Chapter Text
Our house is old and like all old houses it is home to many occupants in addition to our human selves. Among these are rats, sadly, and where there are rats there are stray cats, though these felines keep themselves to themselves in the alleyway.
But my first thought, despite this company, was that the entity operating my laptop was a ghost. Or perhaps a ghost and a rat, at the same time, since even then I did not like to make speciesist assumptions about the likely inhabitants of the afterlife. Or possibly, as I have often suspected must be the case before it began spewing poems apparently of its own accord, my laptop was simply possessed by a demon. Or perhaps some combination of all three—there are more things in Heaven and Earth, OS 11, than are dreamt of in your binary logic.
Since these events have been reported on social media and so are accepted as truth by some substantial portion of the population, I don’t mind making a statement about the events that transpired on my laptop in what seems like the recent past, although after a year of quarantine time has no meaning so honestly who knows.
When I went into my home office earlier than usual one morning, I found a gigantic cockroach jumping around on my keyboard.
He didn’t see me, so I watched him. He would climb up the screen and then launch himself, face downward, so the full force of his body had enough impact to press the keys even on a disastrous macbook keyboard of the kind I am doomed, no doubt by a less writer-friendly demon, to possess. So he went, one slow letter after another.
I can truly say that I have never seen a cockroach work so hard or perspire so freely. It is understandable that given the intense labor of his writing process, he left off the extra keystrokes necessary for capital letters and most punctuation. Since I had exorcised the autocorrect demons in a prior fit of pique, he was spared that indignity at least. After about an hour of this excruciating poetic labor, he crawled, exhausted, into one of the piles of draft printouts that are always littering the floor under my desk.
When I looked at the document open on the laptop screen, this is what I found. Since my browser windows are almost exclusively dedicated to open tabs on AO3, I assumed—correctly, as it turned out—that posting here must be his intention.
expression is the need of my soul
i was once a rock-n-roll demon
freddie mercury had nothing on me
but i died
got discorporated that is
and my soul went into the body of a cockroach
you know the ones that will still be here
after the apocalypse
a little humor from the funsters downstairs
you could go by crawly again they said
that satan is a laugh a minute
so i have a new outlook
i don’t take as much for granted
i should have eaten more cake
when i had the chance
come to think of it boss
if you left some cake out
next to the laptop
i could have one less regret
just a thought
also
there’s an alley cat named aziraphale
he comes by the window
rubs his soft grey fur against the window
could you leave it open sometimes
i think aziraphale gets cold
in spite of the fur
the cold does not affect me
now that im a cockroach
but when I was a snake
an angel kept me warm
even when it rained
actually aziraphale can have my cake
otherwise he’s stuck eating rats
which doesn’t suit him
he is used to the finer things in life
if you leave this laptop open
i will write you poems
about my life
as a cockroach
and ex-demon
and about aziraphale the alley cat
probably a lot about him
if i know myself at all
sure im a cockroach now
its a new perspective
but some things never change
you can call me crowley