Silicon Kadath

In the hushed labyrinths of basements and closets,
beneath beds and behind garage walls,
they lie—
eldritch husks of circuitry,
glimmering like fossilized time.

The Ewaste,
our haunted relics of progress,
dead familiars with eyes once lit—
phones that whispered across oceans,
laptops that dreamed in code,
tablets touched like sacred scrolls.

Now they hum no more,
but their silence is not empty.

They leak mercury like forgotten prophecy,
cadmium bleeding like the blood
of some long-extinct machine god,
plutonian in their hush.

Each one a tombstone
in a digital necropolis,
strewn not on dream-soaked plains,
but in heaps—
coiled in shadowed landfills,
or shipped across oceans,
to be burned beneath
the dreaming sun of another man's sky.

Is this not what Randolph Carter feared
as he climbed the onyx steps of Kadath,
seeking gods who had long abandoned
the pulsing warmth of man?

These are our gods now—
in sleep mode,
in shutdown,
in error code.

And like Lovecraft’s forgotten cities,
we built them tall
then left them to rot.

Cold waste.
A term fit not just for the stars
and wind-lashed peaks
where dreamers lose themselves,
but for our half-life offerings
to an ever-hungrier void.

And still we build.
And still we dream.
And still we discard—
our tech,
our time,
our minds—
into the pale abyss
where even Nyarlathotep
would blink and say:
Ah yes, these humans,
they know waste as I know chaos.