Once you know
You can’t actually make it right
You sit in that
At first you think
Yep
This’ll kill me
But
It doesn’t
How bizarre
Wholly unexpected
Stewing in it
This ridiculous wrongness
Waiting
Then
Suddenly you’re watching yourself
From outside
And….wow
You’re ok
Clearheaded
You can see
Really see
This action I choose
It’s the best available
I can’t make it right
Not this time
And
That’s alright
I don’t hate me for that
This is a taste of freedom
I thought
Thought
Had hope
Only briefly
But still so beautiful
Short the love
Short the longing
Long but then the pain
Drilling
Painful then the questions
All fallible
All gray in me
All gone now
Heavy the heart
Burdened now
With pain that never fades
Mistakes now
The questions now
Thinking so frantically
To help
Find help
But where only
Everything now wrong again
This is a pain in the butt to read (before: hard-wrapped, after: unbroken). Yes, this applies to #Markdown files especially. Burn me at the stake if you want, but Markdown embedded in source files is not an exception.
I am peer reviewing a lot of #poetry and #prose for a #literary magazine, and I have to say, by FAR the most common issue with these pieces is self-indulgence and a failure of #editing
Lots of writers have fresh perspectives, brilliant passages, fantastic evocative images... but they just can't resist wrapping them in weaker language, exposition, clumsy sense-making, etc.
If they trusted their readers more, and cut their writing down to the bone, these would be gold.
Walking past thousands of openings in the ether, long reddish cracks in a seemingly invisible wall, as they would appear to the trained eye, we were truly happy. Lyanna held my hand—something she usually didn't do for some unknown, inexplicable reason. I, on the other hand, was a romantic fool; hence, I loved holding her hand, showing her, and the whole fucking world, that I belonged to her. That I was her grangent, and nobody else's…
We always found ourselves in Magdalena, a quaint, abandoned town nestled far in the western reaches, Lya and I, as we ventured into the Spree. I didn’t know why. And I had never really thought about it. Until now. Something had changed. An unfamiliarity settled in, akin to a glitch in the synaptic code—subtle yet present, behind the scenes—rendering the details of our surroundings more vivid; the once-dimmed sun now brighter, the pale blue sky intensifying, and the weight of the prairie dust seeming to lift…
Breakfast. I always got my breakfast at Pushkin's. It didn't matter how early, how late, how tired, or how stoned I was—the coffee shop next to our apartment building had become my steady waterhole. The gent that owned it, Greg Pushkin—a middle-aged Russian immigrant from the Cuban colonies in the Atlantic—was a good friend, or rather, he'd become one, because I would always pay him straight up, with either creds or dope…
Lyanna was sound asleep. I looked at her. My eyes touched her silky smooth skin, lingered there for a while, then regressed, slowly, back into a semi-dark, blueish abysmal world of nightly dread and anguish—the buzzing strobe-light from the handheld projected screen faintly mirrored my pale, unshaven face on the wall…
It never stopped raining. It never ever stopped raining. Hence, the crimson red always washed away. Good, or bad? I didn't know. I didn't wanna know.
"Inexplicably dead, this man is, isn't he?" I thought, and turned to Lya to get her beautiful but sad-looking face remapped in the kibershop window in front of us…
Step into the dystopian future of Spree, a genre-blending novella that throws all the storytelling rules out the window. Think sci-fi, cyberpunk, and then some—it's a wild journey that keeps morphing with every tweak and cut. This isn't your typical tale; it's a live experiment, guiding you through an unpredictable mental maze where the lines between reality and fiction, sanity and madness, are constantly getting smudged. Just like the portrayed instability, this adventure will leave you contemplating the dynamic nature of stories and the worlds they conjure, especially when they vanish.