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Samuel Apr 17
It's a free world,  
You choose when you're born,  
then fill a form, an early warn.  

It's a free world,
You apply to meet your end,  
Just sign the sheet and send.  

It's a free world—
so they all say,  
We chose to struggle every day.  

It's a free world,
We picked the pain, the loss, the mess—  
Of course, we chose our loneliness.  

It's a free world,
love.
Love, it's a free world.
I left my phone in the fridge again.
Texted my dead friend by mistake.
The dream said turn left at the red door
but every door was mauve and melting.
I wore the wrong shoes
to the right breakdown.

God, I’m tired of being
the lesson in someone else’s flashback.
Of saying 'I’m fine'
like it’s a good thing.

Sometimes I bite a fingernail off
and flick it to the ground,
just to prove I was here,
just to pretend my DNA
is not a walking lie.

Sometimes I talk
to the dogs with TikTok accounts
like they’re holding something back.

Sometimes I rehearse my disappearances
in liminal spaces:
parking garages,
abandoned malls,
group chats I left on read.
Now I RSVP to nothing
and they still say
“you’ll be missed.”

I keep meaning to heal,
but the plot keeps thickening—
And my name—
God, my name—
it echoes like a spoiler
in a house that isn’t mine anymore.
A trivia fact
no one got right.

My memories keep getting
auto-corrected to get over it.
I don’t.
I alphabetize the wreckage.
I romanticize the ruin.
The rot is getting readable.

Anyway,
I’m late again.
Time got weird in the hallway.
I swear the mirror
was trying to warn me—
but I was too busy
checking if my under-eye bags
made me look exquisitely exhausted,
or just ordinary and old.

I wanted to scream  
but the hallway  
was practicing silence.  

I wanted to run,  
but the rug said stay  
and the mirror said  
be still  
and beautiful and
unavailable.

The mirror said:
this is what longing looks like
when it runs out of places to go.

So I stood there—
a half-wreck, half-reflection—
trying to decide
if disappearing quietly
still counts as survival.

Somewhere,
my phone is defrosting.
Somewhere,
the red door is waiting.

Somewhere,
my dead friend
is laughing
his ghost-laugh,
mouthing: same.
A pattern emerges,
Beyond the seems.
It cries,
It screams.

Some are friends.
Some are foes.
Some revenges.
Some sew woes.

It screams to be recognized;
It screams to be.
It is the pattern,
On an apple tree.

Abyss as eyes,
Once it sees.
If one stares,
It will be.
Bonnie Apr 11
What is the meaning of meaning you ask
As if understanding could even unmask
The word described by the word is just cagey
And the search for it, well, that’s pretty new agey

Perhaps it’s the happiness, before we focus on dread
Our beauty that’s fleeting before we are dead
It hums in the silence, it leaps through the air,
It thrives in knowing — and not knowing — it’s there.

Yesterday whispered, “You’re nothing at all,”
Today stretches forward, a tentative call.
Tomorrow might gift me a torchlight, a spark,
Or leave me still wandering blind in the dark.

It’s both the climb and the ache in our knees.
It’s both the summers warmth and the winter’s freeze
It shouts in our triumph, but it hides when we lose,
An whisper of a mumble that will only confuse.

The search for the question, or the answer’s pursuit,
An enigma of itself that will never compute
A cosmic conundrum, a riddle, a game—
the meaning of meaning is one and the same.
The existential topic of meaning whimsically teased at.
K E Cummins Apr 10
Time is a story we tell
To order the absurd.
I see nonsensical injury:
The handprint on her cheekbone,
Bruises yellowing like dandelions.

Why? There is no reason.
All love mingles with grief.
Maelstorm cycles repeat into madness.
What can we do about it?
I do not know.

I look to the river.
Willows grow soft in spring,
And the ice melts again
Under ineffable blue sky.
Such it is;
Such it will be.

One day the river will flood.
One day dandelions will break the sidewalk,
But not today.
Today, we hope.
Today, we mend the bruise.
I smiled so wide my molars got jealous.
Everyone said I looked stunning.
I said thank you in the voice I reserve for customer service and playing dumb.
That’s the closest I’ve come to a scream
this week.

I wore the dress that says: I’m over it.
(It lies.)
I walked like a question mark
straightened out with rage.

There was a man in the corner
making balloon animals.
He asked what I wanted.
I said surprise me.
He handed me a noose
shaped like a swan.

No one noticed.
Or maybe that’s just what I tell myself
to feel interesting.

Later, someone told a joke
I didn’t get.
I laughed like I was being watched.

The punchline wasn’t funny.
It just echoed
like something I would’ve said
before I got careful.

I stood in the kitchen
with a paper plate of olives and nothing,
holding it like proof
I was doing fine.

Someone spilled wine on the couch.
I said I’ve ruined better things.
Everyone laughed
like I meant it to be charming.
(I didn’t.)

A girl in white heels asked me
how I knew the host.
I said same way I know most people—
by accident,
and with the kind of premonition that wears perfume.

The bathroom mirror was cracked.
I counted the breaks like confessions
and chose not to atone.
The soap smelled like fruit
that only exists in dreams
you wake up crying from.

I reapplied my lip stain
like armor,
like alibi,
like an exit strategy.

Then I left without saying goodbye
because I couldn’t figure out
how to do it quietly
and still be missed.
A poem about the quiet performance of "doing fine." It's about olives, nothing, and everything under the surface. How we decorate our sadness to make it digestible. How we want to disappear, but be remembered as something haunting. This one came out sharp and honest. I hope it finds the ones who feel it.
Life is like a ticking clock,
No one knows how much's in stock,
No one knows what lies ahead,
No one knows when they'll be dead,

Life is a process not given clarity,
But no soul lives for all of eternity,
No soul is aware of when they depart,
No soul in here knows they're falling apart,

Life is so simple and yet it is hard,
It is hard to live it out with pure heart,
With or without these days I still live,
As for my heart there's not much to give,

Life is so cruel and that's just the rule,
Sometimes absurd I think I'm a fool,
Sometimes I wish things would have worked out,
Sometimes I cry and sometimes I shout,

Life is a path both uphill and down,
It is a pathway on which one might drown,
One better be careful and get a grip,
If on this dark pathway they wish not to slip,

Life is so short you better take note,
Take note of all the things you wrote,
The things you wrote may go down in history,
Though as far as I know they remain a mystery.
….
….
The door drew fate.
A face amidst the darkness?
My anxiety inflates.


A passing day draws in darkness,
each day an eye sees me.
My senses urge, trying to decree;
For It finally began,
It now watches, it can now see.



I have fled my place,
But will it ever follow?
I closed the lights,
lifted them in darkness,
My feelings ever hollow.


I may be crazy,
But this is forever true.

It was never like this,
It was my fault.
I had defeated my own nightmare no less,
But my actions caused it to bless.
A cage in a basement I made,
It turned that to its charade.

Now I shall find something to confront,
It shall never leave my front.
An existence that shouldn’t exist.
I shall annihilate that, fist with fist.

An old shadow, with yellow flaming eyes.
I looked in past at time, I try,
Four preceding angelic numbers of time,
Guided times hand to defeat;
It was something, my greatest feat.
The nightmare that I caged.

𝘐 𝘸𝘢𝘴 𝘵𝘰𝘭𝘥
𝘵𝘰 𝘯𝘦𝘷𝘦𝘳 𝘳𝘦𝘵𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘵.

For I shall now figure this cursed time,
Else I will meet an inevitable demise.
My very own.
Bonnie Apr 1
I welcome your avatar, to eternity's nest,  
A programmable haven, where none shall find rest.  
No hunger, no thirst, no tedious milieu,  
Just infinite hours after mortal adieu.
It’s all up to you . . . , what games shall we play?  
What tasks will endure the endless array?  
For Aeons stretch long, and novelty fades,  
What joy could remain in such stagnant parades?
If time is unbound and death is no more,  
Could pleasures grow richer, or simply a bore?  
Perhaps you'll go mad on your own, all alone,  
Or beg for the silence of the endless unknown.
But before you do; You may exit with grace,  
Deleting the program, depart from this place.  
Before you decide, consider and find,  
An end to eternity might be better aligned.
Some futurists have contemplated uploading consciousness to some kind of melded web of eternal existence. But eternity presents its own dilemmas; perhaps simulated consciousness would need entirely new frameworks of motivation, learning, and experience. After all, concepts like boredom, desire, or identity may change drastically for a non-biological existence. A “virtual eternity” might not be something to desire at all
Bonnie Apr 1
What devilry is this, Consciousness keen,  
That tempts us to see what ought be unseen?  
A plague upon survival's ilk,
This thinking beast now wrapped in silk.
No longer content to forage and breed,  
now dabbles in lofty thoughts of need.  
Hope . . . , you deceitful *****, how you mock  
Promising grace while hurrying the clock.
To question, to yearn, to toss and to flail,  
The folly to search and drink from the grail.  
Yet, mad hope persists, to soothe our lot,  
and reason abandons the mind it begot.
I often like to take existential subjects and write essays of thoughts that go nowhere but seem to scratch an itch. This is a satirical summary on the idea of Schopenhauer that hope itself is folly.
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