Cantos for the Algorithm
(after the fractured syntax of now)
I.
Tiresias in a cubicle farm, bifocals fogged
with the breath of NASDAQ’s oracle —
Buy. Sell. Buy. Sell. His smartphone hums
a Babylonian ledger, cuneiform of likes.
Schopenhauer’s Wi-Fi password: WILL2NOT.
II.
Young men, their faces QR codes half-scanned,
drone Sprechstimme into AirPods —
“I was born with a dead man’s hands
in my pockets.” Their fathers’ war was the Somme;
theirs is a Slack channel named Agamemnon’s Ghost.
III.
At the Food Court of the Vanishing West,
they gnaw chicken bones, recite Hart Crane
between bites. The broken world is a TikTok loop:
Zarathustra’s Uber Eats arrives cold.
The app demands five stars for its nihilism.
IV.
Dante’s Inferno glitches. Fifth circle:
the wrathful scroll Twitter feuds,
the sullen drown in crypto’s septic tide.
Beatrice? She left her avatar on read,
her bio quotes Sappho and a OnlyFans link.
V.
Odysseus sails a Carvana lot,
his crew a crewcut AI spamming YARRR.
The sirens? Alexa, Siri, Cortana —
“Your cart is empty. Your cart is empty.”
Error 404: Ithaca not found.
VI.
In the chapel of the 24-hour gym,
Nietzsche’s Übermensch bench-presses tax returns.
Spotify shuffles Prufrock, then Pitbull.
Do I dare? The protein shake says EAT ME
in a font lifted from Alice in Chain Stores.
VII.
Midnight. The blockchain’s Byzantine choir
sings Dies Iræ in Python. They code
their epitaphs in memes: “Here lies
John Doe, who mistook his shadow
for a girlfriend. F in the chat.”
VIII.
Waste Land 2.0 boots up. The Fisher King
streams his throne — a La-Z-Boy hemorrhaging foam.
What branches grow out of this stony rubbish?
Only the thistle of a Zoom call on mute,
the Minotaur’s GPS recalculates
endlessly in the drained pool of a foreclosed suburb.
IX.
Kierkegaard weeps into a burner phone:
“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom —
also, my Venmo’s overdrawn.” The stars,
those age-old influencers, post nothing
but reruns. The moon’s a dead stream.
X.
They build arks of firewalls, herd
two of every extinct emotion aboard.
Rain flashes on Apple Weather.
No covenant, no dove. Just the cloud,
the cloud, the cloud, the cloud.