Drip-Fed

The feed refreshes with a fish-mouth flick,
a gill of glow gulping the plankton-news;
each thumb a tiny thaumaturge of quick
resurrections tailored to attention's shoes.
The screen unsleeps. The pixels pearl and preen.
A thousand notifications pollinate the nerve.
The eye becomes an aye becomes a machine
for granting every appetite a verb.

We breakfast on catastrophes in flakes.
We spoon up spoon-fed spoons of secondhand alarm.
The algorithm algorhythms through our wakes,
counting pulse by pulse, harm by purchased charm.
A headline hedges. A rumor ruminates.
A fact fractures into faction, then into feed.
Meaning molts. Significance migrates.
Every need grows knees and learns to breed.

The scroll unrolls its scrollwork. Soulwork too.
Each gesture genuflects before the glass.
The present tense grows tents within the view,
whole cities of attention built to pass.
An outrage enters salted, cured, preserved,
fit for long consumption, shelf-life grief.
A grief becomes a brief. A brief gets served.
The sentence seeks conviction and relief.

The good appears with absolution bundled,
shrink-wrapped in smiles and frictionless acclaim.
The bad arrives leveraged, stacked, and fundled,
a blackened dividend payable in blame.
We spend it lavishly. We spend it twice.
We spend tomorrow's outrage yesterday.
The soul accepts promotional sacrifice.
The conscience clips a coupon on the way.

And noon expands beyond all natural measure.
No evening enters. Shadow loses trade.
The clock develops chronic overstature.
Time itself becomes a brightly lit arcade.
A million dawns remain unborn, unfathered,
their gold still folded somewhere in the seam.
Around the bell of self the hours gather,
iron filings circling a private dream.

The metrics bloom. The numerals propagate.
Every count recounts the counter of the count.
I feel my inner weather bureaucrate,
turning rainfall into figures to amount.
My laughter leaves receipts.
My sorrows audit clean.
Even memory invoices its retreats.
Even longing asks what longing means.

Then comes the hush beneath accumulation,
the quiet sum beneath the summed-up sum.
A cemetery hidden in computation,
a ledger where all columns finally come.
Each swipe a little sanding of the spirit.
Each click a clerk inscribing further loss.
I hear the arithmetic inherit
the burden once assigned to god or cross.

The feed refreshes. I compress with it.
A mutual haunting. A mirrored consumption.
Bit by bit by bit by bit by bit,
a feast of gradual self-assumption.
The screen keeps offering immortal little morsels,
bright sugar discs of never-enough light.
I taste the future whitening into fossils.
I watch the day ossify into night.

I must set down the thumb that served as stylus.
And close the mouth that learned to feed on glow.
The bell keeps ringing, though it rings behind us.
The river totals what the banks still owe.
Tonight I choose an exit over endless entry.
Tonight I leave the ledger to itself.
I shelve my name among the unsent century,
extinguish the account,
and join the shelf.