HR Manager During New Employee Orientation: Welcome to ACME Incorporated's state of the art factory! You should feel proud to work here because ACME is the exclusive supplier of coyotes, roosters that sound like Kentucky Colonels, hunters with speech impediments, narcissistic ducks, and two foot tall red haired bandits everywhere! It's a great place to work! Oh, now don't listen to the rumors about employee turnover. We value our employees at ACME and consider each of you as more than workers, we consider you family!

Let me assure you that the quality control workers at ACME are the foundation of the company and we pay you accordingly! What other employer offers its employees 100 paid days off, a company car, clothing allowance, and free chef currated meals and $10,000 an hour? Now, I can take a question or two from the new hires.

Cartoon Mouse: Do you offer health insurance?

HR Manager (sweating): No, but the pay alone makes health insurance a small consideration!

Cartoon Cat: I really like the life insurance policy, I mean $10,000,000 for accidental death or dismemberment, that's amazing.

HR Manager (with a smile): I told you that ACME takes care of it's workers.

Cartoon Cat: That's great, but when I went to fill in the spot for beneficiary, ACME Incorporated was already there.

HR Manager (taking the cat's life insurance application): Now, I thought those monkeys in clerical fixed this typo! I'm gonna get this fixed as soon as we're done here! Now, does anyone else have any questions?

Cartoon Dog: Yeah, the job discription's a bit vague. Exactly what'll we be doin' here at ACME?

HR Manager: GREAT QUESTION! Your job here is to test our products as they come off the assembly line to make sure that they work as designed and it doesn't take any special training. The process is simple. To test each finished item all ya gotta do is just tap each product on the detina.....er.......top with a wee hammer as it comes off the assembly line and answer one question on the form attached to your clipboard. Does it explode?

11 reads

It’s gonna blow

For weeks I've ignored it

Reaching around it

Overlooking it

Actively avoiding it

But now, it's demanding my attention

It's straining at the seams

It's bulging like a bloated belly

It's ready to explode

Curse my procrastination

And inaction

And depressed malaise

With gentle fingers

I gingerly touch it

Wary of it's hair-trigger

And threat of violence

I hold my breath...

But it does not explode

Gently, I ease it from the shelf

Treating it like a fragile thing

As delicately as a baby bird

Then with smooth footsteps

Like a cat burglar on a roof

I glide to the door

With acute care, I am through

There stands the dustbin

Just ten feet away

nine - down the step

eight - foot on the driveway

seven - avoid the neighbours gaze

six - long to itch the end of my nose

five - steady now we're almost there

four - oooh that was close

three - breathe, breathe, BREATHE

two - so close now

one - Oh darn it

The milk missile explodes

17 reads

The Second Hand

with deference . . .

smokers understand

timing is everything.

04.29.2024

Does it Explode Challenge? @AJAY9979

16 reads

Literary

Is there a literary device broad enough, complex enough, to encompass this feeling - one of explosion? I suppose there's ALL CAPITAL LETTERS, but that's not a literary device; that is a desperate attempt at making a point, perhaps most especially on the internet.

In April 2020, I sat down at my rickety wooden breakfast table in a sunny kitchen in California, and opened my laptop. I wrote every day during lockdown, little poems and sentiments that encapsulated my growing disdain, my contained rage. The end of 2019, for me, was like someone had a hold of my life and also a stick of dynamite, and threw the dynamite inside my mind, creating a simmer of smoke that finally exploded into words that April.

I overshared. I thought: no one knows me here. The internet is a strange place. Someone "liked" my first post and I felt famous. I kept at it, writing little nothings onto my keyboard, onto this little white screen of promise.

Lockdown ended. The world moved on from COVID. Sometimes people put that in all capital letters. I just did and it didn't make a difference. I wonder if it was the world screaming, trying to make a point. I wonder if I was trying to make a point. I certainly wrote about it, like there was a contest and I needed to win it. And that is a literary device in its essence.

23 reads

Title.

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up

like a raisin in the sun?

Or fester like a sore—

And then run?

Does it stink like rotten meat?

Or crust and sugar over—

like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags

like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

Has anyone read this poem? I had to. For school. Five years ago. I was... Fifteen. I was fifteen five years ago. It's been five years. I'm twenty. And adult. I'm twenty and technically an adult though I won't feel that's true until I'm providing for myself and living apart from my parents I guess. I suppose we all have a metric. For success and what we think will make us feel happy and satisfied and fulfilled in life.

When I was young, I thought adoration and validation, love and affection would do it. A hero or saviour type to stitch me back together. Someone to wipe away the things I felt were broken. People came. Put more cracks in my foundation without a care in the world. The kinder ones didn't rebuild a thing. I walked beside them a while and pushed them away when it got too much.

For better or worse... I'm here. Alive. Every dream I have seems to get wrecked rather quickly and easily. I don't know where they went. There's probably a land of broken dreams in my brain. Some cavern. Bottomless and yet, you can tell what's down there is grey. Devoid of light. No soul left. Above it all, this pit of nothingness are little white glow bugs that flit around.

Hope.

Not because I want it there but because my younger self needed it to survive at times and so do I. My dreams had nowhere to go but farther into me when I gave them up, piece by piece. The dream that my father could love me the way I wanted him to when truly, he's the man he is and has been himself for sixty years, more to come. We all choose our change. The ones we decide we need to make, the ones we actually do make. And sometimes they help. And sometimes they don't.

Dreams are nice and all but I'm more accustomed to nightmares. They feel more likely. More real because they hurt and the pain feels so much more tangible when it's felt. To me. I lean into the hard things cos prettier things feel more fleeting.

Everything is choice. I didn't get it when I was young. Part of me still doesn't. I thought I was stuck. I thought I had to listen to every word my parents said, even when I was told that the god we were meant to serve sent people like me to hell for loving different. I felt that if I followed the world enough and fit in enough, I would be safe and so... Why not hate my fatness and my social aversion and my "strange" interests and about everything about me? Why not decide my body and mind simply weren't correct?

That my dreams weren't correct?

It takes a lot to change a misconception you've held since childhood. And remember, everything is both true and false. Everything can be believed and disbelieved. Proven and disproven as long as that's what a person wants. It's all perspective. Every last piece of this world is built on choice. Some people chose wars and the power of fancy coloured paper and religious beliefs and discrimination... People followed along, as we so often do. Because sometime it seems easier to just bow your head. Most times. But there is always. Always. A cost.

I dunno. I felt like a weak person a very long time. A coward. A puppet. I used to write stuff like that in the back of my notebooks. I remember what was my first class studying law because my father picked it for me. Laughing and crying at the back of the class, head buried in my arms, hoping no one could tell I was going mad, trying to understand why I couldn't simply control myself.

If you leave a dream to die, it doesn't matter whether it shrivels or festers, shrinks or runs. It doesn't matter if it explodes. The residue will remain. The shrapnel will piece at your skin and your mind and your heart, whether you want it to or not. Scars will be left as reminders of the betrayal of the self. And you get to choose every day to let more go or not.

Dreams are an inextricable piece of being alive. Where one dies, another often follows, no matter how long it takes. Many have too many to know what to do with. I dream of a version of existence where I feel safe and confident and at peace with my choices. With myself. A place where I have come to a state of utter self-acceptance. A place where I let go of the world and cling to myself. To my hopes - the idiotic visions of better that kept me alive all my life.

I will be a dreamer till the day I die. I'm almost certain of it. I do it every time I plunge into yet another world of fiction. I do it every time things get too hard in this reality of ours. It's so much prettier in worlds you have control over. The ones you can traverse freely. Some day, I'll realise - truly realise - that this reality I am in is already mine to shape to my wishes. One day I'll realise my dream is my own and an easy one to reach at that. One day, I will let go of the "them" and plunge into the "I" like the hopeful, idiotic Icarus I am.

I don't expect eternal happiness. I don't think it's possible to be fully satisfied forever. But what would life be without that little, annoying prick of hope for those prettier, fleeting moments?

I'd rather live and die a crazy fool. Things would be much more drab and boring otherwise. I wish for better chapters in my stories and a happier ending than the Nightmare King in my thoughts expects.

I dream and so, I live.

12 reads

Dressed in White

Dressed in white, the man stepped off the main road and walked toward the compound. Though it was only mid morning, the sun had beaten the scene into wavy submission. Sweat beaded on the man's forehead before streaming down his face. His loose clothes offered little help circulating air across his skin. Some of the people walking in the opposite direction thought his clothes were too big. And the fabric, the way it jutted, didn't look quite right. His lips moved, just enough to be noticeable, like he was talking to himself. At the same time, there was a strange calmness in his countenance. When he was 20 feet from the gate, he was hit with a wall of warnings. He'd wanted to reach the gate, but, still, he could have an impact from here. Besides, the sands of time had run out. All sights were on him. He paused for a moment, then looked up at the sky.