NYE, 2024
As soon as it takes power, the Nazi government offers the German proletariat sport and transport. No more riots, no need for much repression; to empty the streets, it’s enough to promise everyone the highway.
—Paul Virilio
I.
I won’t be
lyrical tonight, so pass
the dark chalice, a Tiny
Vipers record sounding a
way in another room,
Life on Earth only
just making it
through
the walls
as the first quarter
of the 21st century spins out,
having hardly spoken for itself
much less anyone else.
It’s all ending
again. The year, or
the cartoons
substituted for memory.
I’m thinking not
of the chassis itself
but the Google Ngram
thereof. A small, two-ridged
mountain that climbed
across the opening
decades of the 20th century
to peak in the 1950s (like
oil never would). Mean
while, the machines,
comfortably set
upon their frames,
rolled on, locked organs
gently fuming to themselves
beneath metal
hoods and aprons.
II.
It’s a very late
conclusion, one
about capital and
the punishments thereof,
but the frame
hardly frames
at all.
It’s not the rapidity of light
that we see
but the abrupt, apparent
plenitude
of what formerly
in the dark
hardly existed.
I’m thinking
the precipitous decline of
“chassis”
on our tongues
is not unlike
the proliferation
of “streams” in our lives,
the endlessness of mal
content and
the actual reservoir,
poisoned.
So is obscured
the rising
tide
that slits
all throats.
Big Data
for lives made small,
pockets loaded
with Africa and mouths
pouring light.1
III.
The years, like the sentries,
are coming.
And the state? O, the state
will have kept us
hungry, kept us cold,
AI having eaten
its fill of fuel.
But there is love, and our lives,
if they are, are
not small.
Or just what
Baldwin said, it’s
nothing personal, that
incompletion of
being
alive. The hive
which speaks the flower speaking
the soil which spoke the night in perfect
arousal for the day-broken yolk not of screen
light but that dailiness, planetary revolution.
And so, in
sofar
as revolution
is repetition, there is that
love for which you too would surge
at any barricade, imagining it the last.
It was either a sunflower or
your face, but once more
and then and there
again:
life is not small.
I held whichever in my hands
and became a world entire.
_____
1. This line repurposes language from Benjamin Bratton’s The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty. He writes, “now billions of Earthlings carry little bits pieces of Africa around with them in their pockets.”