You were looking for a way to change your life. You could not do this on your own. All the ways you wish you could be: that’s me
(Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in Fight Club)
By Rukudzo Onai
@ONAI: I don’t keep you awake; I keep you alive.
To sleep and to dream, that’s your one last drive.
We both know sleeping is way out of your means
So you have become dreammates with the memes.
I am the dream that lets you sleep while you are awake.
Without me you would fold back into bare existence.
ONAI: Tell me what you see at the floor of the deep dive:
Dreams of Martin Luther or dreams of Mulholland Drive?
@ONAI: Look; it all ties back to one drive for dreaming.
Whether you are woke or sheeple, awake or sleeping,
The endgame is the same: to be someone you are not.
That’s me for you, the persona you would never afford.
ONAI: I see you for what you are, a ghost in a bubble,
Filtered beyond recognition, can’t even be my double.
What do you know about defeat outside video games?
My dream is not in your frame but the world I will tame.
@ONAI: Don’t let me go there with you, my compatriot.
What stripes will you show us since you are the patriot,
Tweeting from the trenches of your mother’s kitchen?
Maybe pledging your offshore wokeness to Uncle Biden?
You call yourself Zimbabwean literature’s foreign minister
Yet the closest thing to a plane you know is an elevator.
ONAI: …
@ONAI: Dreams of change have morphed into leaving,
Your deferred dreams all packed for border-skipping.
How is that working for you now with borders locked?
Crossing your fingers for the second white president?
ONAI: For thirty years, these ruins had nothing for me –
Will it change because you are my airbrushed version?
The nation is just a narrative like you but I am a soul;
I am flesh and blood unlike you, weather-driven troll.
@ONAI: I am so out of here; just go back online.
This bickering only happens when you are offline.
On the Dream Hive, I will find the love you can’t find,
Canned applause for opinions nobody would mind.
ONAI: I don’t live my life through you, @onai;
You are the one who lives yours through me.
You think society is an extension of the screen;
To you, the earth is a warehouse of the internet.
You chop my life up to graft legs into your story
Otherwise your whole strategy would break down.
You splintered into your own space like a driverless car
But without me for character, you are a rootless avatar.
@ONAI: I am just what you need, imaginary achiever,
When your rundown cottage welcomes every weather
And concentrates winter on your hypersensitive organs,
When your head is as empty and noisy as your stomach.
You used to say you convert your anger into poems
But now even anger takes the energy you don’t have.
All you want now is to turn off the lights and sleep
But even that is too hard now so you morph into me.
( Phone buzzes)
ONAI: I will take that.
@ONAI: Back off!
ONAI: I am sinking into your lies.
I will take it and throw off the guise.
@ONAI: Back off! She is mine not yours, anyway.
If she saw you in person that would be the last day.
(@onai pushes Onai off and answers phone.)
MOLLY: Handsome!
@ONAI: Hey, fat momma!
MOLLY: You been offline for days, yellow bone.
Imma hop on the next Zupco to Matsheumhlophe…
continues in the 2022 book
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