“What you do speaks so loudly that I cannot hear what you say.”
Emerson
Let’s call them little algor-golems drilling my skull
for diamond-data
click, click, chipping away
they crawl like Texas kissing bugs over my face
thirsty little zuckers
micro-thug-creepers, the whole plotty lot
of greedy pickers
gathering all they can on you and me
stealing memories pushing suggestions
recommendations
to buy crap we don’t need, find others
friends of friends we’ll never meet,
they keep a steely-dan focus on driving ads.
all for the fat wad of big bills
the gold dust of Mark Z,
that is the Facebook money machine
not easy or sleek, but slick
and big time greedy.
We are marks for social media
easy prey, sitting bucks
dancing to rithims of predictive success
not mine, not yours
only his and the crew
using low sodium cheerful language
for easy coin, created
by bots for bots, all rights reserved
invades the brain, ransanks the heart
rifles through dreams with no consent
forbids the unfiltered truth:
it’s ok to lie, just be polite, as our people
suffer truth decay:
politicos tweet from towers
conspiracy visions, warped fantasies
as if we don’t see what they really are
ravenous spiders
weaving their threads, the will to power
gone to their heads
they want us distracted, unaware, under control
devoid of soul, as soul racking news fills the air,
to quote a real Republican, “Bullfeathers!”
I turn tonight from the book of smiling faces
to mourn for old Senya, my Grandmama
Ukrainians gone to untimely graves
and for my own guilt
our complicated complicity:
elected leaders give what they’ve made
spending for what
they cannot save by brute force
it’s already done, while those invisible gremlins
mine for gold, our world, our home is bought and sold.
