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AwakeningPoems
It is spring. that is to say another season tries to begin under bombardment. On the feed a girl from Kherson explains, without a tremor, that the drone killed both her dogs and the cat. She lists them like groceries. She is tidy about grief. The Iraq War vet down the pub says: "that’s how my father talked" life on the Eastern Front, after four years plus six more, unlucky volksdeutsch toddler, as his unholy kindergarten. So we look again at the child on the screen and the silence isn’t just for her it is for him for 1943 for winter marches for men who learned that the heart can be planed down to a flat board if history keeps running it through. We used to think it took trenches and rifles and orders barked in bad weather to get that flat. We used to think it took mud and a man beside you turning into red air. But now the instrument is lighter. Now it is a room with blackout curtains a headset a broadband line a boy and the lesson is: a harmful act followed by no suffering followed by reward / rank / XP / banter again again again again. No flies. No bleach. No mother shouting from the stair. Only ping. Only “nice shot.” Only “gg.” This is not “teach him to **** But This is delete the price tag. This is will without residue. This is power is clean. Do that for twelve years and then ask why he posts like no one bleeds. Ask the teacher, my just-passed sister so dear. She had forty years of faces in her. She said: the millennials at least had a playground that was not wired. They fought over swings where someone cried for real. But these Gen Z kids are pure Lord of the Flies she lamented but with Wi-Fi. Feral but indoors. Each year, worse, she said. Each year more boys arrive already armoured in irony and grievance and the voice of some hideous British podcaster saying women took everything. She said they don’t believe in consequence because they have never seen an action finish. Every action for them is cut by an ad a tab a parental call a respawn. We implored her but McLuhan promised a global village. She said we got one. It’s just the village from 1932. In the trenches a century ago men learned that you can impose your will with enough steel. When they came home many of them liked it and built parties to keep it. In Österreich, in the Weimar glare of Deutschland, in Italia, the mothership of all, in tightened-belt Magyarország, in shrine-bright România, in waiting-room Hrvatska and Slovensko, in royal-latched Kraljevina Jugoslavija, even down into Bălgariya and Elláda; those places that didn't call it fascism but just look at the boots... I know how to make the world listen: force. Now in basements with controllers and similar hunger and 15% youth unemployment (over ten-thousand applications at one New York City Mickey Dee's) and a feed that keeps saying "you were robbed by women by migrants by progressives by queers" (but almost never by the automation you’re actually mad at) boys are being taught And don't tell me it ain't true cause I'm a gamer, too ... the same pose without the mud. What once was learned in trenches and rifles is now learned in basement with controllers. The fascism is interface-shaped now. They do not need book clubs. They have lobbies. They do not need brown-shirted Sturmabteilung. They have clans. They do not need München beer halls. They have Discord. And in those rooms older, angrier men — some of them real-war broken — fish for them, praising the clean headshot, adding a little Tate, a little Farage, a little Trump, a little Le Pen, like seasoning, till the boy who only wanted to be good at the map is suddenly discussing “the great replacement” between rounds. "America adores violence," Williams said. "We have violence for service. Battleships for peace. Enterprise to bring bananas to breakfast." He said that before television became nightly war, before the net took out the last restraint of distance. He did not yet see killstreak bonuses. He did not yet see stream-sniping. But he saw us. By the road to the contagious hospital spring struggled under dead grass. By the cable to the contagious household a new spring struggles under lifeless feeds. There is the same thinness of color, the same half-life (or Half-Life) of feeling. The children should be green. They are buffering. And still we say let it pass. Because we like the convenience. We like the dopamine. We like our kids quiet. We like our outrage coming pre-edited. This is how a species arrives at adulthood having practiced two hundred thousand painless harms before the first real death in the family. This is how a girl on the southern front can name her dearly beloved two dogs and one cat like items struck from a grocer's list. This is how a veteran in another country can look at her and think, haunted: "she has my father’s eyes..." This is how we build our next authoritarians. Not from Mein Kampf but from menus. Not from Nürnberg but from lobbies. Not from triumph of the will but from triumph of the ping. And so we remember that Williams also said "Poetry is a rival government." Because tyrants always shut down the comics, the puppets, the satirists. Because Guthrie wrote on his guitar "This machine kills fascists" and he meant the song trips the circuit of obedience. So let this do the same. Let this be the line break they can’t algorithm away. Let this name the wound the games refused us. Let this cost. And because you wanted it — the old voice, the one that knew how innocence and forgetting can both be terrors — let the last echo be: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;” — and hear how it fits too well for kids who can press Start and make a new self whenever the old one gets stained. And let us all create a true New Republic a global New Republic where in our republic decrees are issued only after tea and no child or dog or cat is ever collateral. *
0
Mar 30
Mar 30, 2026 at 12:30 AM UTC
By the Wire to the Contagious Household
It is spring. that is to say another season tries to begin under bombardment. On the feed a girl from Kherson explains, without a tremor, that the drone killed both her dogs and the cat. She lists them like groceries. She is tidy about grief. The Iraq War vet down the pub says: "that’s how my father talked" life on the Eastern Front, after four years plus six more, unlucky volksdeutsch toddler, as his unholy kindergarten. So we look again at the child on the screen and the silence isn’t just for her it is for him for 1943 for winter marches for men who learned that the heart can be planed down to a flat board if history keeps running it through. We used to think it took trenches and rifles and orders barked in bad weather to get that flat. We used to think it took mud and a man beside you turning into red air. But now the instrument is lighter. Now it is a room with blackout curtains a headset a broadband line a boy and the lesson is: a harmful act followed by no suffering followed by reward / rank / XP / banter again again again again. No flies. No bleach. No mother shouting from the stair. Only ping. Only “nice shot.” Only “gg.” This is not “teach him to **** But This is delete the price tag. This is will without residue. This is power is clean. Do that for twelve years and then ask why he posts like no one bleeds. Ask the teacher, my just-passed sister so dear. She had forty years of faces in her. She said: the millennials at least had a playground that was not wired. They fought over swings where someone cried for real. But these Gen Z kids are pure Lord of the Flies she lamented but with Wi-Fi. Feral but indoors. Each year, worse, she said. Each year more boys arrive already armoured in irony and grievance and the voice of some hideous British podcaster saying women took everything. She said they don’t believe in consequence because they have never seen an action finish. Every action for them is cut by an ad a tab a parental call a respawn. We implored her but McLuhan promised a global village. She said we got one. It’s just the village from 1932. In the trenches a century ago men learned that you can impose your will with enough steel. When they came home many of them liked it and built parties to keep it. In Österreich, in the Weimar glare of Deutschland, in Italia, the mothership of all, in tightened-belt Magyarország, in shrine-bright România, in waiting-room Hrvatska and Slovensko, in royal-latched Kraljevina Jugoslavija, even down into Bălgariya and Elláda; those places that didn't call it fascism but just look at the boots... I know how to make the world listen: force. Now in basements with controllers and similar hunger and 15% youth unemployment (over ten-thousand applications at one New York City Mickey Dee's) and a feed that keeps saying "you were robbed by women by migrants by progressives by queers" (but almost never by the automation you’re actually mad at) boys are being taught And don't tell me it ain't true cause I'm a gamer, too ... the same pose without the mud. What once was learned in trenches and rifles is now learned in basement with controllers. The fascism is interface-shaped now. They do not need book clubs. They have lobbies. They do not need brown-shirted Sturmabteilung. They have clans. They do not need München beer halls. They have Discord. And in those rooms older, angrier men — some of them real-war broken — fish for them, praising the clean headshot, adding a little Tate, a little Farage, a little Trump, a little Le Pen, like seasoning, till the boy who only wanted to be good at the map is suddenly discussing “the great replacement” between rounds. "America adores violence," Williams said. "We have violence for service. Battleships for peace. Enterprise to bring bananas to breakfast." He said that before television became nightly war, before the net took out the last restraint of distance. He did not yet see killstreak bonuses. He did not yet see stream-sniping. But he saw us. By the road to the contagious hospital spring struggled under dead grass. By the cable to the contagious household a new spring struggles under lifeless feeds. There is the same thinness of color, the same half-life (or Half-Life) of feeling. The children should be green. They are buffering. And still we say let it pass. Because we like the convenience. We like the dopamine. We like our kids quiet. We like our outrage coming pre-edited. This is how a species arrives at adulthood having practiced two hundred thousand painless harms before the first real death in the family. This is how a girl on the southern front can name her dearly beloved two dogs and one cat like items struck from a grocer's list. This is how a veteran in another country can look at her and think, haunted: "she has my father’s eyes..." This is how we build our next authoritarians. Not from Mein Kampf but from menus. Not from Nürnberg but from lobbies. Not from triumph of the will but from triumph of the ping. And so we remember that Williams also said "Poetry is a rival government." Because tyrants always shut down the comics, the puppets, the satirists. Because Guthrie wrote on his guitar "This machine kills fascists" and he meant the song trips the circuit of obedience. So let this do the same. Let this be the line break they can’t algorithm away. Let this name the wound the games refused us. Let this cost. And because you wanted it — the old voice, the one that knew how innocence and forgetting can both be terrors — let the last echo be: “How happy is the blameless vestal’s lot! The world forgetting, by the world forgot. Eternal sunshine of the spotless mind! Each pray’r accepted, and each wish resign’d;” — and hear how it fits too well for kids who can press Start and make a new self whenever the old one gets stained. And let us all create a true New Republic a global New Republic where in our republic decrees are issued only after tea and no child or dog or cat is ever collateral. *
Just cleaning out my draft-folder fodder.
Awakening
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Awakening
Mar 30
Mar 30, 2026 at 12:30 AM UTC
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