Once upon a time,
You and all your kind,
lived underneath bridges.
Had ridges for ribs,
that dropped off into empty chests.
As if your hearts were all stolen treasures.
As if an excavation crew were hired to dig up and remove the part of you that let you feel.
And while the world above you invented the wheel,
You stayed put.
Knowing that would one day roll over top of you to get to where it's going.
You had an endlessly flowing supply line of food.
You began to brood over humanity,
And made meals of our hope
as if crushing our spirits would make your mirrors cast better reflections than the ones they gave.
As if the only way you could save yourselves was to make the world ugly.
So no one would notice you hided in it.
You learned to knit pain into a kind of camouflage.
Treated hope like a mirage that you could use to lure in your next meal.
You lived off our fears, you could taste what we feared and every night, as the moon at bedtime stories on sunlight,
You took darkness as an invite to head out into the woods.
You curled your hands into wrecking balls, your breath became squalls, you made rocks rumble, you made land shiver.
You made boys and girls pray that someone would deliver them from you.
We told them, you aren't real.
And then one day, the world changed.
But you all stayed the same.
Just migrated from living underneath bridges,
To living underneath information superhighways.
Concepts like love fell into your gravity.
We turned ourselves into life preservers,
hoping to save as many as we could.
But the fathers who guarded closet doors and the mothers who secured the floors under beds...
All shook their heads, not knowing how to deal with you you, who crept into our lives, with tongues like knifes.
Stabbing your words into our skin,
you began to begin uploading yourselves into our homes.
You had computer screens for eyes and software for bones.
You turned your hate into stones and hurled them at beauty, as if you couldn't bear to see anything other than ugly.
Anything different.
You had fingernails like flint and scraped them against decency, hoping we would be the ones to all catch fire.
You all had smiles like one-way barbed wire, not meant to keep us out, but to keep us in always like a firing pin.
You spoke in explosions.
It isn't cute.
it isn't funny.
You talked strangers into death and laughed.
And as each family learns to graft skin over the wounds you gave them, you helm yourself into the scar.
You have coaxed the sober back into bars, handed out cigars at memorials.
Offered nooses, cliffs, and pills to those who unfortunately found you before they found help.
You praised suffering.
Waltzed in between tragedies, gracefully dipping miseries,
as if we would be somehow impressed by the dexterity of your animosity.
You cheered on rape, dashed through police tape as if it were the finish line in a race on who could be awful first.
Even now, you somehow see this as an invitation to turn your keyboards into catapults.
Wondering which one of you can be the first to hate us.
Best your loathing, already dressed in riot gear, ready to incite rage as if each message board is a stage where you recite.
Hostility turning freedom of speech into freedom of cruelty.
We are stuck with you the same way you are stuck with you.
Your mind is glue and it keeps malice fastened there like cheap wallpaper.
We were, once upon a time, told that none of you exist.
We dismissed you as make believe or myth, now on only with resolve.
We can no longer afford to tell ourselves, that you aren't real.
We will not let you make your dinners out of the things we feel.
