Dear stranger,
Your opinion of me
Is about as misplaced
As the. Dot
In this sentence
– O.D. ©2020
Art by:Â Aenami
Morbid Curiosity.
When the curtain lifts
You play the part of the victim
Sharing sob stories with anyone willing to lend an ear
You tell them how much you’ve struggled
How much you’ve failed at overcoming life’s obstacles.
You tell them how much you appreciate having them around
You make it clear how you would be lost without them
Through your meticulously curated vulnerability
You advertise honesty, harmony
And the promise of stability.
And of course, a willing listener eats it all up
Charmed by your words,
Feeling power as you cement their worth.
I’m almost tempted to say I feel sorry for them.
Almost.
Because they don’t know you; the real you
Not like I do.
See, you’re not the victim you claim to be;
No, far from it. You’re a predator, the worst kind,
You don’t lurk in the grass but hide in plain sight.
You take the truth, and if it fails to illicit –
The intended reaction, you mould it –
By God, you mould it, as much as possible,
Till it unquestionably does.
You pretend to be weak and vulnerable
To pacify and to placate,
Till those that choose to listen
Begin to believe defending you is not beyond reason.
Connection, or whatever your misguided mind chooses to call it
Isn’t about deepening bonds, not to you,
Your endgame is establishing power over those around you,
It’s what gets you off, isn’t it?
Switching roles on those you’ve baited into trusting you,
Twisting the narrative is a given
If it means your agenda is fulfilled.
You push and you probe because lord knows,
You need to know everything, to be a step ahead,
A testament to your fear of being irrelevant
Your sob stories (I would have you know)
Mean nothing to me,
Your conquests doubly so.
You will continue to think you know me
You will continue to think you have everyone fooled
God-willing you eventually gain enough sense
To question why I keep you around despite.
It’s not to beat you at your own game, that’s ridiculous,
A single fool within our midst is more than enough.
Never in my life would I have thought –
I’d come across someone so lost.
I am not ashamed to admit
I have kept you around for purely selfish reasons
You’re a particularly rare breed on the spectrum of the deluded
Makes me curious to see how it all ends.
– O.D. ©2020
Art by:Â snatti89
LIVE.
Time, to you, can be viewed as a straight line
Somehow going somewhere.
Relish in my way of thought for a bit
And you will perchance see how I visualize it.
Time, to me, is a complex knot
Entangled, never moving;
Stuck in the same spot.
What you’ve concluded as the passage of time
Is instead, a single moment.
A single moment that has stayed the same with no change.
There has never been a then, just a now.
The futility of my curiosity towards what comes next
Has only been rewarded by my newfound ability
To suppress unchecked inquisitiveness.
You speak highly about a life long-lived
Based on a metric dictatedÂ
By a terrestrial unit of measurement.
It takes the lifespan of a mayfly
To give you much-needed perspective.
You only think you live long
Because the world is full of things that die faster.
It’s just like me, isn’t it?
To break everything down to its fundamentals.
I wish my way of thinking could be described as a gimmick;
That would most certainly help your psycho-analysis.
But go ahead and ask me, the answer is always a constant
Days? Months? Weeks? Apart from herding everyone in mutual directions
All mean nothing to me.
Day and night? Right. It’s a relay
And Earth’s residents are simply taking turns with the sun.
You can ritualize the process of the earth moving on an invisible rotisserie
For as long as you please, but to then expect me
To give it nearly as much weight as you do?
Well, you’re the one who’s always going on about fate
Would it be too much to ask if I leave that part to you?
– O.D. ©2020
Art by:Â kevron2001
O.D. 