Shared Faux Heritage

I know we don’t share the same blood. That’s fine.

You got a whole different existence, definitely, though it’s strange how we have this same language.

Do you think we picked up the words from the same TV shows, cultural icons? I’m sure we share a flimsy overlap of teachers and such personalities: there’s always the fat kid.

We can take this limb of language and reach further into the past: at once I am fused up by the bloodshed in these sentences’ spaces. We both could’ve been MK-Ultra victims: do you think there’s a brotherhood in that?

The sidewalks seem poured yesterday. Everywhere around so comes whispers of a shared heritage slowly eroded, or at least mauled and scavenged.

Maybe this, then, is where we diverge. You look up at the state and see it as something to give way to vines. But maybe others look up and wonder how the metal molted this way, the same hands attached.

Sure, we played the same videogames. Absolutely, cartoon network or nickelodeon and its foot fetishing. Could plunder up an animelist, too. Records and catalogs, movies and how “The Matrix” uncomfortably dots this reality more than one would care to admit, at least in lexicon.

But I am reminded of the parasite that infects its host, hollows it out, and directs it toward its ends.