The world does not spin.
It crunches.

Gravity folds upon itself, devouring its own weight.
A pestle grinds Being into the mortar of Oblivion, and here we are — caught between, reduced to dust.

I taste grit. I bleed Polyfilla. Asbestos coats the lungs. Tar and concrete calcify the air.
This was no bargain. No dotted line bears our names. Consent was never offered.

Freedom, liberty, autonomy, free will.
Free free free.
Say it fast enough and it almost feels true.
Spin the colour wheel and confusion blurs to white. Almost. But the taste of ash remains.

Billions slop through primordial muck, aeons deep, never stepping out.
The soup remains rancid. We never left it.
And so the world crunches.

We whirl like fingertips on angle grinders, tenderness stripped raw.
The clock accelerates.
The Skimming looms: wheat from chaff, lifted from left.

Sleep is mercy.
In dreams there is balance: equations hold, cause precedes effect, logic breathes.
There, sense. Here, disorder.
Whose humour cast us into this place?
Pure chance married to infinity could not conceive such orchestrated tragedy.

I sought Atlas in the marrow of mountains, in the vertebrae of valleys.
I knew him in the fold of his cheek, in the lip of his brow.
Atlas sweats ligament and weeps calcium.
Atlas does not shrug. He buckles.

The Great Organ Grinder plays on, turning the handle of the particle dance.
The curtain falls. The theatre dissolves.

Were we ever here at all?

The Skimming will lift the few.
The rest flail, their sense-making collapsing.
Self-pity burns at the altar of impotence, and the Crunch reigns omnipotent.
Soot ascends, humming beautifully.
The axis blurs. We are pulled inward, then flung apart.

And Atlas smiles.
And the Crunch smiles back.

…

If you’ve read some of what I’ve written before, you may suspect that the above is not representative of my general philosophy. Indeed, you may suspect here some kind of psychotic break.

Do not fret, dear friends. The door of sanity still rests secure on its hinges.

In an effort to write more broadly, to push myself out from my cosy-creative-nook, the above was written in response to a prompt, or, challenge: to write from the perspective of a villain, but to do so in a sympathetically compelling manner.

And who is more villainous than MF Doom, the villain of all villains? With his Accordion on repeat through my headphones, the yarn of the crunching world was spun.