Take Your Pick

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Safety lies
in truth.
What do 
I believe?
This becomes
my decision –
a mental decree.
Where do I look for
the peace in me?
It becomes
A notion of
where and when
we want to perceive.
Sheep ready
to believe.
Looking for
credibility, 
while there’s
something up 
their sleeves.
Could it be
I’m outsourcing
something that
is in fact in me?
A realization
that can be.
Misguided by 
some notion,
Threatened with 
fear’s potion.
A social-psychological
erosion.
As the creep
continues his commotion.
And our religions
become more broken.
What becomes spoken
that the truth 
is interwoven.
It’s the change
That happens.
A quotient with
continual motion.
While its source
is never broken.
Part of the vast ocean
of emotion.
Open to the realization
Of love’s atonement.
In not before,
or what comes next;
it’s the presence of
this great dialect.
A conversation
with no words,
a feeling without
any verbs.
A state to be,
a state to see.
A state of knowing
I am right here
with me.
A citadel
with no walls.
It’s the present
that calls.

Citadel With No Walls

AM went into my mind. He walked smoothly here and there, and looked with interest at all the pock
marks he had created in one hundred and nine years. He looked at the cross-routed and reconnected
synapses and all the tissue damage his gift of immortality had incl uded. He smiled softly at the pit that
dropped into the center of my brain and the faint, moth-soft murmurings of the things far down there
that gibbered without meaning, without pause. AM said, very politely, in a pillar of stainless steel
bearing bright neon lettering:
HATE. LET ME TELL
YOU HOW MUCH I'VE
COME TO HA TE YOU
SINCE I BEGAN TO
LIVE. THERE ARE 387.44
MILLION MILES OF
PRINTED CIRCUITS IN
WAFER THIN LA YERS
THA T FILL MY
COMPLEX. IF THE
WORD HATE WAS
ENGRA VED ON EACH
NANOANGSTROM OF
THOSE HUNDREDS OF
MILLIONS OF MILES IT
WOULD NOT EQUAL
ONE ONE-BILLIONTH
OF THE HATE I FEEL
FOR HUMANS AT THIS
MICRO-INSTANT FOR
YOU. HATE. HATE.
AM said it with the sliding cold horror of a razor blade slicing my eyeball. AM said it with the
bubbling thickness of my lungs filling with phlegm, drowning me from within. AM said it with the
shriek of babies being ground beneath blue-hot rollers. AM said it with the taste of maggoty pork. AM
touched me in every way I had ever been touched, and devised new ways, at his leisure, there inside
my mind.
All to bring me to full realization of why it had done thi s to the five of us; why it had saved us for
himself.
We had given AM sentience. Inadvertently, of course, but sentience nonetheless. But it had been
trapped. AM wasn't God, he was a machine. We had created him to think, but there was nothing it
could do with that creativity. In rage, in frenzy, the machine had killed the human race, almost all of
us, and still it was trapped. AM could not wander , AM could not wonder, AM could not belong. He
could merely be. And so, with the innate loathing that all machines had always held for the weak, soft
creatures who had built them, he had sought revenge. And in his paranoia, he had decided to reprieve
five of us, for a personal, everlasting punishment that would never serve to diminish his hatred that
would merely keep him reminded, amused, proficient at hating man. Immortal, trapped, subject to any
torment he could devise for us from the limitless miracles at his command.
He would never let us go. We were his belly slaves. We were all he had to do with his forever time.
We would be forever with him, with the cavern-filling bulk of the creature machine, with the all-mind
soulless world he had become. He was Earth, and we were the fruit of that Earth ; and though he had
eaten us, he would never digest us. We could not die. We had tried it. We had attempted suicide, oh
one or two of us had. But AM had stopped us. I suppose we had wanted to be stopped.
Don't ask why . I never did. More than a million times a day. Perhaps once we might be able to sneak a
death past him. Immortal, yes, but not indestructible. I saw that when AM withdrew from my mind,
and allowed me the exquisite ugliness of returning to consciousness with the feeling of that burning
neon pillar still rammed deep into the soft gray brain matter.
He withdrew, murmuring to hell with you.
And added, brightly, but then you're there, aren't you.

Cogito! Ergo! Sum! (I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream)

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Cogito! Ergo! Sum! (I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream)

Revolt Monkey Collective

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