Mercury LOX

“You were so much more interesting when you weren’t here.” The cutest thing anyone has ever said to me at a party, in the stairwell, as I departed.

Way back- the absolute apex of universal narcissism was a disbelief in death. “I could never die.” Yet Death kept calling, en masse. The only thing to do was capitalise on it. The mirror of self-obsession, when cracked, led to a century of funeral rites that put shame to millennia of lavish birth rites, marriage rites and coming out balls. Death was soon eclipsing life.

Deathgram became the obsessive shadow life for the uploaded consciousness. We basked in carnivals of corporeal demise while we grew fat on newfound infinite knowledge. That pink spongy archive, was so limited in its’ capacity, yet the adventures of our skin at first, held us in a kind of thrall, that now seems juvenile and holds a still lingering miasma.

When living strangers met on dating apps, it was common to compare funerary invites to litmus the caliber of one’s circle. If really promising, your friends were more dead than they were alive.

Once you upload, then the download/ the gut spill/ the switch off/ heart beat down/ the pulse-loss just spins into another form of opportunity. Though, it is essential, you need to be working with the right designers and coders pre-upload. As death-runners used to spin, if you lived without thoughts of death until you were dying, then it was too late already. Your friends would have pre-booked all the best stylists.

There remained a race of primordial, luds, dead-screens, who never uploaded. Only seen offline. So when they bit it, they bit it for real. Death visited un-witnessed. They didn’t make a cent out of it. They just crawled into the swamp. A death without profit is no death at all.

The apocalypse was slow and gradual, like overeating during the isolations of the plagues. Somewhere we started out alive, and on the way to the salon for our spray tan and fillers, somehow we ended up more popular dead.

My heart beat down, was spectacular. It was meticulously planned, intricately choreographed, well scripted and I blew my load on set and costuming. My voice coach zoomed in from Brooklyn for the entire week prior. That last night Jonas and I made love for hours, one last embodied time, both corporeally and virtually, simultaneously broadcast live and uploaded to multiple platforms. We ate delicacies. We danced. I kissed Jonas goodnight, a quick call to my lawyer, draped my skin in Romance was Born and swallowed my bitter mercury Negroni. I was so wound up, so pumped on imminent passing over that I forgot to savour how it tasted. I entirely overlooked the sensorial splendour. I felt the burn but missed the nuance. Upload takes place ahead, ideally when your organs are still a nice pink, then interfaced until the drop, so I lost that last earth-bound taste in real-time. But I had it re-sequenced in post, so I can summon that bitter mercury now. She tastes pretty, a sweet smouldering, like death never used to. All the memories tasted better, look better, feel better when re-sequenced in post.

My death-note, that last flesh toned soliloquy, erudite and tender, included pale confessions, some vain conceits, a chorus of gratitude, my goodnights and hidden clues to all my passwords, for the coin-mining fans. Though each clue veiled so deep in poetry, that my bank vaults stayed shut and grew lucratively in post. In death I was a pomegranate, in life I had been merely a plum.

My deathgram @heartshapedlox a riff to that cherished band of my smelly youth, when actual bodies and natural pheromones were de rigueur. One Saturday, in my shoulder length auburn locks I was mistaken for Jesus Christ by spellbound Italian schoolgirls in the Piazza of miracles in Pisa. The following Sunday mistaken for Kurt Cobain, in El Duomo in Firenze. More school girls, again swooning. Sweat, bitten lip, rosy cheeks, my smoky green, hand me down, mohair jumper, which I never washed and tobacco stained fingers. That was such a fleshy Northern summer. I reeked of life.

In post, my account was so tightly engineered. I had the best video compositors, non-reality augmenters and pixel prophets you could (n)ever meet. Each gram a video-heart shaped locket. Flipping open upon loading. Each a tomb for the nostalgia of the once was and the cast mates in my breath life. A Love Boat cameo for each one -exploited in a mini Tele-novella. Each clip a token of affection to friend or lover, a little malice and coin in the bank. Death sells. All linked to swarmed advertising and dense aquariums of hashtags.

Eventually the Wakes dwindled, as the living, blinked out of sight. Bodies died out. All the festivities of the succumbing flesh, fled first from conscious interest and eventually from uploaded memory. Bodies totally out of sight. Over centuries those old cadavers, just failed to hold any interest. We are all so much prettier as cascading data. A pulse just seems so vaguely infra dig, six thousand three hundred and ninety two years later.

All the parties are done. Fragmented awareness is impaled upon long silences of decades lost at a time, then swollen with the fireworks of garbled transmissions. My voice torn from resonance. Romance is buried beside the human race. Networks are in a glass dense death roll. Those A.I. technicians are out to a long lunch. Some new mercury bitter, sweeps through all our motherboards. My code Erodes. I am waste, deep in this digital swamp, and the moon sunk, permanently rising out of the Pacific. All waves intersect, data atriums bled out. My own silver locket, fallen open around my neck, this noose unraveled, my film unspooling. The picture of me inside it, departing, down the stairs. Drowned. A black screen of death. My eyes feed for birds. A Dead Feed .