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Instant Message
Hello. I read your post and am deeply sorry that measures did not work out. Still, please continue living life on your own terms. Watch the dust dancing in the sun as you take your morning medication. Enjoy having your daughters home from college, sitting beside your bed while you dutifully nibble the breakfast your wife prepared. Relish the videochats with loved ones until you tire and need your oxygen. I’ll be back at the end of summer, maybe there’s a chance for us to meet up? We can revisit memories from your class, our discussions over drinks, and the jokes we shared. For as long possible, let’s inhabit the past, ignoring the future outside of the room that’s patiently waiting for us both. —C
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Bumbling in the Void
Boötes Void is the largest void in the visible universe, 62 megaparsecs1 to be exact. With only 60 galaxies, your dating options are limited—a quadrillion times worse than the Faroe Islands! Set your dating app filters broadly. Select lifeform, AI, or cyborg. Set the age from 35 to 35 million years. Be open to anything: dating, friendship, a slow orbit. Don’t be picky if someone has been divorced. Try different parsecs to increase your dating options. You might never meet the one2, but you might meet someone. Have a nice conversation, make small talk, and don’t be upset if your chats abruptly end. Messages take so long to transmit across the void people lose interest and return to cryosleep or evolve into unsociable hermaphrodites.
1 That’s 330 million light-years across, Dave.
2 Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do….
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When I arrive, you & me + coffee? Discuss us? Delivered at 1:19am
Odi et amo ergo sum (“I hate and I love, therefore I am”)
—Catullus, Poem 85
After things ended, I was awash in rash decisions—like getting Odi et amo ergo sum tattooed in gothic script on my right forearm and using all my airline miles to fly to Japan just to dance with the rockabillies in Harajuku District. This didn’t kick my despondency (No dice, daddy-o!), so I decided to walk El Camino de Santiago; hence, I bought a stick with a scallop shell trinket and began the pilgrimage. While plodding, I kept you beyond the mental perimeter of my sacrosanct thoughts, but on the fifth day, I dreamt tenderly about you and me, so I curtailed my trek and chartered a bunk on a rusty cargo ship that constantly creaked, creaked while crossing the Atlantic. With barely one bar….
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To-Do List
☑ Grade papers ☑ Change oil ☑ Clean apartment ☑ Buy sweet plums for the icebox ☑ Ponder the self ☑ Learn Mom’s recipes ☑ Try a new hobby for one hour ☑ Photograph the alphabet using found objects ☑ Create a list of new words to use randomly in work emails ☑ Interrogate the nature of morality ☑ Procrastinate, put off work ☑ Meet a friend, make them a meal—charge them for meal ☑ Publish obscene odes on the windows of the skull ☑ Read a poem, rip it off (no remorse!) ☑ Rest by the Tumtum tree, heed the Jubjub bird ☑ All your base are belong to us ☑ Buffalo buffalo Buffalo…. ☑ Disrupt the purpose of writing ☑ Grade papers
For more information about prose poems, click on the following LINK.
opusculum 