Work Text:
You pretend you don’t hear the static.
That is the most grotesque part.
It is everywhere—
The hum behind the walls,
The electric itch under your skin,
The blue-light nausea that stains your vision long after you close your eyes.
Static, seeping into sockets,
Rotting in twisted wires
That suffocate the heart.
The static calls you obsessed.
But you both know
That you are not the only one who lingers.
Static, lingering like mildew in circuitry,
A voice caught in a speaker cone,
Scratching feverishly until the membrane splits.
You tell yourself it is hatred, nothing more.
. . .
You have always been a liar.
You repeat your sorry sentiment the way a broken ad repeats itself—
With volume, yes, but never conviction.
Hatred is clean.
Hatred is sterile.
This is not hatred.
Whatever this is, it is infectious,
A festering, pussing wound
That refuses to close
Even after seven sarcophageous decades.
The static is a tab left open,
A buffering wheel that never completes.
It refreshes, and refreshes, and refreshes
Until your screen burns white,
The pixels blister,
And the glass face you wear for the world
warps from the heat of your pathetic desperation.
Are you proud of what you’ve made me?
If the static could hear your thoughts
You’re certain that in some perverse way
It mourns those bygone years, too.
Does it understand what abandonment does
to something built to be watched?
You begin to peel yourself open,
Layer by decaying layer.
Behind the polished grin
Is a nest of wires and circuits
Chewing themselves raw.
Behind the practiced voice
Is feedback shrieking,
A cacophony of thought liquified.
The voltage tightens
To feel resistance
To feel something push back
To feel something that is not
An act of odium.
The static is old noise.
Dust-thick, sanctified, smug.
It stains the air with nostalgia
and calls it superiority.
You want to gut that sound out of it;
Rather than silence it, you would keep it,
Thread it through your ribcage
Like stolen fiber optic.
Make it pulse within your lungs
So that it never withdraws again.
If it lived beneath your glass,
Would it finally see
Your true intentions?
. . .
You can't even name them yourself.
Nevertheless,
Your screen still fractures at the sound of static.
You
Fracture.
The static says you are predictable.
The static says you are desperate.
It is correct.
And yet
It is also the one who redefined
What it means to hunger.
The static starved you with indifference,
Left you gnawing on your own signal,
chewing through your pride
until it tasted like copper and ozone and humiliation.
You still listen for that sound.
Sometimes you imagine it
slipping through you like a blade.
Sometimes you imagine it is gentle with you.
Mostly, however, you imagine it craving you,
Craving to settle back into
That festering, pussing wound it left.
That, perhaps, is the real most grotesque part.
Not the violence
Nor the voltage
Nor the way it would tear apart the spectrum
Just to trap you in it.
No.
If it turned toward you—
If it truly saw you for what you are now—
It would be repulsed.
Because the only thing worse
Than being ignored
is being understood
and found
Lacking.