Cancel Culture

An extinct creature wandering through the internet.

This poem is based on the prompt by Alicia.

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Cancel Culture

While the iridescent six o’clock sky
watched me through the window,

I heard a sound so immense
the bones of the earth
began to tremble.

Then the ground began to rain.

Supplications split the air.
My ruins scattered everywhere.

The world kept collapsing
until it stood naked.

The lies.
The pride.
The hidden darknesses.

A brontosaurus
forced its way
through clouds of dust.

BOOM.
BOOM.

BOOM.
BOOM.

A storm of hatred
drowned everything in its path.

Its skin hung in shreds.
Its spine was gnawed through,
rusted,
parasitized.

The brontosaurus,
consumed by fury,

trampled prisons,
trampled crime,
trampled politicians.

It trampled children too,
playing tag between abandoned carts.

It trampled adults
glowing blue
beneath endless scrolling,

leaving venom in comment sections,
spreading toxic weather,
ritual plagues,
contagious hungers.

It could no longer tell
good from evil.

“What do they call you?”

“I don’t remember anymore.

But some people
used to call me
cancel culture.”

“May I climb onto your back?”

And it lowered its tangled neck,
while I climbed
onto its rusted spine
covered in dead trees.

BOOM.
BOOM.

BOOM.
BOOM.

Together we wandered,
and the brontosaurus
kept ruining everything in its wake,

consumed by screenshots,
conversations ripped from context,
irrational hatred,
and the slow death of empathy.

It swallowed everything.
Poisoned everything.
Withered everything.

Destroying itself
and the world beside it.

In the middle of our journey,
we heard a distant voice,
the fragile lament
of a solitary man.

“WAIT!”

And we stopped abruptly.

I climbed down from its back
and gathered the man into my arms.

“Why do you weep?
Why do you mourn?
Why do you suffer so deeply,
lonely man?

Why do you kneel beneath the night,
rocking the dark
with your ash-filled hymns?”

The brontosaurus watched him,
while the repentant man sighed,
waiting quietly
for his sentence.

The repentant man told his story.
His griefs.

He confessed his crimes,
his failures,
his torment.

The weight.
The aftertaste.
The scars
of remorse.

I pressed my forehead against his.
I chose
to feel his pain.

I cried.
He cried.
We cried a river,
an ocean,
an aquarium breaking open with fish.

And the brontosaurus’ rotting skin
slowly turned lime green,
while tiny leaves
sprouted from its roots.

Sunlight washed the anguish away.

Forgiveness.
Symbiosis.
Shared pain.

Dawn carried the past away with it.

Then he and I
climbed onto the brontosaurus together.

BOOM.
BOOM.

BOOM.
BOOM.

Love.
The overflow.
The radiance
of happy tears.

Laughter learning how to rhyme.

Spring blooming
with every step.

A new world being born,

and the return
of something ancient
we were never meant to lose.

The brontosaurus stretched its body
so the entire universe
could hear it speak:

“No.

That is not my name anymore.

My name is
second chances.”

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Let’s change the world together!

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Every quiet gesture helps.