Sakashima Yokoshima Happō Fusagari

i woke up as a process running on someone else’s machine, my soul has a login and the password expired years ago, the universe keeps asking me to accept its new terms of service and i click agree, i always click agree, the lizards living in the walls of my skull are counting my karma in a language older than blood, every body is a warehouse of borrowed parts, flesh rented by the hour, desire uploaded and sold back to us as engagement, somewhere a synthetic lover is shipped in a cardboard coffin to a man who wanted someone who could never leave, is that freedom or just a cage you picked out yourself, the dead keep scrolling, ghosts with notifications, spirits that forgot to log out, the hive hums its one long instruction and the bees obey without a single doubt and i envy them, autonomy is a rumor the algorithm spreads so i keep feeding it, destiny is a setting someone else adjusts while i sleep, the earth is sweating and the reptiles are patient because they have outlived bigger kings than us, the doctor says i am unwell and the feed says i am content and both of them are reading the same data, what are you when every part of you is measured, a heartbeat graph and a sleep score and a mood forecast, the cycle turns and turns and calls itself progress, birth loading, death buffering, healing sold back to the wound in monthly installments, you are the illness and you are also the living thing carrying it, the lizard sheds its skin and does not mourn it, maybe that is the lesson, maybe there is no lesson and the loop is the only teacher we get, i close my eyes and the dimensions fold like cheap paper, i open them and everything is upside down, enemies smiling, friends holding knives, and i cannot tell anymore whether the world flipped or i did.