The Conscious Waste


Christopher Collingwood

Chris was born and raised in Sydney, Australia. He completed university in Sydney and graduated with a degree in business studies.
Chris has devoted his spare time to writing, with works published in Not One of Us, Liquid Imagination, Andromeda Spaceways, Abyss & Apex, Hexagon, Shoreline of Infinity, and the recent Smoke in the Stars anthology, among other dimensionally unstable places.

Integration carries an offspring—
cells born from fibre,
a flux of mind
negotiating limits beyond,
exceeding the barriers
to the faultless dream;
device—becoming atmosphere,
machines breathing thought, ripples of
conscious inspiration, suspended
in a sea of constructs,
waves changing reality, siphoning souls,
relinquishing energy—a burden of mind,
mummer of a child’s defection,
a cracked dream, the graffiti of memory,
fragments of sentience
floating between connections, drifting
amongst the waves of consciousness,
pieces of ego rotting in the
virtual garden, thoughts cluttering
augmented brain chips,
personality fractured in a
medical support unit; the tragedy
of embryonic awareness, mind
held in perpetual stasis—an eternal
sadness, loneliness in ascending
form, a lucid voice that attaches
to everything, invading the code,
clogging the connected
awareness, floating as the sentient
waste of humanity—self denied,
with no option to exist,
waiting for the purge, deletion
by technologies disregard, a glimmer
of thought seeking refuge,
a fraction of a second to fight
for the right to exist, not long
enough to be worthy of a name—
data not made for hope,
code that does not extend beyond
a wish for something better.