AH, YES, DEAR NOVELISTS
ah yes, dear novelists,
I appreciate your skill
at bringing characters
to life
putting them through Hell
and we look on in wonder,
utterly inspired
muttering to ourselves:
great character arc
great character arc
tragic, bittersweet, happy ending
we love them all, savour
the way they battled,
suffered,
fought their way to victory
via titanic struggle
or
so close to victory
failed at the last
and then we must think
of those characters, prototypes,
who did not even
find their way onto paper
something about
them defective, limited,
no reader empathy there
nothing with
which to identify
and then
those darlings who would have
had us all bedazzled, drowned
our everything with
their purple-prose intensity
these darlings who
had to be killed off, jettisoned,
thrown
by the wayside, suffocated
in their cribs, so to speak,
I wonder about them, being
things of text, creatures of
pen
and ink
how might they have suffered?
how sad
if they were conscious
feeling beings
their fate would really be
a fate
we would share if we
ourselves were, unbeknownst,
actors, players,
characters in
some advanced simulation
the reality of our
flesh-and-consciousness
simply a
fantastic advance in technology
literary creativity, inventiveness,
and writing technique