Existential Haiku
(after Beyonce)
Older and breaking.
another day closer to death.
I woke up like this.
The extraterrestrial addresses the skeptics on earth
You don’t think I’m real?!?! FINE WELL I DON’T THINK YOU’RE REAL. With your ugly thumbs and your stupid lakes and your two legs. Hey, why don’t you go start a war today, TWO LEGS? Maybe throw some more gas at the sun, TWO LEGS?
Hey TWO LEGS, where’s your sun car? Oh yeah, you don’t even have a sun car. You just have a million little poison suicide death cars you take every three spurinks just cuz you can’t just turn yourself into a beam of light so alive you could only reduce it to a metaphor. But I don’t get reduced to a metaphor. YOU get reduced to a metaphor
for being an IDIOT. Hey, TWO LEGS why don’t you go play TENNIS? You know what we play instead of tennis? SPACE TENNIS. Where instead of racquets we just bend space-time and ride the strings of existence like space ponies and live in every multiverse SO EVERYONE WINS EVERY TIME IN SPACE TENNIS.
Hey TWO LEGS, how are your four wittle dimensions? Hey two legs, how’s God? Hey TWO LEGS, where do we go when they die? Yeah, I probably woulda known the answer to that like a gazillion quirps ago when death was still a thing for us but death is so like quirp 10q5*989er, bro. Or, in your words, death is like so pre-Fleetwood Mac’s rumors.
Must be pretty awesome living in a universe where life is only precious because everybody dies. #psych. I guess what I mean is, what’s the point of all those wars and deaths and cars and poison if you’re nothing but a stupid body?
Just friends
and I’m the one who left anyway so my stomach really has no right to summersault when you muse about your Tinder dates but sometimes when we talk I can only see you naked
like I’m trying to calm my nerves at a speaking engagement
and suddenly you have really good taste in bad music
and all the things that bothered me then don’t bother me then
and i think that’s maybe what irony is or at least what it has come to be
in a post-Alanis Morisette Universe.
Afterall, it’s hard to steal the blankets when we never share
a bed so I’m really well rested these days but sometimes
all of that clarity just makes me want you to ruin my sleep schedule.
See I never want to get married because studies show marriage is the root cause of most divorce so I don’t really want you to get married either because it really shouldn’t be to anyone who isn’t me which is of course a terrible idea
because I have phobias there aren’t even words for when chaetophobia
is the fear of loose hair. When I’m supposed to love someone I just become a square wheel. I guess what I mean is I think you would understand what I’m trying to say which is I guess why we make such good friends.
Remember when I laid you down by the ocean and we made love until the sky turned bluer?
Me neither!
If this was a slam poem you’d have to die now or something so I’m glad that it isn’t.
Mostly.
Remember right now? You and me at this diner? All this affection?
The kind you can only feel toward someone you don’t need to be with now but are thankful you once did?
Such strange instincts. Such a rare and wild moth. To hover over the same flame without touching wings as more than a passing goodbye.
Rota is a poet and public interest lawyer specializing in housing justice work who recently moved back to Chicago! His chapbook ‘Giveth and Taketh’ was recently published by Wild Pressed Books. Rota’s work has been featured by Button Poetry, BBC Radio, Entropy, Voicemail Poems, FreezeRay Poetry, iO Literary Journal, and elsewhere. He is a proud member of the MMPR collective and the Assistant Executive Editor of Knights’ Library Magazine which you should submit to. You can’t miss him. He’s the tallest Jew for miles.