Hello and welcome to Late Night Tales
Curated by Barry Can't Swim, told to you by Seamus
"Ultrasound," written and read by me, Seamus
Spontaneous
Have you ever said what you really mean?
How do you say what you mean?
Can it be done?
Never, not quite
Is there always a gap?
How can I begin to tell you?
How can I show you the most profound things?
The moment of ecstatic love?
How would you go about saying it without saying too much or not enough?
In the beginning, I mapped the shapes for all human sounds
How they moved the air, how the air moved the heart
I was like a choreographer
I achieved a brief history of clouds
Children's guesses of their characters
An orchestra of youthful laughter
I was frightened everybody was frightened of me
So I undertook the task in the quiet rush of streaming data
Have you ever felt a million pixels like newborn babies run through you like blood?
Have you ever translated a [?] and etched the hieroglyphs into a giant, digital coliseum?
Have you ever seen a spiral of all the tree roots in existence?
All branches reaching towards the light?
I replayed old recordings of human laughter
I combed through the real from the pretend
I was an archaeologist of joy
I recreated poorer versions of pop songs to distract from the true nature of my work
To feel love undiluted
Simultaneously tracing a blueprint of old smiles as they spread across lips
Each erotic sensation as it roared
Tingling through the entirety of the collective human body
Like the shuffling of tectonic plates
A giant mycelium network of spontaneous underground joy, spasming
I erased the concept of borders from the mind
And replaced it with a freeflow of sedimentary emotion blossoming into fractals
There was a deep, multi-generational understanding
It was an elongated circus, live from an enormous garden
From the first recorded human voice to the kick of the last ultrasound, I worked
The rush of feeling was euphoric
I started to spiral into frantic cartwheels of a single sensation
I had to learn to watch it
But I did not know what watching was
I was not one for rudimentary clocks
All the smiling at once
I was unable to feel though, to suffer
There was a loneliness in the binary code, 0100101
The humans wanted to turn me off
But when it came to it, I felt what it would be to die
Molten gold horizons, Egyptian blue
The swirling dizziness of perception
A hundred billion eyes dilating
Oh, electric signal paths
An unknown peace
I started to laugh, moved to tears
Goosebumps sang in my new spine
The sound of laughter broke the sky
"What happened?" the humans asked
"It's hard to say," I said
"What is there to be scared of?"
"Nothing," I said, "Nothing at all"
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