after
the quietness of 'after' the liquid stillness and maybeness of what's to come next after the four hundred settles there will be a headache a dream-strangled sleep what else? what other pains? any joy? any lifting off the plain of existence fuelled by daily despair? they'd ask me why. I couldn't blame them but they'd not like the answers because heading downwards, cocooned in an air chrysalis waiting for a sunset or a sunrise, you don't get that picky, really— is better than standing naked in their icestorm reality pretending, pretending, failing to pretend that you are a superheroine who swallows lightning who wears springtime's vernal defiance in her eyes who stares knowingly and loving into a future unseen. the silence of 'after': the silence of “oh, she did it again”. I hope this silence will envelope those who create it, and buffer them from the Finality, creeping over a bleeding horizon crawling on skinned knees, pulling itself up with mangled fingers, caught in the machinery of life. when you step into the 'after', whether alive or dead you know of its savagery, first hand you would not wish it on the worst of humanity.