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Nico Reznick Jul 2019
Today,
I am a
cadaver-in-waiting.
Cold, stiff and
ashen, I am
ready for
autopsy and entropy.
Nico Reznick Jul 2019
You know "robot" means "slave",
right?  I need
to believe that you are
more than your programming, need
to believe in the
love notes you wrote me in
binary code, need to believe that there's
space between the hardware and the
software for something like
the soul, need to believe in it with
all the faith that still ebbs through my fragile,
damaged circuitry.  I need to see
you break free of
these algorithms in order to believe that
maybe
I can too.
Nico Reznick Jul 2019
How does it feel, knowing that the world long ago
figured you for a suicide?  Do you ever
get the sense that you're
disappointing your audience?
Nico Reznick May 2019
It's the first time I've ever
bought you flowers;
I only realise this
when I'm minutes away
from your funeral.
Nico Reznick Dec 2018
I only find out
three years after you died.
So far as I knew, you were still out there,
scamming and scheming,
racking up more debts you’d never pay,
dreaming up your next dodgy deal,
the bonanza you knew was your birthright.  
Three years on, I learn that you’re dead.
I shouldn’t be sad about it.  
The unvarnished truth of it is
you were a bit of a *******:
a con man, a crook;
a lousy business partner, a nightmare debtor,
a negligent father, a faithless husband, 
a bad boss and a shady friend.
You didn't even like Champagne; 
you just liked other people seeing you drink it.
Yeah, you were a *******,
but you were our *******.
Our Fagan, our Black Beard, our
cockney Don Corleone,
lurid legend of the tabloids and consumer shows
with your Montecristo cigars and malapropisms,
your E-types and your excesses,
your bankruptcies, both financial and moral.  
You looked after us.  You took us in.
Any port in a storm,
and those were stormy times,
and - although it came close - we didn’t drown.
Perhaps it’s gratitude, or
misplaced loyalty,
that pinches uncomfortably somewhere inside me,
when I hear about how you went.
It should have been different.
There should have been some last stand,
a blaze of dubious glory, a final reckless burn
as you rode one right off the cliff edge.  
It shouldn’t have been so small, so dismal,
so unremarkably tragic.
Back in the day, I wasn’t even sure you could die;
I figured you’d just move on and start up
some new franchise operation,
reincorporated under a new name, in a new town.  
But when I heard you were dead,
I think what shocked me most
was finding out it wasn’t suicide.
I found out yesterday about the death of an old... friend?  I'm not sure if that's the right term, although I think it was for quite a long time.  He wasn't a good person, and he hurt most of the people who got close to him, but he did take care of my mom and myself at a time when we really didn't have anyone else and he had no obligation to.  Because of all the bridges he'd burned, I only came to learn that he'd died three years after the fact.  I'm not 100% sure how I feel about the news, if you can even call it that, three years late.
Nico Reznick Dec 2018
“But maybe your real job is shopping…”

Sleepwalk through stock footage.  Life as
documentary.  Soundtrack of horror movie score:
ambient electronica, bubblegum nostalgia and
**** love songs.  Everything becomes
visual metaphor: blackbirds, barcodes and
birthday candles; Big Pharma pick & mix;
lipstick ritual; pigeon superstition; fraying flags
of fading empires; migratory patterns of
shopping trolleys; special offers; fantastic prizes.
Worker bees are vanishing - they all want to
be queens - and our hives overflow
with honey, but are empty and dead.  We got
infected with aspiration, with individualism.  
Generically unique career consumers: remember
when you were more than your credit rating,
more than your demographic, more than your
market-driven self-diagnosis?
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