If the light is a fork,
(and it is)
and you are the wooden handle,
and the wood still dreams of root and rain,
Then
The shadow is a spoon.
Don’t ask me why.
It just is.
Else,
If the light is a lie told by a switch—
a small god of true, false—
and you are the wire, stripped
a nerve that forgot its skin.
Then
the dark is the truth that got caught in the throat
It hurts.
it just does
But what if the if never ends?
No closing brace,
No semicolon sigh—
just a hanging question
a wound that would not scab?
I live in the Else
The country of overwise
The soil no seed selected
A bone that never found its skeleton
Here the light is not light—
It’s the echo of the light
begging the dark for a loan.
Here, the dark is not dark—
It’s the negative of a sun.
I am not I.
I am the line the compiler skipped.
The road the electron didn’t travel.
A ghost in the machine of chance.
Either you open the door
Or you become the door.
Either you name the silence
Or the silence names you.
There is no Then here.
No consequence.
Only the choosing:
to be the wound
or the weather that worries it.
Do not nest me in another If.
Do not bracket me in maybes.
I am tired of condition.
Weary of branch and loop.
I am the Else.
Absolute.
Un-If-ed.
The answer to the question
no one remembered to ask.
And what if Else itself
has an Else?
Then I am the Else of the Else —
the otherwise otherwise—
a recursion of silence,
a nested void
humming its own dark code.
Come, inhabit the gap.
Dwell in the parentheses.
that never closes.
Be the truth that occurs
only when every condition
has failed.
Be the Else
that is no alternative—
but a home.
About the Author
Ivan A. Salazar M. is a silent bard, author of several poetry collections—Temporal Echoes, Dream Weaver, If You Head South, Love and Life ans Other Poems, Hope, Stranger and Other Poems, Our America, Pixels, Planets, and Playful Rhymes, Others in Us and Other Poems, Our City and Other Poems—Salazar inspires and connects cultures and hearts through the magic of his pen.
He is also a social critic: Disruptive Technologies, The Anti-Machiavellian, Labour and Value, Aesthetics to Ethics in the Algorithmic Age, and The Road to Cannabis Legalisation. And a science fiction writer: Ziggy in the Void and Beneath the Gas Giant’s Gaze.
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