Regular ice is bad enough
so try not to step in the living stuff.

It'll latch its little shards
into the soles of your shoes
and chew through them
until it reaches your bare skin.

Then it will seep through your pores
opening
welcoming the numbness in.
You won't even know its within you
until you're almost fully numb.

After all,
your foot falling asleep is totally normal, right?

Next thing you know
your whole leg is encased in clear blue
and you can't feel a thing.

I swirl into being

a lick of paint
spread thickly across the page
shaped by an unknown hand

do I just sit here
amidst the other colors
while I wait to be altered
​and made into a bigger picture?

The piano keys are discordant
no matter how much you tune them
The guitar has lost its strings
its hollow filled with dust
The gong lays shattered
upon the ground
Yet you stand
untouched
whole.

The silence crushes in on you
a thickness to the air
an unbroken stillness where words should flow.

Instead you sit there
avoiding what should be said.
Whether it's because of fear
or an attempt to protect
or even a malicious choice
you sit.

Staring ahead
with all of your thoughts bubbling inside you
pressing against the back of your tongue and teeth
ready to fight their way out.

​You know it can't last forever.


One of you will give in
to the unwavering need to speak
and once the floodgates open
you never know what will come rushing out.

Tables of food stretch
across the room, buffet style.
Heaven on a plate.

Once you feel it once,
you can't get it out of your head.
It's the only thing you want to feel.

The sharp crack of ice
as you walk across Entrenti's frozen lakes,
watching the two moons rise.
Or the warm, musty breeze flowing freely
from the caverns beneath the country
that cradles your skin in a soft cocoon of warmth
against the icy wasteland of the world above.

Once you go exploring on a planet not your own
you'll never want to go back
to the plain old dirt and dusting of snow upon the peaks
of a world so familiar it's almost a marvel of bordering.

It's funny
how something as innocuous as a whisper
is barely something to bat an eye at
in most circumstances.

But as soon as the lights go out
the sun has hidden itself from view
a noticeable chill settles upon your skin
and you appear to be alone,
a whisper
can strike a person dead
or at least terrified.
Especially when accompanied
by the hint of a breath
from right behind your ear.

Time ticks by with each heartbeat
choppy
breathless

No matter how hard you try
you can't breathe in the moments
and hold them longer
stretch them out until your lungs burn
until your forced to release them or faint

Time sprints forward
in the moments you like to cherish
and crawls
when you'd wish it would fly
stubbornly resisting
your endless attempts to manage it

How is it that someone who's grown up in an age of screens
who first played on a computer while they were still in diapers
who uses it daily to enrich and distract themselves from their life
can have such terrible luck and lack of tact
when dealing with technology
in all its form and facets?

I ask myself this every day.
Because- well that person's me.
Hi.

I'm not entirely sure when
but sometime in my early childhood
I must have thrown a truly terrible insult at a computer
or maybe a phone,
because now whenever the opportunity presents itself
all forms of technology will rebel against me.

Whether it's little things
like refusing to work until my boss picks it up
or needed to be refreshed five times before it works,
or vastly more important and/or dangerous things
like power outages
and mass streaks of incompatibility,
tech will find ways to make my life more difficult.

Now, in a world where I am meant to be proficient
to assist my elders in troubleshooting
to do victory laps around the internet with no trouble at all,
I am actually struggling to get a microphone to pick up my voice
and making sure I actually save bookmarks properly.

In an age of tech,
my world is a hub of technological resistentialism.
And oh, does it suck sometimes.

I'm not even going to try
to keep my eyes open.

They're drifting steadily
away from the screen
in front of me
and won't focus
any longer
on what I'm supposed to do.

They're craving dreams
and the rest that they'll receive
while I'm running around
and being chased by fragments
​of my own mirrored mind.