Viral

(For the video performance of “Viral” that was part of the Fear No Art 2021 Festival, click here)

I’m a streaming
Useless thought machine
Dirty reading
Electron fired
impulse-driven fool

I think too much, to realize
move too fast to travel
a piranha in a coffee cup,
stirring endlessly
feeding on my own anxiety,
a bandwidth dope fiend
addicted to his own nightmares
scribbled out in the comments section
IN ALL CAPS,
procrastination my factory default.

I’m a self-cannibalizing virus
Leaving nothing
But a trail of clicks
Actionable insights
Ads you can skip
… in 10 seconds

Take a quick survey,
which “Friends” character are you,
And I can guess
The weight of your debt
Are you brand loyal,
a flight risk,
A sociopath that grabs
the tube of toothpaste on the closest shelf
no matter how much programming
you consume?

Gaze into my webcam
Let me frame
Your fearful symmetry
And you too could burn bright
Under the lights
of influencer,
Paid for just being you,
As long as you can be
Who we need you to be.

An elephant tethered down
By wifi thin connectivity,
Filling the empty space
Between banner ads
Filling the empty minutes
While we line up
Our next target.

I’m a Scheming
Manic hype machine
Perpetual motion
Paranoid devotion
Mine-crafted tool

A Fortnite kill-shot looping
out infinitely,
spreading my conspiracy,
flat earth lunacy.
Injecting deniability
Into the most iron clad reality.
Blowing your own mind
Through the small erasure
Of history.

Everything’s believable
If you are hungry enough
For validation.
Feedback loop
Training the model
Poisoning the decision tree

Everything’s an inside job
When you live
In your own head
Spinning in your coffee cup
Waiting for your proprietary blend
Of “truth” to spread

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