beans:
disseminator rob-ski
no proxy
our relationship rocky
a flying squirrel
save your breath when you say you love me
never knowing who i was
or that i am
too afraid of lamb
or rap that i am
never had the chance
a pox on you
chips fall where they land
where were you
gone belly up
save breath
say you need me
watching from sidelines
that you wish unraveled
that you weaved into fiction
the grip torn to maintain
hold
hold
not holding
limbs convulsing
terrible twerking
robbed of ignorance
tables turn
paid mourners weep
muppets sing of castration
holding grasping
yet failed
the whites
of eyes
bleed dry
the bloated
from induced
incoherence
litter from the pulse of wretched spasms
pillows are tongues
to the weight of my loathing
if i am as weak as i feel
sheds of pity
tastes sour
from breasts with
milk of greiving
suffering makes for a noble ideal
shredded by a vail of lies
a lost past
a nail through the head of a bird
wept a swollen river
like god
the sorrow fell
through the hole
in his hands
im as happy as an empty chair
who could fill it?
is it gloom if there's no one there?
or does anybody care?
vyle.:
the screens' interface is autodidactic
first words when i got my device
we might have to be repackaged
that's like the best break-up line
when abject tape-stop normalcy contiumnnm
sounds like the chyron for yesterday's advancements
makes the nearfuture just seem contrived
opportunistic greenhorn knows that
artillery adjacency
is usually conflated
isn't the same as being brandished
right before the traffic isn't automated
like i don't even use my card
just wallet on sensor
near field communications
famo called her
my italo-disco
chiseled cheekbones
easel model boosie fade
exotic foreign
the way he spoke about her
was abhorrent
to me she normal
from the elevator to door
my window panoramic
she walks statuesque
looking down
at the street lamping
from up here it feels
like urban planning
she say tomorrow it's gonna feel like damage
and my glasses
already the see the augmented current candid
photogenic
you asked her for her contact card
she acted like she didn't hear it
Drag Cursor/Finger to view
Drag Cursor/Finger to turn
Wheel/Two fingers to zoom
Interact with Craft with cursor/finger
The memories rush in like an inhale too sharp to bear.
Though he had been raised in the polished quiet of a relatively posh neighborhood, the grammar school he attended stood in the shadow of the Robert Taylor Homes, towers stacked high with the weight of history, of struggle, of survival.
"They shot at our school bus."
The line flickers in his mind—a lyric, a memory, a fact. Something too harrowing to be metaphor, too lived-in to be fiction. A line from NO ONE WROTE THIS OUT FOR US, but really, a line from his own story.
And it wasn't just that moment. It was the stories that lived in the bones of those buildings.
Children snatched up, thrown from rooftops, running from snipers.
Truths that rang out like warning shots in the night.
But he also remembers something else. Hope.
Hope that somehow made space in the cracks, between the concrete, beneath the weight, alongside the chaos. Hope that kept people alive even when nothing else would.
He used to visit friends in those same buildings. To him, it was simple. Their homes, their spaces, their lives. The stories should have haunted him, but they didn't.
Not then.
Because hope filtered the world, softened its edges, kept him from fully seeing. Maybe that was his grandmother's doing—her presence acting as a shield against the truth, against the heaviness that came for those who saw things too clearly, too soon.
And now, here he is—years later, worlds away, standing high above the city in a tower of steel and glass, watching it all unfold from a height that turns the streets into veins, pulsing, shifting, dissolving.
The city is delaminating.
Layer by layer, peeling, breaking, fraying at the seams.
He isn't sure of the speed.
Is it collapsing in slow motion?
Or did the unraveling already happen, and he's only now seeing the pieces come undone?
He is met by Beans from Anti-Pop Consortium, a mind that moves like broken satellite signals, reflections that don't seem connected until suddenly they are.
They speak in fragments—not riddles, but echoes.
Of benevolence, of entropy, of the strange ennui that comes when truth refuses to stay still.
And then—the object in the breezeway.
Another one.
Particles shifting, hovering, windblown but deliberate.
The same substance, the same phenomenon he saw outside his building, at the gas station.
It doesn't behave like air, doesn't bend like dust—it moves with intention, adjusting with his presence, responding to his nearness, as if it knows.
As if it's waiting.
Another sign. Another marker.
Telling him—move forward.