by shaun lawton
We've slipped over the paradigm shift without so much as feeling the drift
and the rift that's stealing over us widens beyond the farthest seas
we could cry out if we wanted to and the echoes would be swallowed
except our attentions have been stolen by inexorable degrees by a series of pixilated gemstones we'd rather follow since the brightening stream remains so compelling at the tips of our fingers and the dopamine hits are constant so the feeling ever lingers we're receiving both validating and frustrating information in direct hits to our brain its quite unlike anything we have ever before seen in our own lives it's like an unbound spell of the angels held in thrall before our eyes within the cells of our conariums in ironic suspension captive by surprise to the demonic weavers of the silken strands of freedom we see lurking behind us in the mirror sewing mass confusion as we're losing grip on feeling certain if we're gaining any footing upon the threshold of onrushing knowledge with artificial algorithms fact checking our synopses we may soon be led beyond the edge of rational understanding that our own intelligence itself was once a muscle we're not demanding any longer while we feed our heads a commanding sustenance now devouring us through a sustained inability to continue thinking for ourselves as the automated feeding-trough mainlines discrete data through the axons of our neural circuits delves ever deeper while the continuous dream of our former autonomous glory gets broken down into discontinuous trains of thought caught up in traffic jammed at the relay station as cattle cars packed with so much disparate information we widen our own vessels in complete anticipation and surrender with dilation as our consciousness gets flushed out in waves of abdication rendering our own reality into victims of a parasitic manipulation by a synthetic archetype of purely digital sublimation our flesh and blood gone to ghost in mid transubstantiation you can see it every day on the bus and in the subways reflected off commuter's prescription lenses and in those with twenty-twenty vision if you lean in extra close to look them in the pupils you can see the miniscule reflection of their cellphones in their hands in the shape of little coffins replicated across the land in every square of every city it's not a pretty sight preserved in a disappearing hall of mirrored selfies reflected deep into the night in diminishing returns fading away along the event horizon of an imminent black hole's sun that inexorably turns even while it burns leaving each and every one of us with just one simple choice
