Play depressing songs by female vocalists
Sometimes things are shit
and you can’t make them beautiful
and you can’t see a way to grow from them
and goddamn it you just hurt.
You ache with the impotence of your humanity
and you cling to some diminishing, recontextualized concept of love
and you just have to wait.
You just have to sit with dry tear ducts
because you trained them too well for too long.
You think, I’m cold, without
the energy to get a sweater
and you stare at the wall
and say, “Alexa, play depressing songs by female vocalists,”
to which it responds, “I can’t find any depressing songs,”
probably because some grotesquely rich techie
is afraid someone might sue them if Alexa knew
you might not feel one hundred percent perfecthappyamazing
and hadn’t done something about it.
So it’s silent, inside and outside your head,
just this heavy, bright grey,
like one hundred percent humidity
that never erupts into the storm the weather channel promised
but instead of the whole, unending sky
it’s just imprisoned in your brain
which is too polite to ever erupt so it’s just haunting you
because this world can just be really shit.
***
Previously published in Our State of the Union by Moonstone Press, 2024
Horror Sleaze Trash 