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.