I am just a poor boy

I understand that my place in the scheme of things is very small. Miniscule. I could live and die without a tear being shed. My impact on this world is negligible. I guess I could have fucked my way to the top, that was an option once: sell my body, smile at the cameras. Become what do they call it? That thing where people create relationships in their head and project them outward onto images that seem life-like, anything that might contain consciousness but is flattened, powerless. Inanimate matter: machines made for calculating become hyper-machines, godlike, consciousness projected upon them. So too pieces of paper, once trees, gathered together and sewn into pamphlets and books can take on lives of their own. Here, anything can. The whole world is illuminated, the poets already said so. The light isn't coming from above or outside, it radiates from deep within.

Don't listen to me though, like I said. I'm just a poor boy who's stuck on the farm for another harvest season. I'm a Black woman who's aged out of the job market— keep your jobs, I never wanted one, I was faking the whole time. Lying to your face for that paycheck because I had to in order to survive. It's not for myself so much as for the others I love and care for. The baby needs shoes, food, shelter. The animals need protection and care. I thought I could do it, I tried to be a provider, but that's not my role I guess. All we are turns out to be all we are. The only thing I've ever been good at is scribbling in letters and ideas onto pages and screens. Words and images flow through me. I am highly suggestible, permeable. I feel things deeply to the point of exultation or paralysis.

This body is breaking down now, more swiftly as the earth also fractures into its component parts. Any child can see that this world has already fractured. Earth already shattered, breaking into different dimensions. We're not on the same earth anymore, and people are still trying to keep going to jobs, keep busy with routines, find parking, pay bills and get the last word. Murderous politicians smiling at cameras after wiping the blood from their lips. You can't see the bugs all over this room? Crushed underfoot, pools of blood and rot all the way up the brilliant white marble stairs of the capital's monuments and memorials? Drenched in blood, rank with it. But some can't see or feel it, don't perceive it. That's because we're operating in different realities, on different timelines, in different dimensions. Each and every one.