These mornings no longer arrive with paper.
They arrive with a thumb tap on glass
and a brief ecclesiastical flicker of light.
A small illuminated rectangle
awakens before the sun,
and the city, still half-dreaming,
places its faith upon the cold altar
of tensioned glass.
I scroll,
eyes barely clinging to the light.
Here is war, it says,
compressed into twenty seconds
of trembling footage
a building that stands in destruction
a city dissolving into dust
between two advertisements for shoes.
Here is a ****** again,
repeated with admirable clarity,
looped until horror
becomes choreography,
that aestheticizes violence.
Here a politician smiles
with the serene teeth of virtue,
announcing charity, progress, civilisation
our greatest accomplishments
making something great again,
while the comment section burns
like a miniature revolution of fools.
What prodigious theatre this is.
Princes of finance and espionage,
prophets of wellness and decay,
children dancing before mirrors in the sun,
philosophers distilled
into bus-stop slogans.
The spectacle renews itself each second:
a perpetual motion of images
where atrocity and laughter
share the same small stage.
A war is raging
where children and families are crying for loss
interrupted
by a cooking tutorial.
A catastrophe dissolves
into a meme.
A dying man becomes
background sound
for scrolling thumbs.
And everywhere the same perfume:
goodness, awareness, compassion
distilled into hashtags
and distributed
like holy water over open hands.
Oh admirable century!
You have perfected the old newspaper.
Where once horrors marched
in columns of carbon black
and printer’s ink,
they now bloom
in high-definition colour and motion,
radiant as carnival lights.
The crowd drinks deeply
from this electric river.
Each man both spectator and exhibition,
both witness
and accomplice.
Outside, the sky still performs
its ancient and indifferent symphony:
clouds travelling in solemn streams,
the sun painting
its patient harmonies of gold.
But inside the glowing screen
another cosmos expands before us
a universe whose gravity is spectacle,
whose stars are scandals,
whose darkness
is endless appetite.
And we,
faithful astronomers of the feed,
lift the glass each morning
to contemplate the infinite sky of disaster
and call it
connection.
But don't forget
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