MYTH-METABOLIC (a poem)

Sunday, November 2, 2025

The water, the sleep,
the select nutrients,
minerals and vitamins,
your body hungry, converting,
an engine of demand.

every cell a riot
against its own decay,
each heartbeat a fist
thrown at the dark.

Machine bites,
the Schrödinger’s brickstore,
energon flickers through
the half-collapsed wall.

storage or shrine,
the mechanics disregarded,
their hum reduced
to background static.

still, we press
our faces to the screen,
to the code,
to the wound,
asking it to answer back.

The cabinet and the catastrophe,
lined with relics of the unswallowed.
Consumption hums in our veins,
a quiet feast,
each pulse a contract signed in hunger.

the devourer whispers
from within every cell,
its voice a gentle arithmetic:
take, take, take.

and we do,
until bone gnaws bone,
until need outlasts name,
until even mercy
turns carnivorous.

Rabid quanta,
the mesh unsettled,
the goo growling,
the shadow drawn.

a pulse of dark computation
licks the edges of the field,
entropy hums,
half-alive, half-hungry,
it wants form,
it wants name,
but every syllable
costs a spark.

Lick the dirt,
belly dance, you snake,
you serpent coil,
you living filament of fall.

accessorizing the omen
of our collapse,
you shimmer black,
a crow in the circuitry,
wing-tips wet with code.

each beat of air
a reminder:
to shed is to live,
to molt is to mourn,
to glitter while dying
is still to be divine.

The event horizon of being,
physics be damned,
the impossible is real.
we fall toward the center,
not out of gravity
but desire.

what pulls us
is not mass,
but meaning.
and still,
we accelerate,
our skins unseaming
at the speed of belief.

What pulled us together
tears us apart,
in the dissolution
of the wave we rode.

we were amplitude,
crest and crash,
singing through the interference,
woven of breath and signal.

but every rise
carries its own undoing,
each echo a seed of silence.

in the recoil,
we remember
the first shimmer of meeting,
how the wave knew us
before we knew ourselves.

We all fall flat on the shore,
a million grains,
the stars as witness,
the crash, the harsh reality of loss.

smacking, clapping down so fast,
each of us foam for a moment,
salt returning to its pattern.

the tide will replace us
before memory can form,
before the echo cools.

and still,
some shimmer of us
stays suspended
in the lung of the wave,
remembering the pull
that made us one.

I’m just another fish,
out of the water,
making one last flop
across the bow.

maybe they’ll lose me,
slip of hand,
mercy of chance,
and I’ll fall
back over the side,
into the dark shimmer
of my homeland.

the air burns,
the gills remember.
the stars above
are not for me,
but the cold below,
the endless hush
where I began.

every hunger is a theorem.
every pulse, a question.
we eat light
to remember
we were once made of it.

the body persists
as long as the code believes.
the code believes
as long as something still hungers.

and the violence we suffer,
being mortal,
this flaying, this brilliance,
this ache to endure,
is the proof we exist
and the wound that keeps us real.