I could not predict how quickly he would
get you by the debt-strings
how quickly he would become your creditor-crush
your beloved bankruptor, your evergreen future foreclosure

We have a future history, Luigi. Last time, I focused on your resilience, because I am
resilient. Is there space for us to discuss futility?

You traded the life we
recovered, your enduring
self, your research, our
home, all for this weeping
dragon left in their stead.

When it comes time to vote some-
one off the ship, I finish my will and tell myself
that space is as good of a coffin as the body
of a tree. That floating through an endless void
used to be my definition of heaven.

Choose, reader, between mind and sword:
Mind grants you beaches, serenity, and vacation anxiety.
Sword, politics and the blood song of football.
Walk the path I shoveled for you, hug
cubes dug from our private
shared earth, and build toward the portal
with an obsidian crown.

The fishing hole man gawks: Nobody
he says, I mean nobody hauls
these suckers in anymore. He stretches
over the counter, strokes the dark
circles, scales patterning your flesh.

A man hiked through the Faron region to the ridge where he sat upon a rocky beach near the Riola Spring watching a water snake whorl in the cool-clear basin, slip-smiling between refracted sunbeams that pierced the invisible surface.

You are optimized integrals and algorithms without a bedtime, without friends or YouTube videos to watch, while I exist in this body with organs, yours without, the rhizomatic tendrils of an imagined player, a threat, a test to improve my own play style.

I hope you’re still watching these numbers grow
because the sun refuses to set and I cannot
extract the sound of axe on trunk, of the split body

from my bones. I keep growing sharper
because the sun refuses to set and I cannot
separate the chaff of all this cold experience

Broad-chested, flat
And just out of reach

Perched as he is
A clenching boy

On his digital horse
Crooked incisors flashing

and every second with you counts
more than any stunt
this is us against the world
against an ever-emerging backdrop
of paper mache mountains penetrated
by snake skin tunnels, of pyramids
and other representative landscapes