Morpheus,
Mate, I am a big fan
I adore the moving multiverse
Surrealism, the fanfic, the cameos,
The wondrous vistas of blended worlds
Poured into both profundity and meaninglessness,
The twilight planes of being unmade
Always in flux
All of it,
Great stuff.
I don’t even mind your Cassandra moods
Generally.
But there’s something, right,
The nostalgic stuff
That sometimes leads
To all-time favourites
And sometimes to an entire day
Ruined in aftershock.
I don’t mind you playing about
With memories,
Recycling old unused decors and faces.
But I gotta say, be careful of the scenes
You cast with major players from the past.
We mortals don’t dislike to be
Reminded of pleasures great and small
Long buried beneath humdrum drabness,
We sometimes even like to see an old nemesis return—
PE, French, and Maths are mine—to be told
What we’ve conquered and never have to face again.
But please, don’t reconstruct
Our darkest days, either truthfully
Or enlarged with absurdist tragedy.
And also don’t gaslight us
With these gleaming simulacra
Of those people that left who
We rather didn’t
Or those times that ended which
We rather hadn’t,
Reimagined as white washed holograms
Of perfection hallucinating
A history that never was.
Shaper, please don’t use memories
The hurt of which
Only time could mend
As moulds for new and fresh regret.
No offense,
Just a thought;
Just, you know,
Constructive criticism.
Tuur Verheyde is a twenty-two year old Belgian poet and student, currently completing a Master’s Degree in English, Literature and linguistics at the University of Ghent. Although Dutch is his first language, Tuur writes poetry exclusively in English.