Famine

Novelette Munroe

Winners wear medals on top of pyramids 

and look down at the losers,

though some say winners only look ahead of themselves,

always trying to find a way to achieve more,

never content to win once, starving to find crumbs of 

the essence of success only to consume it whole and move

on. I escaped from citizenship in order 

to speak out, grappling at the hope for freedom and free will.

It is as if I was given a blank puzzle with 

no picture to guide me to the right tabs and knobs but the hunger

and senses to move a hand to connect the slab. In the shadows

and dark corpses of the present I am desperate to permanently 

mark the pavement of my life so that I can make a future 

memory. For without the light of your past you cannot see 

where your feet go on the steps outlined by tomorrow. 

My heart relishes the colour of pheromones stripped 

of identification. The only white light that poverty knows 

are the irises in famine’s eyes. The only way to be remembered 

is to murder Ockham’s Razor or become a celebrity by 

lodging bullets in drive by shootings.

You cannot save them all: 

the world 

the moon 

the stars. 

Superman is a myth they built to grow on us all like commercials 

grows on us during the Superbowl, the police are meant to enforce 

the law. Life is the feeling you get when the earth spins and falls 

gravity evicts us. Alright, I won’t lie to you; I am really here to 

tell you we are all just copies of chairs in a headless body’s imagination. 

I was supposed to be a tree until the leaves took one look at me 

and decided to commit a genocide against themselves.

I am a scavenger hungry for parcels of verity 

and the freedom to pursue death. Heaven is wasted on the dead; 

the living need God’s marrow in their stomachs 

and digesting in their heads.