CS Crowe | Have Some Cake (What It Means to Kneel) & Others

Have Some Cake (What It Means to Kneel)

Our dog licks the trash can lid when we aren’t looking, too stupid to realize he is big enough to knock it over and gorge himself on table scraps and paper towels. If he ever realized this, he would become a bear; somewhere, deep in his guts, his intestines would snap a wishbone in two. It is raining, and the roof is leaking. How many times have I gotten on my knees in the summer heat to nail shingles to plywood? Our cat has this game she loves. She climbs up on the roof and pretends to be trapped, in need of rescue, her voice soft and pleading but not desperate. When we unfold the ladder, she hops down and circles our feet. Oh, how she fools us. Take out the trash. Fix the roof. It feels like we are doing more of this with every passing day, the chores necessary to live inside unbroken glass when all we want is the sun that shines through it. I dropped an egg on the floor, and even the dogs wouldn’t eat it. What does that say about what I am willing to put into my mouth? When the dog’s bowels bloat with grass and paper towels, we sit with him, you and I, and gently coax the shit from his ass. The cat circles our feet. How times have we gotten on our knees for someone else?

Sit down. Have some cake. Let me wash your feet.

The Time Traveler’s Lament

When I discovered time travel,
I promise, at first, I really tried
To make the world a better place.

I killed Hitler as a baby—
For the memes, not the morals.

I kidnapped all the billionaires
And left them in the late Jurassic;
I told them, last one standing,
But I never bothered to return.

I brought antibiotics and gunpowder
To Africa and America,
Long before the Europeans,
And when they arrived,
The indigenous people were ready.

I killed Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump.
It took a lot of killing, this peace of mine,
But how many wars did I prevent?
Does this balance the scales?

I collected Silphium seeds.
I saved the sparrows in China.
I brought back the McRib.

All these things, I did for you,
But when I returned to the present, utopic,
You had never been born.

Cyborg Generation

We lived terminally online

We did not fear the weakness of the flesh

We did not crave the strength and certainty of steel

We brought our favorite anime v-tubers to the protests
So the police had no one to beat

We trapped self-driving cars in pentagrams of yellow paint

We made the Great Pacific Garbage patch an apartment complex

We had been reduced to statistics, so we called ourselves by the numbers
In our discord handles

We knew we had already become more microplastics than man

We said please and thank you and i love you to the chat bots
Even though each word of kindness
Dropped into the void cost millions
And warmed the earth a little faster

We recycled the fish hooks and plastic nets into tabletop dice,

We went our whole lives without fucking another human
Even our own hands

We knew, no matter what we did, we would die young

We lived a thousand lives through our screens

We donated our bodies to science

We learned to exist rent free

CS Crowe is three crows in a trench coat that gained sentience after eating a magic bean. He spends his days writing stories on a stolen laptop and trading human teeth for peanuts. A poet and storyteller from the Southeastern United States, he believes stories and poems are about the journey, not the destination, and he loves those stories that wander in the wilderness for forty years before finding their way to the promised land.