Moon at Half Past Noon

I find my history in the scroll.
April is the cruelest algorithm,
breeding forgotten memes from last year’s damp desire.
Winter kept us warm,
forgetting in the constant hum of the server farm,
streaming catastrophe in Ultra HD.

My river is not water, but light.
A data stream where truth and toxin braid a single,
shining cable to my hand. I bathe in it. I drink it.
It carries the voices of the influencers in their mountain resorts,
the gig worker’s sigh as he clicks ‘Accept,’
|the news anchor’s flawless, practiced dread—
a thumbnail of a thousand-yard stare.
It is a discourse network, and its god is a selective filter,
blessing the scream, drowning the whisper.

I am diagnosed.
Narrative Fragmentation Disorder, the doctor said.
A polite term for a life lived in tabs.
One tab: a tutorial on self-care.
The next: a live feed of a glacier’s death rattle.
Another: a chat with a name I can’t quite place,
typing bubbles that appear and vanish, a ghost in the machine.
My self is a browser, frozen, too many windows open,
each screaming a different version of a world that is ending,
or a product I must buy to delay the ending.
I deliver food to those who can no longer taste it.
I swipe through faces that blur into one highly-edited smile.
I have traded camaraderie for a comment section,
kinship for a shared Wi-Fi password,
love for the warm glow of a heart-icon, given and received.
Sex is a documentary I watch alone, more compelling for its lack of consequence, its clean, digital distance.

I am the hollow king. I am the crowd.
I am the data point and the scientist reading it.
And through my curated window, the literal world insists.
The sky is not a canopy, but a wound.
The few trees strain, too young to breathe the air we gave them.
The river below my tower changes color with the season’s chemical regret. The mountains shift.
The oceans boil without warning on my feed,
and I feel a mental tension that is not mine, but ours.

This is the new stony rubbish.
The true barren land. It is not post-war.
It is present tense.
What are the roots that clutch?
What grows in this?
I know only a heap of broken images:
a notification, a headline, a memory of the salt spray
from a beach I can’t quite place.
The sun beats on the black glass of my screen,
and it gives no shelter.
I will show you fear in a handful of rust—
the dust of a forgotten phone, the dust of a parched earth,
the dust of a self, scattered across a thousand databases.

The cure is not in the stream, but in its cessation.
The peace, not in the like, but in the logout.
But the silence is a mirror.
And in it, a stranger, a human alien, waits.
We have chosen the curated illusion,
and now the difficult,
beautiful work of building a soul feels like a forgotten language.
We wait for rain, but we are the drought.
And the thunder speaks.
I have taken your attention.

I have parsed your love.
I have herded your desire.
Shantih shantih shantih.
The peace of a closed ticket.
The peace of a finished process.
The peace that passeth understanding,
because we have chosen not to understand.
What will we choose next?