Poetry I wrote you some flowers

[Error 420]

There is a place
where the sands are stars
and the waters are sky.
There is a place.

There is a place
where I always meant to take you
to begin to explain how lovely you are.
There is a place.

There is no time
left for me to take you
or to even see your face anymore.
There is no time.

There is a place
but
There is no time
and yet
I try all the same.

 

[Error 420]

I find myself bargaining
But there’s no dealer to deal
And the dead stay dead.

 

[Error 420]

two years on this thread, lads
been a good one
off to fake my death so the cartel can't find me
hope y'all have enjoyed this

 

[Error 420]

sometimes in the cacaphony my mind
I find myself in Spanish Harlem
(a place I've never been)
and listen to the horns
and the drums
and close
my eyes
and let
music
take
me

 

[Error 420]

Sonja
A song could never speak
The sorrow that fills
My heart when I know
You’re so so far away
And that distance will never shorten.

 

[StayFrosty]

Some of these really resonate with me. Thank you for sharing your lovely work, it's inspiring.

 

[Error 420]

Every night, my love crawls into bed with me
and holds me close
and runs fingers through my hair
Just like you used to.

 

[Error 420]

In the last days of the waning existence of humanity, politicians would vehemently exclaim that they were always against the destruction of humanity. Humans were, after all, a major voting bloc in practically all elections. It’s possible that some of these exclamations were true. They didn’t matter though. Who cares who’s in charge of a dead species? Humanity never got to meet the ones who would record their stories, judge their failings, and speak for their existence. They died millions of years before intelligence began to bloom all across the galaxy, the Thousand Races all leaping out into every star and beyond into every galaxy in the local group but all heeding the warning left by humanity: that before they make that great leap into the eternal beyond, they look first. “Look before you leap” was a human saying that, despite being an invention of humanity, was scarcely followed by anyone.

Science is, ultimately, about learning — not learning truths, mind you, but learning possibilities. How might we look into the atom? How might it behave when it is split? The truth of the matter is impossible to comprehend. The possibilities are formed and figured merely through observation, and a good scientist wishes to observe everything. Many scientists observed how energy and matter are linked. Many observed how matter and space are linked. Many observed how space and time are linked. It stands to reason that many have observed how energy and time are linked, and indeed many have, since before such words as energy or science existed. However, none saw any practical use to these possibilities, and none would until the invention of the Chronograph.

The Chronograph was a most uninspired name, which was meant to be replaced before a working prototype was developed. However, the name was never replaced during humanity’s existence, so that will be the name used here. It was, however, an inspired machine: through manipulation of philotic matter (a wonderful discovery of the late 21st century), one could observe pulses of philotic energy moving faster than light, and, with enough energy, faster than instantaneously. Sooner than the pulse was created. With enough fusion reactors rented via substantial amounts of grant money, the Chronograph was able to transmit binary data at a rate of negative 20 kilobytes per second, that is, 20 kilobytes per negative second. The receiver would receive 20 kilobytes of data, and a second later the transmitter would send it — rather quaint by modern standards, but enough of a brain-melting impossibility at the time that the Chronograph was taken seriously enough to net more investment.

Eventually, during testing, the Chronograph would begin receiving messages never planned to be sent — two research assistants fainted during these encounters, but it was eventually theorized that the data being received was simply from further into the future, an exciting possibility. One that could spell disaster, one professor (correctly) noted. The project was immediately halted, but not before a calculated greater amount of power was added to the Chronograph to transmit back the received messages.

It was confirmed by this causal loop two things: firstly that the Chronograph could be predictably magnified with a linear increase in energy, and secondly that a message could be received from any point in the future, so long as the Chronograph was on when the message was to be received. When could the next message be from? Days in the future? Weeks? Months? Years? Centuries? Each moment after a message was received before that message was sent was a moment that held the possibility of actual paradox — a destruction of all concept of linear time and, if science fiction was to be believed, possibly a destruction of time itself. This machine would have to be used with total responsibility.

The United States Space Force was not well known for total responsibility. Since its half-brained inception at the start of the century prior, it was responsible for the first 600 deaths outside of Earth atmosphere, as well as a remarkably poor first contact with life on Venus resulting in total ecological collapse and subsequent extermination of the very few multicellular organisms there. Impressively, not a single one of those deaths was an enemy combatant, purely because nobody was stupid enough to actually start a fight in space. How the Chronograph wound up in the hands of Space Force is still largely unknown, but many rumors of the time centered around potential messages from future alien species. As of the writing of this, no such communications have ever been sent. The acquisition of the Chronograph by Space Force allowed the device access to a great deal more power in the form of Dyson Station: a half-hearted attempt to make a Dyson Sphere around the sun, only about the size of Africa. Still, much more energy than was safely attainable in any lab on Earth. Early testing showed that this new power source was able to send messages for much longer negative times, but heavy compression was required for further transmission. The usefulness of the Chronograph in this period is unknown, as the collapse of the US government occurred long before any attempt at true application.

The Chronograph was appropriated as property of the People’s Monarchy of Greater Lesser Australia, whose Queen at the time of its acquisition had no better idea of what to do with it than hook it up to the internet and hand over all of Dyson Station’s power to it, effectively allowing access to an internet that had a few days left until it existed. This is regarded by many historians as a very bad move. Almost immediately, countless forms of social order which had been built on four centuries of internet broke down. Investment became meaningless as investors would try to get ahead of real life on prices, resulting in wildly fluctuating highs and lows, leading many sellers to replace their algorithms with random number generators until the whole thing had been abandoned. Billions died and the entire global political system was destroyed in the next sixteen years.

The Cult of Pain took over the Chronograph for a while after, using the receiver to communicate with their leader, who would not be born for another century. Through following his dark bidding, humanity would be plunged into an era of bloodshed. Commentators throughout later points in human history would often note that this was arguably a high point in human existence, and that the music created during this era kicked ass. When the God of Fire was finally born and came to his throne atop the planet of corpses, political pundits agreed that he was actually really nowhere near as cool as they thought he would be, so, after getting caught up to date on his prophecies, he was thrown directly into the sun.

The resultant society decided to just go ahead and make a perfect Eden-like anarchistic utopia, because, in the words of political theorist Bonecrusher Sexbeast, “screw it, I guess we haven’t done peace and prosperity yet, and we don’t really have anything better to do”.

Humanity went through the usual phases after that, having forgotten about the Chronograph altogether.

Where we find again the Chronograph is by accidental discovery by a human society much like the one that had built it originally. Technology had reached an equilibrium of progression and regression that everyone agreed was good enough (at least, until the 90th century), settling equivalent to the 22nd. Here marks the last message before the destruction of the human race.

Energy calculations all agreed on a constant, linear progression of energy needed to send messages through the Chronograph based on the total energy output of the sun. A kilobyte of data would take about a hundred years of the totality of sun’s solar energy for every millennium it was sent back — an amount of energy by the standards of the day to be beyond consideration to ever be necessary, but extreme pessimists nostalgic for the days of the Cult of Pain insisted on, and eventually built, a full Dyson sphere around the sun, in hopes to one day send a message to the God of Fire to allow him to reign forever.

While a popular idea, there was some contention among scientists over the possibility of altering the progression of time — the Chronograph proved a linear, unchanging time, in which observing the future inevitably made it so. However, no such large-scale experiment had been done before. Sending a message that had never been received was a possibility that was hard to think about. The full Dyson Sphere was built, however, much to the shagrin of the people living on Earth, which had to be destroyed for raw materials. Those who opposed construction were also destroyed for raw materials.

There were no messages sent for the next five-hundred years, as the Sphere had to collect energy for its great message to be sent. At the end of those five-hundred years, however, a message was received.

The message was one kilobyte of data, later realized to be an image file. A color image, roughly 20 by 15 pixels. Completely incomprehensible, but largely red. Scientists immediately concluded that this file must be from very far in the future, or else it would never have been sent under such heavy compression. A follow-up message was never received — not never as in “not in a substantial amount of time”, but never as in never. Another message was never received, and our historians have thoroughly proven that no message was ever received on the Chronograph, to this day. The entirety of mankind’s collective effort was dedicated to deriving meaning from this mess of pixels. The early years were promising. The image lacked metadata but the encoding clearly showed flawless, immaculate compression: there was no way conceivable by mathematics to store any more usable data in a packet that size. Clearly advanced algorithms. Perhaps sent by AI?

Dissenters to the value of the message would always bring up the possibility that the message was sent from very soon, and that just because the file was small does not mean it was from the future. To quell these arguments, and to ensure the message came from the future, the Chronograph transmitter was destroyed and rebuilt with a firmware limitation that made it impossible to access for at least 500 years. With no messages received that this limitation had been breached, all were in agreement that the message was, indeed, from the far future. What it meant was still up in the air.

Like many great questions, the question of the image’s meaning quickly became a political one, and even a theological one. If the image was to be understood without language, then it may have been sent by something without language. If the image was sent by a civilization so far removed from now, how would they know how we encode image files? How would they know how we perceive color? Is the meaning technical? Emotional? Religious?

It is hard to make clear the importance of this message and its meaning. It was the only message received from a silent future. It was not only a sign of things to come but a commandment of the inevitable future. By a message being received from another time, that time was anchored by observation: all the possibilities that led up to the message being sent were collapsed into one existence. If that wasn’t true, neither was any understanding of time or physics. If that was true, then the concept of free will and random chance wasn’t. For every moment that the message wasn’t sent, humanity was on the precipice of two very different and incompatible realities.

Even in the mind of the layman, these realities had radically different forms: one which promised infinite potential for change, and another which promised the dissolution of all guilt. If free will wasn’t real, how could one ever truly make choices? How could one do wrong? There was a Sartren ecstasy of living in such a reality: a relinquishment of meaning to the processes of time — a complete destruction of responsibility, where man was no longer burdened by freedom.

It became clear to both parties that the lockdown on the receiver should never be removed — not literally, of course, then the message could not be sent, proving beyond doubt the fallibility of time. Instead, the date for its removal was always quietly moved forward, century by century. Eventually, to ensure totally that none would use the Chronograph until such time as the message was inevitably (or never) sent, the lockdown was made physical, with a total encasement in depleted uranium, with wireless hookups to make sure the machine was in full working condition for its eventual use. Slowly, but surely, mankind settled into an eternity of waiting for the nothingness to come.

Here is a riddle, which has come to form a bitter metaphor of what befell mankind in the millennia to pass.

Rich men want me. Poor men have me. Eat me, and you die. Wait for me, and you’ll be waiting forever. Find me, and you’ll wish you never looked at all.

Indeed, humanity found nothing. It found nothing in ceaseless abundance. Humanity could not persist on a meaning based around nothing. The question of the message was forgotten and humanity was left with one philosophical problem in the end, that which Camus called the only philosophical problem. Humanity disagreed with Camus’s answer. Humanity needed to end.

In low whispers, so quiet the people speaking barely knew the thought was crossing their minds, the species agreed on self-extermination. Decay and depression became the norm. Permanent, consensual sterilization became first commonplace and then later an expectation. The last generation of humanity consisted of only a million, desperately beating back against its own chosen fate in vain, struggling uselessly against death in that human way. A few attempts were made to recover the Chronograph, to change time, but the firmware lockdown was never beaten. The last human died alone, still waiting for nothing.

 

[Error 420]

I am alone
Inside my mind
Every moment
Of every day
And I just want to share it.

 

[Error 420]

You are my world
but it’s heart-breaking
to not be part of yours.

 

[Error 420]

Sorrow is the opposite of toast
and rye is the worst of all breads
and yet is made one of the best
via toasting

But even the sweetest sorrows
cannot become greater
there is no fondness in pain

 

[Error 420]

Frogs are the opposite of cinnamon
they hop and leap and draw their breath
and cinnamon only exists in death
frogs die too but I'm sure you'll find
it's in their life that they're oft defined
while cinnamon sits
in a bottle
on the shelf

fuck i'm clever
look at how clever i am
that's sarcasm i'm not actually clever

 

[Error 420]

I like to keep my hair long
(I hate it that way)
It lets me realize that it’s okay
To not be in control
To leave things as they are
To let down my guard

Sometimes I get frustrated
(when it gets in my face)
But I remember the way we’d lie together sometimes
Too cumbersome
Too restrictive
Too warm

But I loved every moment of it.

 

[Error 420]

Let me fall in love
with the thought of having you
by my side
and safe in my arms,
my love.

Let me dream of you
dancing in the light
of the moon
and safe in my arms,
my love.

Whisper now and
tell me how
you watch me
and tell me
somehow
I’m gonna be alright
without you

Let me fall in love
with hearing your voice
in the night
and dreaming of you,
my love.

 

[Error 420]

I wish that your eyes weren’t the color
of the flowers on my wife’s grave.
I wish I could forget, one day
to put those flowers on my wife’s grave.
I wish I could look into your eyes
and see beyond flowers on my wife’s grave.

I’m not upset you went away.
I’m upset that you still won’t leave me.

 

[FeliFeli]

May I add some of my poetry here?

 

[Error 420]

May I add some of my poetry here?

No, this is my personal thread. Feel free to make your own thread though, I pretty much read all of the poems on RPN lol

 

[Error 420]

i see you in a sunpatch
soaking up rays
but you're always alert
and attentive
when i call your name

but it's time for me to go
and it's hard to explain why
but know that you're still
a wonderful dog
and it's hard for me to say goodbye

This is the saddest thing I’ve ever written in my life and I’m upset that I unleashed it upon other people

 

[Error 420]

To marvel in the wonder
of knowing you is
to give thanks for
what is there
and nowhere else
and stands in need
of no thanks for
being what it is.

 

[Error 420]

Am I truly the last unicorn?

 

[Error 420]

Tonight, pretend
that I wrote a very sweet poem
about you

 

[Error 420]

me and the boys post-vaccine going to open-mic poetry night

 

[Error 420]

Nobody understands that I love you
Beyond the moon, beyond the stars,
Beyond the grave.

Nobody understands that, even now,
After all you did (and I did too),
I love you.

Nobody can know the warmth
That was the splendor of your smile
And your cold absence in my bed.

Nobody knows you as I knew you.
Nobody loves you like I love you.
And now,
Nobody loves me.

 

[Error 420]

Kids, let me tell you about the story of the tortoise and the hare. One day, long ago, the hare was going around the animal kingdom, always showing off how fast he could hop. Up and down the street he would hop, always making fun of all the other animals because they were too slow to keep up. The hare went to find the slowest animal he could, just so he could laugh at them. He found the tortoise. He started going off about how he was so much greater, but the tortoise simply said “if you’re so fast, race me, and we’ll see who’s really the best”.

The next day, the tortoise and the hare had their race. The tortoise showed up early, and stretched her legs as hard as she could stretch them. The hare showed up late, and didn’t bother stretching. He knew he would win.

And so, on their marks, they got set, and were off! Right away, the hare hopped and hopped and kept going, almost all the way to the finish line. When he was just about to finish, he looked back, and saw that the tortoise had barely moved an inch. The hare laughed, and thought for a moment that he could take a long nap and still wake up in time to win.

This, of course, was hyperbolic thinking. The hare hopped over the finish line, and even went all the way back to the start to beat the tortoise a second time.

The moral of the story is that tortoises are slow and hares are fast.

 

[Error 420]

i need no soft lights to enchant me
if you only grant me the right
to hold you ever so tight
and to feel in the night
the nearness of you