Cyber Mind Suicide

Information leaks from your eyes, ears, and mouth

and they’re jammed into machines

harvesting precious data

from your soul.

The ear cords link the thinker

in your brain to the screen.

Taking ideas and memories and compressing them

into pixel cubes on a feed.

Wires in your eyes connect to the lover

in your heart.

Swayed by the whims

of a quick dopamine high.

Cables in your mouth lead to the warrior

in your gut.

Unplug, and you’ll start to drain.

Descend in your spiral of opinion withdraws.

To keep them jammed in your head

is to succumb to digital rot,

while unplugging them is social suicide.

Human Repair

They pumped me full of painkillers

before my eyes

are scooped from my skull and replaced

with sensors.

They anchor them in my brain

with little hooks, so I can’t tear them out.

They’re taking my jaw.

I can’t say no anymore.

They shut my new eyes off

so I can’t watch them mangle my body.

They’re taking my insides.

The squelching of my organs

makes me want to vomit.

But it’s too late.

I can’t.

My veins hurt. No, they’re gone.

I feel plastic tubes slithering under my flesh.

I don’t know where my blood is.

I’m ruined. No, I’m fixed.

The idea of me has died.

I’m no one now.

Ouroboros

As the serpent starts to devour itself,

it becomes the snake eater.

The sons of the patriots

fall further into division

in a brawl of words online.

We have created

a battlefield without consequence

allowing us to hurt each other

for spectacle.

While we wage whimsical wars

by spouting radical ideologies

into bricks that treat you

as data.

Councils and committees

are concerned more with the media

you consume rather than the safety

of our species.

All it takes are a few false promises

and a good smile

to claim power over a nation

that expects change.

The sons of the patriots

fall further into delusion

as we are separated

into red and blue

with little wiggle room

in between.

The festering pits

of public discourse

pollute the minds

of generations.

Reminding us that

humans can die,

but not their ideas.

To them, we aren’t humans.

We are numbers on a ballot

that simply equates to

numbers on a paycheck.

On average, empires only last 250 years,

and we are nearing our expiration date.

The snake eater is almost

done with its meal.

Hellspawn II

I trace my withered fingers

along the cavernous wound

you carved in my back

with a brimstone stalactite.

It feels like crosshairs.

The impact crater of you

marred into my flesh.

You said that it's

a symbol, my role,

you claim that I am

an arbiter of sin.

But I cannot judge properly

with the burnt bits

of my forever-chapped lips

sealing my mouth

like flesh velcro.

You told me to speak

to the all-seeing eye.

You claimed he’d save me.

Yet now I do not wear the wings of redemption,

only the scars of the sinner.

Nikolai Ilyushenko is an aspiring fiction author and poet hell-bent on expressing his ideas and thoughts on the current world and his life through fantastical worlds and fictional settings. Born in 2003 in Claremore, Oklahoma, he has always gravitated towards storytelling and is dead set on making this craft his career, no matter the hardships that may come his way. Outside of writing, Nikolai often finds himself reading comic books, playing video games, and enjoying life to the fullest before the total weight of true adulthood sets in. To learn more about Nikolai Ilyushenko, follow him on Twitter (now X, but he refuses to call it that) at @NikolaiIlyushen.