Dedicated to the pursuit of becoming oneself—

                    F.

A rumour who lives in other
people’s mouths, entering them by
ears, on tongues resplendent as truth
nears, Mercury in Scorpio

seeks no reconciliation,
won’t be reconnecting, waxing
empathetic, compassionate,
nostalgic, acting tragic, or

giving a shit about the down-
ward, drowned-world trajectory of
your mediocre life’s flightless
path once it ends, never once were

friends to begin with, best not let
that myth persist lest your knot of
lies go and slip into a noose
you can’t get out of quick, don’t lose

contact, I lose interest, don’t
fall out of touch, I throw off this
fake smile’s miles of twisted chains and
get on with it’s erection of

                    U.

fences impervious to last-
ditch attempts at being mended,
crossed wires burned bridges, linked in grids
victims locked in images of

a past which didn’t exist, sick
little intrusive glimpses as
terminal as this illness, this
addiction of theirs to left cliques,

curating sad galleries of
unreliable pictures of
coddled days when funerals were
community events, moving

on from each other a foretold
death’s inevitable parting
a real party to revel in,
a communal ritual, one

mistake always made in such strained,
saccharine reminiscences
is this anodyne belief so
persistent among them all (those

                    C.

idiots) that just because you
once saw someone, perhaps even
met them, spoke for a moment, too
oblivious to your being

humoured by an off-hand, banal
pleasantry, that you were somehow
now and forever on, since that
wasted split-second came and went,

connected(!), and gods forbid, from
then on knew them (past tense), no, not
so, go on perpetuating
that and see how far its bullshit

gets you, nowhere near me, let me
assert for those perpetual
losers whose memory degrades
reality’s quality in

perpetuity, those misty-
eyed mystified misfit fuck-up
televisionaries stuck on
channelling only static

                    K.

fuzz, evidence of a hazy
connection that never was and
never will be, unmoved as I
am, consummately, by your boot-

legged DVD (Deranged Version’s
Details) of my own personal
history’s private movie’s (my
life mine, not anyone else’s

property, you see, those acts, these
facts, reasons by necessity
and rationality, not by
proxy, known only to me, he

who actually witnesses,
perceives, indeed, lives, am he who
experiences its deepest
mysteries) deleted scenes, now

get off my screen (ostensibly,
you’ve lives of your own to live, how
about focusing on those stints
instead, it’s time to grow up, kids)!