Published August 9, 2026
Warning: This work has been rated 16+ for mature content.
The world is a secret I want to tell you.
Did you know the Rovers won?
Did you know about midnight water
and the way it cups the light?
Did you know about the guy who went to a seminar high on coke?
Did you know that I am one small game away
from eating the cosmos whole?
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139,781 Literary Works • 672,759 Reviews
Hello! I saw your poem in the Green Room, and both the title and the description caught my eye. It's pretty short, but there's so much substance in it. I love the direct tie-in to the Oracle of Delphi which has significant meaning in Greek mythology. I eavesdrop as well (and end up staring too lol), and I hear all sorts of interesting lore about the people.
The narrator compares themselves to the Oracle as they observe the world around them, knowing all sorts of secrets. There's no transition between the lines; they're all different from each other, which also fits the tone of the poem. As 4revgreen said in their review, the Oracle's prophecies don't make much sense usually; they're disjointed but entertaining all the same. I love the framing of "Did you know?" It adds so much intrigue and wonder.
Thank you so much, that's so lovely to hear!!! (and yeah I was quite proud of the title hehe)
Okay, so firstly I had to Google who the Oracle of Delphi was, so now I know a little about Pythia, and I hope that's who you mean, or that's a bit embarrassing lol. The oracle gives divine, cryptic, world-altering prophecies, and sometimes these were gibberish. And of course we all know Cookie Clicker, a game known for being repetitive and arbitrarily meaningless.
I love the idea of a poem being made up of things that have been overheard on a bus. I wish it had been longer because I also love listening in on strangers' conversations.
So we start the poem with this framing sentence, setting up the rest to be a list of secrets, perhaps something intimate and revealing about strangers. However, what is revealed to us is:
Which is not really a secret, but a trivial, everyday piece of sports information. I imagine this being delivered in a deadpan way.
A very beautiful set of lines, my favourite in the poem. This is more like a secret observation of the universe, very different in contrast to the Rover's line. Then we bounce back to something more mundane,:
Ahh, the seedy side of student life, the sort of thing that is a secret but is spread around like a rumour. Then back to something more profound:
I love the way the poem zig-zags between the banal and the profound, but it's genius the way that this sounds like a divine prophecy, but the 'cosmos' refers to literally escalating the absurd numbers of the idle clicker game.
I wondered if by delivering all the lines with 'did you know' and treating them with the same gravitas, this was to show how perhaps all information is oracle now, because we no longer have a mechanism to sort the divine from the banal? Everything comes at us in the same tone, the same notification; we no longer have these insane prophecies or details about our lives.
I am very intrigued to know what your intentions actually were! A brilliant poem.
Thank you so much, this is such a lovely comment! I was indeed referring to Pythia
This actually came more-or-less straight from life - I wrote it on the bus home after a really lovely evening out. I'd been a bit of a hermit beforehand, and it made every mundane detail feel like I was being let in on a magical secret. That mixture of the banal and the profound was very intentional, I was really struck by all these different details and vibes existing in the same place.
Then when I uploaded it here I needed to give it a title, and I decided on the Pythia reference because I wanted to capture that feeling of having secret knowledge (and, again, I loved that contrast of this powerful and prophetic figure playing an idle game on the bus!)
I love your reading of everything being flattened! It's not something I was intentionally angling for but it's definitely a very natural fit and one I'm happy to have existing in there.