catatonic gluttons in our plastic stupor
we consume superhero psalms like microwave dinners
immersed in a spectacle of digits pointing numerical coordinates
to the parade of images that stocks our supermarket minds
with halflife ephemera for a diet of radiation and iodine
on the freeway of history we were wrecked
swept aside like roadkill, on hold with customer service
stranded in the suburbs where parkinglot villains
smashed the windows of our subjectivity
making off with the loot of our vacuous desires
at the drive-thru we bite into animal holocausts
and the flavors of our feelings’ repackaged remnants
sizzle on our tongues like carbonized fossils
annihilating the verminous hunger that festers within us
from this petridish culture of popular contagion
stepping on bored sidewalks we subscribe to the sales pitch
marketed by industrial evangelists of the machine future
who spam our inboxes with insipid urgency
and sway us to bestow sacrificial offerings
to the artificial gods of convenience stores
under the glow of television we read headline poems
that program our dreams with robotic narcissism
eager for news we relish the delightful clicks
that shower us in likes while we scroll past horrors
and counterfeit epidemics infecting us with memes
incarcerated in filing cabinets they entrap us in nations
where we kneel in worship of barbedwire lies
before the cartoon walls that separate our families
in weeping shadows where papergun soldiers
patrol the borderlands of our forgotten futures
in casino churches we pray for life’s extinction
summoning the mushroomcloud rapture foretold
in the ancient scrolls of conartist prophets
who swindled us of the monopoly money
that we invested in their fraudulent schemes
our anguished screams sound cheerfully from smartphones
still on hold with customer service we are next in line
but our calls for help drop and we sink in the comic noise
of sitcom killing fields where we can’t escape
the bellicose rituals that bomb us and bury us
in the incoherent rubble of our derelict lives