can futures fade like midnight stars if you’ve
never had one? watch a lifetime collapse into a
singular pulsating point & all the glow of
the horizon compressed into this heartbeat—
—is this what i get for unmasking

five timepieces on every device, can never
be trusted to remember anything but
searing, pulsating, breaking into a sea of becoming where
self-repression never existed, but neither did
a homework planner, hence my need for
at least three. is this what i get for unmasking?
when you grow toward normalcy you ache to be a fixed archetype, but
what is your fifteen minutes compared to my

fleeting eternity? with every moment still here
yet none ever separable—watch me sink into
the dim lights of the possible, and wonder
if any of this is normal.

mk zariel (it/its) is a transmasculine neuroqueer poet, theater artist, movement journalist, and insurrectionary anarchist. it is fueled by folk-punk, Emma Goldman, and existential dread. it can be found online at hey, i’m your weird anarchist friend <3, creating conflictually queer-anarchic spaces, writing columns for Asymptote and the Anarchist Review of Books, and being mildly feral in the great lakes region. it is kinda gay ngl.