Skincare Routine I
By James Joyce
And so we sink, down, deeper down—slipping sodden through the folds of time’s last blanket, toward the pocked and quiet grave of this wisp-thin tribe, the pinkfaced brood, cherubcheeked and mewling not in pain but pose. Ah! here they lie, lie and dwell, curled in the chrome husks of their own delusion, polished up by mirrorlikes and backlit truths, twitching still under the lashless eye of some underworld Ba’al, darkly grinning in the code. The wires hum sermons. The soft ones—they obey, oh how they obey!—thinking, yes, thinking, they brandish virtue when it’s mimicry, a mime of the martyr with none of the wound.
O the vapidity! Vapider than air after a scream! Their cowardice—a pearl of self, unformed, unknowing—clings behind shields of brittle thought, like sugar glass masked as wisdom. Kin call to kin, and the wind catches their wail—a tiny gasp!—an echo echoing the hollowness they build, that they built, that they are. The void, yes, yes, that yawning grey-soap sea, full of eggshell heads rolling, lolling—roll me another thought, sweet boy, make it mean nothing. Beneath the dun-dim sky they skitter, these unborns, these velvet cocoonlings, never having touched the ragged edge of life, or love, or skin undone in joy or grief.
Only ever hugged by upholstery. Raised in rooms too warm. And when it comes—ah, when it comes—they croak their isms, bleat their ologies, gulp their ognys like medicine unearned. 4chan-frothed and forge-born in that gutterlight gallantry, they slap down old ideas with the glee of a child smashing dishes for mother to see. Read, yes, read! And empty. Empty of time, of place, of spine. Fantasists with no fire, caught in mimic-worlds long since burned, long since buried.
No sails, no north, no breath of storm to move them. Just plastic boats for Poseidon’s play. And what shall remain? What marker? What word? A tombstone—perhaps. Some pixel irony, brittle as bone dust. No seed to plant, no mind to nourish, no grief to remember. Just a sigh, perhaps, from some far-off eye.
And we—we who still breathe under real sky—must now bow heads, not in mourning, no, but in that cold hush of recognition. For they were never born, these glistening ghosts, these babyfaced wonders, aborted not in body but in soul.