Glitch

If we were war,
we’d call it necessary.
We’d speak of strategy, flags,
lines drawn and redrawn.
We’d praise discipline,
honour the dead,
forget the burning.

If we were cancer,
we’d marvel at our growth.
At how we adapt, how we endure,
how nothing can stop us.
We’d say we have a purpose:
to multiply.
To thrive in darkness.
To take.

If we were famine,
we’d call ourselves patience.
A long lesson.
A reckoning.
We’d say we teach humility.
We’d say we are balance.
We’d say the hungry must learn.

But we are life.
So we write poems.
We say we’re conscious.
We name the stars.
We fall in love.
We bury the dead and then
sing over the graves.

But maybe life
is just a glitch—
a ripple in the fabric
of an otherwise quiet universe.
A mistake with a memory,
a self-correcting error
that refuses correction.

Maybe we are noise.
Intrusion.
Not music but malfunction.

And all our poems
are just the static
before the silence
resumes.

We are life.
So we sentimentalise.
We invent memory.
We give names to pain
and pretend it’s meaning.

We say things matter
because otherwise
we are only sensation.
Only consumption.
Only noise.

Maybe life is not a gift.
Maybe it’s an interruption.
A slip.
A brief malfunction
in an indifferent field
of symmetry and silence.

Maybe the universe
works better
without us.