A Collection of Paranoid Digressions

vignettes of vestigiality

my grandmother asked me to
ask googleTM how long she is
going to live. i was sure that
no search engine could figure
death out but i looked it up
anyway. she shivered when
the screen filled up with so
many dead grandma memes.
i told her it was meant to be
funny but she did not laugh.
so i opened an app and put ten 
minutes on the timer to tell her
that googleTM did the math. she
smiled and patted me on the head.

a family of pigeons shits
on the window sill outside
my neighbour's toilet. he
stopped shooing them away
when the mother gave birth
to two mini-pigeons. the dad
flew out for a cigarette butt
and never returned. one of the
children died of starvation but
nobody could figure out how
to remove the corpse. the mom
guards it and takes a little nibble
of the rotting, shit-covered flesh
from time to time and feeds it to
the deceased's hungry sibling.

there are little holes in the floor
of my room where grieving bugs
bury their dead. what's little to me 
must be an abyss to them but they
haven't read nietzsche. i have tried
reciting some of his prose to their
perforated exoskeletons but they
keep requesting kafka ad absurdum.
maybe it's just a phase and they
will grow out of it in a day or two
when the vacuum cleaner tears the
surrealism-fetish off their tiny skulls.
i often find some hairy micro-limbs
floating in the soup that my mom
prepares for dinner but she insists
that it is nutritious. i dig(ress/est).

Lithium Dreams

i have traversed the landscape
of induced insanity.
when i close my eyes, i can hear
the whispers of suicidal children
who hang themselves from telephone wires.
i wonder if their last words ever
reach someone on the other end.
i wonder if anyone cares to listen
or if they turn on the television.
i see paper men glued to
the walls of concrete labyrinths.
they advertise self-help
books in unenthusiastic fonts.
when they burn at the edges,
they comfort themselves by
folding into half and pretending
that's all they ever were.
the back alleys are where you can find
fragmented remnants of this city's soul.
you can see transvestite queens
marking their territories with cocaine lines.
nosebleeds and vague recollections
of lithium dreams
are the only souvenirs of the night.
they mask their hedonistic secrets
with cigarette smoke.
i look away when they notice me.
maybe I'm terrified of
the contagious desire to live.
do you worship the neon signs
that convince you to buy happiness?
i stare at the fluorescent pink with tired eyes
that do not let the programming filter in.
can you hear the footsteps
of the photogenic youth
marching towards a negotiated future?
i wake up from my medicated sleep
to the monotony of their manufactured ideas.
can you smell the diluted paranoia
wafting in through the crack in the floor?
the world survives yet another day
with trembling fingers and dilated pupils.
i dissolve into
recreational schizophrenia
and