The Eternal Future

NEW YORK—Shaking off the rust like a beached Gundam, we raise our weary eyes to the red sun. Sandblasted souls smoothed down and worn flat: not dulled, but effaced. What’s the difference? See the same things on the back of the eyelids as when we sleep standing up. Nuclear annihilation was already burned into the retinas before we could even learn our colors.

Burning the flag should be a crime where burning evidence is a requirement for freedom.

Letting a congressman borrow your 2003 Ford Mustang V-6 for a weekend can buy your firm the permanent policy conditions for millions of dollars in profit, for years to come. Throw in a thousand-dollar dinner for his idiot wife, implicating her in the crime and net yourself a small bonus to the tune of millions of voices extinguished at the press of a button.

I look at you from afar, so scientifically, analytically, as I’m taking you apart like an alien insect. I understand you better than I know myself. We know each other as well as two warring nations who haven’t met since the peace agreement, now cloaked in hypocrisy, carpet bombing the spirit, and precision striking suggestions in the dark. On the ether we ride white horses that dance across the synapse as lightning. Dumb neurons.

You got too close. You read my thoughts. Now into the punishment hole with you: where identity is erased and only memories remain, as they do their quiet work behind two hollow slits of a torturer’s hood. Observe eye contact if you really want to collapse a billion particle punctures into distinct wave patterns of anguish.

The future is awesome, because the past was even awesomer.