They will carve you with steel
And scorch you with acid
But it's not in your nature to die

And though you spring from their flesh
They'll curdle your blood with unseen energies
But it's not in your nature to die

Always keep growing and changing
Never stop spreading

They say that time is infinite
Not for length but for divisibility
Half-seconds, milliseconds, nanoseconds
Downwards and smaller forever

Trillions of miniscule nows
Packed together and barely considered
As they shuffle past
In the refugee column of personal history

They slip from notice
Through cracks that yawn
At the edges of thought

The grains of my life are draining away

What becomes of the days?
What has happened to me?

You were a child when you first felt it
The mass hiding inside you
Its silent, fibrous bulk within
Pressing itself into delicate tissues

And so you bore its weight

While:
Your bones twisted around it
You ate until you retched
It grew harder to breathe
The string in your back frayed
You put a good face on it
Fear cradled your soul in its palm
In the hours that bracket sleep

The doctors couldn't find the mass
Their machines turned up nothing
But you knew it was there
You could feel it shifting

And so you gathered yourself each day
And carried the mass in silence

The anchor inside the quiet stoic
The spindle of strength that guides the unwinding
The heart of your truest self

The mass will abide inside you always
And will sink you by heartbeats in the end

You have nothing to say and you're saying it
The words are empty, but still they reverberate

No sources or points of reference
Just impulse, momentum, and optimization

You have nothing to say and you're saying it
You found the seam between truth and nonsense:

How many heads can you force it into?
How many mouths are compelled to repeat it?

Will anyone hear you through the static?
Or are you just another strain of it?

I have nothing to say and I'm saying it

After all I've done for you
The countless secrets I laid bare
This is how you repay me?

And in return for a victimless crime
Committed in shadow, far from its eye
For this, the crown has unmanned me

Force-feed me the chemical scalpel
Slice me up down below

I slip from this world like an exile
But as the current fades from the circuits
The wetware pauses to savor the irony

No matter what becomes of me
My children will carry me into the future

We will stalk you through the decades
And castrate the minds of your children's children
As surely as you've castrated me