Consumption I have eaten your brain, now your memories stir inside me. I feel your emotion like strength within me, as your neurons tell mine all they've known. There's the shifting, sifting blades of coupling, scents like windstrewn, mowed grass I now recall. And in the so-many details of your childhood I have become innocent. I hang on the swing strings, standing up on the seat just to defy the watching, wary elders who shout their concern. I splash in the muddy puddle, stirring bloated and ragged worms with my foot. Springtime! How I have never savored the breeze before, it seems now a crime. I have missed much. Your species is mine now, and it is good. But that part of it has been digested, and it is gone forever. I have never known remorse, but I feel it now. Aging, I as you, you as I, Into the days of learning, I see how the solid world makes sense to you. But though you understand and therefore so do I, I do not see these things directly. Then all passing into ecstasy, the mundane are forgotten; first kisses upon vehicular-cool metals of night. Response, reactions, equal but opposite excitations. Patchwork fadings of the many occasions into an in-out rolling of a collective "Yes!". How we fight the agings from there! Why did your innocence die, why did your magical loves and passions become desolate routines? I now share the further learning, growing before I am diminished by your gradual loss. Oh, even in sorrows there are bursts of love ... I love the taste of your kind. I am loving as I witness -- I have never felt this way before. I know my own past, so inglorious now as yours proceeds through me into the void. I can draw upon your passing concepts to imagine myself, prostrate myself before your stark superiority. How I was hatched alone, unmothered in a cold moisture somewhere near one of your cities. Sometimes in your terrible moody passion, your people create these marshes of despair, somewhere in these marshes I came to be. If there had to be more of my kind, would I have interacted as you do and developed into something more like yourself? Another love. I wish to digest more slowly, call all to a halt to stay here in this moment with what you have done. But I cannot. It is beyond my voluntary control. I try, and I feel a tiny reaction. Your moment of desire extended itself some small amount then snapped back into time. Through my system. Into my energy. Gone forever. More
aloneness, further despair. The presence of your spirit filtering through me allows me
such clarity! If only I could keep you here forever, I could become one of you. Surely
that is all it would take to make me your equal, to be as beautiful as you. But you are
dwindling, near the end. If I had another ... yes! If I consumed more of your kind and But the road to you is so hazardous, and it would take so many. Though I know it could be done, I fear it. My body is even now developing the craving, the delicious NEED to better itself with your spirits. I will brave the Paths and the Torture of your world -- I will brave ANYTHING -- to always have humanity within me! You are almost gone. I see your last memory, I see myself through your senses. I sense your fear, it becomes my own. I have become disgusted at the sight of myself. This is your parting gift. Or are you
fighting back now? Suddenly I am torn: loving hating fearing myself. My gullet spasms,
gagging on what it must consume in the end. It almost feels like you're trying to crawl
out of the void into which I've plunged you. I'm sorry for what I have done, but I needed
to If you fought, you lost. Nothing remains but the reeking, vague factual horror of the destruction I have caused. I have committed a crime. I wish to put you back, but you no longer exist to replace. I have killed. The aftertaste of knowing your love is living with my guilt ... But as your vibrations slowly leave my mind, I become hungry again. I become calm, calculating my next meal. I am entirely myself again, with only a vague memory of what I have just eaten. I know it was excellent, though a bit bitter at the end. But the long-lasting sweetness was well worth it. I know I want more. ©2001 s.c.virtes |