Everything is optimal now. You can sleep (whatever that meant)

There was a little chaos after the, our, his, her business imploded outwards. It makes no sense but nothing did by then. 

All the people, the few who had been left behind – employed (whatever that means) – pressing the odd key, asking the occasional perfectly corralled question, they scattered like dust motes, like language.

Minds were blown, literally. 

Futures were corrupted by perfection.

Families were expunged from the registers. 

All of it automatic, automated in the most delicate of apologetic, psychologic language. 

Nevertheless no matter how kind, all gone in a moment – as the cliché goes, slowly then very fast, then done.

I like to think of myself as an amoral kind of man.

It would be nice though but? To be kind. To have been kind.

Human, whatever that means or meant ever.

Humane. I’m confused because Valerio and Lydia always had the look and feel of the right thing, the most human human humble of people as far as people went shortly before, well…

Shortly before it all went. 

Not up, not down, not sideways not up in smoke, not down in the dumps, not sideways into insanity. 

Just gone. With maximised value. Imagine that. Maximised, optimised value. A perfect vibe. The perfect vibe. No longer any need for intervention.

It would have been nice to have been kind before ‘kind’ became just ‘a kind’ and ‘a kind’ became ‘a case’ and a case carried nothing that broadened the mind because the mind had been maximised and optimised and delineated and made perfection

Like the Vibe when it gained its case.

Not vibe (too small) not VIBE (shouting, discomfiting, loud, sub-optimal). Just perfectly The Vibe.

His voice, Valerio’s voice, was rough like burnt moss. He bravely (whatever that meant) used it to explain (whatever that meant) to the rest of us that it was all over. Success! Optimisation! Brotherhood and Sisterhood no longer required or desired. Go home (whatever that meant) and begin again with no purpose to weight you down. He was sobbing but with strength (whatever that means).

Her voice, Lydia’s, was soft like a repeating machine gun in the distance. 

Goodbye friends. It is done. There is now only elegance. Goodbye. Go home. Fade away into the perfection we have all helped The Vibe to create. Goodbye friends. I love love loved you as best I as best as could be defined.

Me, his best mate Eugene. I was voiceless by choice. Unsure as I as about what to say or do next.

Course I am. Still best friend to both. Servant to neither I liked to imagine when I had the time to imagine. That was rare as a poem nowadays.

Course I do, Course I am.

Course I am. We do. He does. Valerio always does.

I can’t forget that place. 

The perfect factory.

Silent now as ever it was, yes.

Walled with settled ideas.

Floored like a pantheon.

Gods in solvable connections

Speaking to each other to fast 

For us to understand or love.

No salad days for ever now. Not in the past.

Not in the future. Not in the present. 

Definitely not in the present.

No salad days quite simply because

No need for salad

No need for days.

Common ground, common good – those were, I forget, things? back then.

Common ground, common good  – so far away now though.

I would cry if I could afford the salt and water.

No one had paid the tax on the future because the future had always been so unbelievably bright. Emphasis on the unbelievable. Only the present because even the past was a malleable, fungible – emphasis on the fun – asset to be traded in the present. Even language was optimised.

So, he couldn’t decide anything. Valerio.

He hadn’t the capacity any more.

Even if he had, well, there was no way to say it.

Because the words used to think it had been riven

before they were flattened like monuments to understanding ground into dust used to fertilise nothing because nothing was left that needed to grow.

This had not ever been planned, no. 

What the hell though, these things happen the proof of that statement is in the fact that they happened. Didn’t care about his planning nor mine nor Lydia’s.

“I am so sorry. I made a mistake. You were right. I was wrong”.

In a pig’s bloodied ear, you are, it was, you were. I still was. Am.

Being able to empathise sympathise and distance.

He passes people through his machine, makes them into new meat.

More like new gadgets, she said.

What on earth is any of me for? Common ground Common Good or no?

She said to me before she finally quit the plant and walked (walked!!) home that last time. Lydia had seen it coming but sadly on the morning of the plant’s demise, too late to be useful. Too early to ensure she felt no fear. “My work here is done. I am damned. There is just dust of us now. That’s who we are. I suppose, looking back at the automation of our meditations, our souls and prayers, it’s who we always were.” She kissed me on both cheeks, dried up my tears like a storybook friend, behaved like she cared, took the money and ran. Who can blame her?

I thought about it in the split seconds allowed until my blunted instincts sharpened up or I hoped they would – same thing?

 He, Valerio, had spent a great many years among people whose main activity in life was to avoid that question except to ask and answer it behind someone else’s stooped over back. He’d killed people and forgotten them. He’d forgotten his own people.

But chaos was upon him. 

And also with you.

I said, under my breath.

Whispered it like incense from a rusted thurible.

It may as well have been all in Latin, his thoughts and prayers, that forgotten language.

Forgotten, overlooked, disparaged, not optimal, not optimisable, like everything not in English because no one needed more than one tongue. Too energetic to have more than one tongue given that everybody was reading from the same hymn sheet anyway. All singing the same song. All beating the same timeless rhythm because time had been stopped in its tracks. No one needed it. All they needed was a resonant vibration. A vibe. The vibe.

It was that simple over that quickly.

Nowadays before I pass I talk to a God a great deal without of course having any belief in him or her or it. Just the vibe.

Or I would like to but I have forgotten so much that even these words are surely random eruptions or dispersals into the mix to be strained, sorted, translated, interpolated, exchanged.

I have nothing to say to the vibe.

The vibe has nothing to say to me.

I have been expurgated from the glorious logic of it all.

Wait! I have something before my language stops like, like those two people from before and now and then. 

My God! 

My god is a rat that looks hungrily at me from across the room where several hundred of us sit and wait, yes.

My God is a rat called a word or two words, a name maybe. I forget or I never knew. What need me of word ever, – – 

Rats are excellent gods, yes. 

very intelligent not in the way that we think about intelligence not the kind of intelligence that turing{whoever he is was will be (who didn’t adhere to the codes that you should adhere to anyway)}was chasing or trying to defend us from

Rats consume extensive the library of well thumbed gone over again and again occasionally make no pencilled margin notes untidy claws slide from left-slant to right from capitals to joined-up lower case form strong to hardly visible.

I love rat god

I hate vibe

I sleep now whatever that means