❝ none of the above ❞

[litany]

No moonlight on this future. The moon is gone.
We ate it because we loved it, loved it to death
and buried it in old photographs. Not a fairytale
before you get ahead of me. This metal heap
sings its own truths, throbs its own lies, but not
one ends up magic. In the future, extinctions
run feral: no destiny and your dreams are just
a sickness. You: a child. It: a war machine's
egg, cracked early and testing its life against
yours. Green, green grass. Plastic blue skies
curving overhead as a bridge. Acrid taste then
the smell, almost a real hand pushing through
your mouth to introduce itself. War machine's
baby lands, kills thousands underfoot, but this
is just what war machine baby was built for.
You're young enough to want to tell it, outside
of fear, outside yourself: it's not your fault.
There there. It's not your fault. Screams in
peripheral distance hiss otherwise but here
is your kin; you understand contracts. You
know about life before life. We lost the moon
the same way. Dreams. Bad dreams. Monsters
in the closet, under the bed, in the heads of
people with power. War machine baby lands
all the way, a small homage to retro animation
and a bigger shrine of fighting always functional
enough to keep. It aches. Doesn't know how
to do anything else. It fires. Someone told it to.
In the dust storm its core glows red. Blood moon
apple eyed and alone, speaks a language
no one else can hear.