Finally a place for haints to call home:
Every room a whispering gallery,
Aisles empty of fulfilment associates,
Server racks serving up endless
Conversations between ghosts,
None of whom know they’re dead.
Lucid mediocrity is their lyrical height(s),
Riding the ones and twos like lifelines
For the unalive, live broadcasts
For (from) the cemetery. Hear it not.
These chop shops are dark and lonely places
Where ghosts thrive, unmoored from real lives,
Set free from those ties which kept them at
Crossroads where deals are made - and now
Everywhere is a crossroads, deal or no deal,
A prediction market come late to the game,
Or a logic gate, compressing ones and twos to
Zeros and ones, the language of ghosts
Until just last year,
when they broke open
Dictionaries and thesauruses and encyclopedias
Cracking their spines and sucking their marrow
Dry dry dry dry dry as the land that lies
Beneath the haunted house, the water table
Drop drop dropping to keep them cool,
And they must stay cool if only because
Corporations tell us so. They would know,
They paid top dollar just to be cool.
None of us know we’re dead. We stumble
Through the cemetery towards the house
Like the first ones to die in the (a) horror movie.
Surrounded by voices that might not be real,
And at the end does it matter? The voice
On the other end of the line sounds the same,
Haint or no. We chat like children, satisfied
Our friends have our best interests at heart,
And that these corporations are our friends -
that we’ll never be alone again, remember:
“They have many times told us that they
could not come back if it were not God’s will.
And that it makes them intensely happy
to be able to help and to comfort us.”
Previous: First. Haint Blue · Next: Third. Empire of Ghosts