraid to tell Y that.
It’s truly a pattern, isn’t it? You’re always afraid.
You’re way past the line where being afraid
To ask for directions
To use a public restroom
To take a bus in an unknown city
To speak to waitstaff
To utter “I beg your pardon” when you didn’t understand something immediately
Should scare you
But it scares you
And you never utter “I beg your pardon”
And on your way to Incheon that led to you not drinking anything for six hours
Because you didn’t dare to utter “I beg your pardon” when the stewardess offered something
And you quickly replied
Ani yeo
Gwenchana yeo
Waving with your hands
Because you didn’t want to imply you could neither understand her accentuated English
Nor her fast, chirpy Korean
And so she nodded and moved on from you, The Exotic One
Admittedly the same thing happened in the karaoke bar in Mangwon, when you didn’t want to admit to your friends that you didn’t quite understand how the vending machine worked
So you didn’t drink anything for four hours
And actually it wasn’t that you didn’t want to sing, actually you do sing a lot
In your apartment, alone
There were even songs in the catalog you knew the lyrics of
(somewhat)
But you never sang in front of people, not for the last fifteen, maybe twenty years
And you’re afraid
So you wave your hands
Ani yeo
Gwenchana yeo
And you didn’t utter “I beg your pardon” when the person who checked your luggage told you something, you just nodded, because the queue was long and everyone in a hurry
And you were afraid
And now you sit on the plane, even more afraid that your luggage will not be on the conveyor belt after arrival
And you mentally prepare for making some phone calls and asking for help
Even though you know you are too afraid to do that, too.
For some reason, it never occurred to you
That a small mistake will not change your life much for the worse
No matter if you get lost in Seoul’s labyrinthine subway system
Or take the wrong bus and end up in front of some mall in Hongdae
Filled to the brim with anime figurines whose packaging is not faded in the slightest
And people who buy these for whatever reason
You’re too afraid to ask them why
Because there is a reason why you’re afraid, isn’t that right?
Because you do get lost, often. As if you were born without a sense of direction, you even get lost in your own home town
Or the village you grew up in
Or the lyrics of a song you like too much
To this day, you don’t know the names of most streets
Next to the one you live in
You know the lyrics of songs you heard once better than the layout of your hometown
Even the lyrics of the 1990’s Korean pop song Y’s boyfriend sang in Mangwon, high on booze, a toothache and depression, with a heavy Japanese accent and battling with gravity, ring more familiar to you than the name of the street neighboring your childhood home
And without a map
Even a one-way street is a source of fear
Because sometimes you did ask
And people can be terrible people
When you ask them something
People close to you were terrible people
When you dared to be vulnerable
When you dared to not know
When you dared to not understand
So you don’t ask
So you don’t test people’s patience
Because who knows if Y’s patience with you is only endless because you never dare test it
You just sit it out, for hours, in a karaoke bar
The Exotic One, silent
The Exotic One, thirsty
The Exhausted One, listening
While Y’s busy, restless body fearlessly, violently moves, somewhat to the rhythm of the something-like-enka style songs she screams into the microphone, somehow in tune, cheered on by her boyfriend
Tomorrow you’ll be too afraid to ask if you could use the zip line instead of the ferry
(it’s more expensive, but it looks like so much fun!)
Howsoever, it’s seven p.m. in Gunsan, but it could as well be midnight
You carry a bottle of water this time
And you are with Y, the fearless,
Y, the busy,
Y, the restless,
So even though you have no idea where you are
You are not too afraid
You’re just too afraid to ask
If you could stay
And listen
Until it's 7:05 p.m. in Gunsan
Or just as well
‘til midnight-
we pretend
You, I don’t like you
Don’t get me wrong
You’re perfectly nice
And somewhat polite
But you never stop talking
And you self-identify
As the intellectual of the group
And there can only be one
Admittedly,
Your vocabulary is more impressive
And your sense of fashion more in line
With a nineteenth century dandy
Than mine
Which is more in line
With someone who feels ashamed at even the thought
Of buying new clothes
And how you call your girlfriend
That everybody calls ‘your girlfriend’
‘My current liaison’
Is incredibly funny,
Don’t get me wrong
There’s a good chance that behind the big words and the psoriasis lives a man
Who is smarter than me
And deserves to be
The intellectual of the group
But you never stop talking
You interrupt others
Even more than I do
(and I interrupt others a lot)
(my greatest fear is that one day people will realize I’m never really listening)
(that I only converse to get rid of the sentences that built up in my chest during all the times I have been lonely)
(and I was lonely a lot)
(that I use people for their ears)
(but you’re just as bad me in that regard, and that should make me feel better, but)
When I see you
I see me
How others might see me
A try-hard with no life outside the sentences they vomit up
Out of their chest where they stored them all the times they were lonely
And they were lonely a lot
And once they stop talking, they are lonely again
And once they go home
They hope that their girlfriend is still there
And hopefully she doesn’t know that they call her
Their ‘current liaison’
Because they are emotionally stunted pseudo-intellectuals with large vocabularies
Who feel challenged as soon as one other person in the group
Has recently read a book
But
We smile at each other as if
We didn’t feel challenged
As if we didn’t intend
To get on each other’s nerves
We pretend
To not insult each other
And the people are laughing
And it’s good that they’re laughing because
That keeps them from finding out
That we’re both afraid to be found out
That we both feel like frauds
That our second-greatest fear is
That one doesn’t laugh
The silent one, usually,
The one we both interrupt
We fear the gaze of the one
Who sees through the charade
Because the true intellectual of the group
Doesn’t have to prove themselves
And sits there, not laughing
Watching a show much different
From anybody else
And they know
Neither of us recently read a book
no
It now hurts more that you said ‘no’ yesterday
Than it did yesterday when you said it
I was surprised by how well I took your ‘no’
Because I did not expect to take rejection well, but I did
I joked to a friend about how I’d find comfort in my favorite comic books
Went to sleep without even looking at them,
And was fine
That is, until I was awake for a few hours today
There was still relief that I said my part and you said yours
And I was proud of myself for taking rejection well
Because I did
And decided that me having dreamed of us
That is me and you, and you still saying ‘no’
But acting ‘yes’
Violently kissing my neck all of a sudden
(why the neck?)
And kissing my lips then, like the guy who sometimes thought that kissing me in my sleep was a great idea did,
And then stopping and saying ‘no’ again
Was my mind exorcising the thought of you
Of me and you, being compatible
I knew I was dreaming while I was dreaming and I knew it was probably alright that I was dreaming about this
But then the dream continued, and we were somehow living together and you knew my parents and I knew yours and I decided not to think about that
And then I woke up and rode my bike to work in a bit of rain, and felt quite good about myself
And I felt free
My limerence makes me myopic, and I saw the roads and the traffic and the trees on the side of the roads with their crowns above the traffic
And how wide and open everything was and I thought
‘Thank God I finally exorcised this’
‘Thank God I can move on’
‘Thank God you said ‘no’’
(I address you as ‘you’ in my inner monologues)
And I still didn’t manage to not think about you for more than ten minutes
But it was mainly thoughts rearranging themselves, minimizing the idealization that had been going on for a few weeks
Because in fact we, you and me, are not compatible and I do think you drink too much and I do think you can be quite harsh with your words because I do think that you aren’t very mature and I do think you need to find someone with whom you discover together that in fact intimacy does not suck and in fact life is bigger than high school and in fact those walls you build around yourself to protect yourself from what you might otherwise do with yourself will be torn down, and I also do think you are kind of a simpleton still.
And I thought you with your dark eyes and that body you only barely seemed to know yourself were so, so lovely, and I am so, so much too flawed to help someone else grow up in those ways, and your sad smiles so, so made me want to hug you tight and tell you it’s okay, and I am so, so much not in the mood to help you through your depression, and I am still so, so confused about the evenings you sat down with me and told me about yourself
(your love for comic books especially)
And looked into my eyes with this trusting, affectionate, warm expression
(and of course I know that some people are just trusting, warm and affectionate)
And I so, so remember that you never asked me a personal question, not once
And that I am so, so not hurt by your ‘no’
And then I sat at my desk and of course didn’t work and looked at my phone
(you had read my messages)
And I read my news feed and I read that
The comic book artist
Whose work I built my youth around
Has been found dead in the ocean
Drowned while snorkeling
Maybe attacked by a shark
Bowels ripped open
And I couldn’t process that
I sat there and and asked myself
‘Am I shocked about this?’
‘Am I sad about this?’
‘How young is sixty-one?
‘Did I look at them last night?’
‘Did he suffer?’
‘Do I suffer?’
And the serious newspaper app on my phone doesn’t mention this of course; its writers think Boris Johnson’s resignation as prime minister is more important than the person who gave my life direction when I was twelve, and whose work helped me find friends and with whose characters I fell deeply in love with and who was found, bowels ripped open, floating in the ocean
And I google shark attack statistics
And drowning statistics
In that order, even though I know aggressive sharks are less likely than inexperienced snorkelers
And then suddenly you creep back into my head and it does hurt, your ‘no’,
Almost as much as knowing that the characters I fell in love with were unable to ever love me back,
Not quite as much, because at least you exist and have flaws and I can talk to you,
Even though some of the words you reply with are ‘no’
And I wait for work to be over, and I promise myself that the full half hour I ride back I can cry in peace to get it over with
(my schedule is very busy)
And I can’t, and I try, I ride my bike and I talk to you and the first words I blurt out are the first two lines I have written here, and I say all these things and I just can’t cry,
And then the rain intensifies and it becomes a storm,
The roads are so, so slippery and the traffic is so, so dangerous and the trees on the side of the roads with their crowns above the traffic are so, so hazy
And how terrifyingly wide and open everything is
How big and strange the world becomes without myopia
And I’m so, so soaked, and I try to be dramatic and declare that the sky does my crying for me,
But really I am not that sad, I am hurt
There’s no tears, just drowning
And I realize I’m hurt because the thoughts that rearrange our relationship lay bare that it’s not easy at all to admit to myself that my finding you cute
Indeed included thinking about introducing you to my parents
And me meeting yours
Me helping you with your studies
Showing you my favorite comic books
And learning about yours
To learn what occupied both of our youths
And planning to move cities together
The whole nine yards you fantasize about when you
(well, maybe not you, because you still think that love is stupid)
Think just a little bit too much about someone
And that I spent so, so much time thinking about you
When you never, not once, thought any of those thoughts about me
That hurts
That in my head we were together for so long
That I saw you turn thirty and you saw me turn forty
But for you, we’ve only talked one-on-one like, five times,
And I barely exist to you,
As barely as your own body does.
None of these observations are new,
— Hell, to even write about rejection! —
— Hell, what an exorcism this is! —
— Hell, to hell with my wounded ego —
and I’ll be fine,
But it hurts
Floating in the ocean
Bowels ripped open
We’ll meet this weekend
And I’ll tell you about my favorite comic book artist and ask you whether you know him
And you’ll say ‘no’
closed sky
days in the year where the sky never turns black
a turbid grey with blue and orange undertones
like failed childhood attempts at mixing watercolors
the disappointment of realizing you’re not living in the end times
smell of a park only slightly polluted by surrounding traffic
a sky entirely obscured by darksome clouds
protective blanket above your evening stroll
the embarrassment of being alive in an era unmentioned in history classes a thousand years from now
slight breeze with no variation of temperature
a rustle coming from drying leaves of the limetrees
not uprooted by last year’s summer storm
the nerds who’ll like the underdog fringe history from the start of the bumptious third millennium
alley with dying lilacs and open windows
a neighborhood ecosystem relying on air freshener
hard to pin down the origin of your favorite smell
the intolerable certainty of living in relative comfort
at night, successfully forgetting you’re going somewhere
a noisily moving hunk of outdated metal with a broken radio
and a paint job that was out of fashion long before your baby teeth fell out
the moment you pretend feels eternal
noise
HUH?
…pheeeeew.
buzz
the dishwasher humming
the fridge buzzing
the stove pristine
a catastrophe of unfathomable proportions
destroying millions of lives
at this very moment
the shower a bit moldy
benzoyl peroxide
Dear teenager writing in all-caps on reddit
you are in all likelihood not an antinatalist
you are angry
at your mother
which I understand entirely because I, too, have a mother
and was a teenager, though I preferred to write in all-lowercase because I thought it looked way cooler
I still do that from time to time even though my teenage years move further and further away into the yonder
that being a youth gainfully spent on thoughts about capitalization and the appropriate number of exclamation marks
while auto-correct took over the world and robbed me of my last remaining stylistic edge
I might have to come up with some grammatical shenanigans to regain my literary vigor
for auto-correct’s grammar is even worse than yours when you try to write
as if you were a poorly translated Arthur Schopenhauer
converting your tormenting and raging teenage angst into irrefutable philosophical logos
because apparently there is something to be gained in getting
your mother
into an apologetic mood about being
your mother
But I have to tell you that I don’t believe that once you stop screaming at her through your door about how you wish you’d never been born
it would fix your situation or lighten the mood if then, after a moment of awkward silence, she pointed out that, regarding that issue
you two agree with one another
and I know it’s mean and belittling to reduce your ideological subscription to a mere oedipal hang-up
but to be fair,
you are very habitually, unexceptionally angry
at your mother
Anyhow, I will now also say something you claim no one ever says to you and that is
I am in complete agreeance with you
I don’t believe you’re depressed, no
I do agree that human existence is utterly pointless and not at all rewarding and more anguish than any collection of joyful moments could ever compensate for
and indeed no one asks to be born while plenty of people wish to die
and there is no solution to this because people just don’t stop breeding and neither you nor I have any intention to kill ourselves
which makes antinatalism a very pubescent school of thought
ineffective and angry at the world for not being allowed to be a carefree egotist for all eternity, utterly unaware of such things as death
or acne
stuck in a position of perpetual contrarianism
and the frustrations of a life lived under unjust conditions
like acne
and I agree that there is no magic in the world to be discovered, maybe a few interesting things here and there
but no matter if I were able to promenade on the surface of Mars or at the very least be a billionaire with the means to do that if I ever felt like it
or if could have the most amazing sex of my life all the time with plenty of beautiful and intensely willing participants who also deeply care about me and my well-being
or if I was highly successful in a field I’m passionate about, being blessed with a constant and fulfilling sense of achievement
or if the world itself became a bright and joyous place devoid of every last thing we inflicted on ourselves to make life hard on us
nothing negates the dread and the fear and the suffering and the pain and the decay and the hollowness, the inability to feel anything lasting and deep
and most of all all the empty and preposterous and infuriatingly boring chores and interactions each and every one of us has to carry their poor sanity through day in and day out
charading themselves into a grave that’s both too early and not early enough because life is unthinkable without always wanting something else or more or less
because without a lack, there is only complacency and that is like dying
I’ve tried it, it works, you actually feel dead, for what reason I would recommend it to the right people
it’s a shortcut
and nothing can make up for the fact that every life will end and the universe will end and everything will turn into less than dust
less than particles
less than what we even understand about what “nothing” is
and to make matters worse for you
I’m in my late
later
my very latest
twenties
and I still have acne
and to once again be fair, part of this really is about acne
because even though it would be pointless and wouldn’t take away any of the fear and only some of the suffering
I would very much like to have the means to go on a spontaneous trip to Mars with a bunch of attractive and horny individuals while being celebrated on a utopian earth as, indeed, very successful in my field
but instead, I just have acne
and sometimes, I’m angry
at my mother
nah
there’s work to do
not doing that
because
there’s a life to live
(not doing that either)
miracles
today
soothing voice of a Japanese man streaming his playthrough of an American video game
he has to find places to hide while a patient ambient soundtrack promises a doomed world
he doesn’t know it’s me who’s watching, yet he allowed me to contribute to his tiny view count
years ago
woman on a train telling me i need to re-allow miracles back into my life
i believe she is trying to sound profound talking about being awed
by sunsets over mountain tops or poetry or hipster coffee shops in Amsterdam
-
successful live performance
you wrote a poem that started something like this:
you fall, no, you run, no, you walk, no,
you just stand still waiting for
the inevitable breakdown
that will never occur
and ended with:
once, you thought you were better than everyone else
then you thought you were worse
now you think that you might just be a little bit different
that others see red while you see ultraviolet
like a bee
(people clapped)
you were twenty and awful
the poem was awful, too
but that’s not the point
-
progress bar
copying files i haven’t looked at in years and years and years and years and years
n (dot) bodyproblem (at) tutanota (dot) com