14.6.17

This is Your Facebook Page Bursting into Flames


Match to match, tree to tree, soul to soul,
disembodied faces roiling into a roar:
This is your Facebook page set on fire. 

Coffee house man. In his black danger shirt.
A style set alight in Cambridge and San Francisco.
Distant and divisible. Locked into his spacey game face.

Day traders with caps on backwards.
Facing each other at a table, but not seeing,
talking, an electrical frenzy feeding.

Headphones plugged in.
Tommy knows where to put his cork
as more vacant ghosts enter each door.

Crew cut hipster male in a tight T-shirt
walking up and down the caffeine freak floor.
Waving his arms. Speaking to the invisible ether.

No one calls for the men in white suits.
No one says this is the quickening,
the fall of the robot on his auto-pilot throne.

Pressing all buttons! Pressing all buttons!
Faster fire faster fire! See and Say toys
pressed into weapons for desire.

Help me! Help me! 
Look at me! Look at me!
Immersion is art is affirmation.

One faces suicide as one faces toast,
another's salad has done and gone soft,
another selfie's on a yacht and you want it to sink.

Political rage. Monkeys in a cage.
The narcissist echo going ping ping ping.
The troll leaping out like a jack-in-the-box,

Eternal documentation for our verification.
The anniversary meme bounces back
like a bad dream. What were you thinking?

There's a rumble in the hacking.
Is this Rome for the sacking?
The lit-up void gone paranoid for peeping.

The click-per-minute pace.
The ache in your back
as the moment is breaking.

Disembodied avatars burning brown
as fake news reels as real news keeps faking.
God is the cyborg but God is just joking.

You sit still so long you can't take a shit.
A leader who will take us all down
just for the clicks.

~ Douglas McDaniel