Doom Scroll

The Last Poem

(B-2 at Sunset - Credit Northrop Grumman)

Doom Scroll
(The Last Poem)

So finally it’s happened, as we always knew it would.
Quite quickly really, as we sat down to watch the evening news.
The channels say they don’t know who started it,
as they splutter out, one by one, replaced by static.
But we know. Old and greedy men. Under any flag.
Always the same, old and greedy men. Always raising flags.
And I am getting older and getting greedier,
and if I had the power to do so, I’d be the same. Perhaps needier.
Satiated only by the satisfaction, when I have more than any other.

As the sky is split by violent streaks of dividing light,
the horizon’s grim glimmer radiates like a prayer in the night.
With the brightness of a bulb that was always going to blow.
We were waiting for the moment the lights went low.

Though I am inoculated from wisdom by years of ignorance,
I knew it was coming, when I saw the adverts for soldiers, insistent.
As someone who has always worked in wholesale,
you’re only buying when your stock will sell or fail.
We treat history like a distillation column,
holding the product, the solution, and the problem.
Towers of black blood, the citizenry poured in.
The raw product. At the bottom, the run-off refined.
What falls and will not rise. The useless parts,
the victims and the dead. The stopping of hearts.
Then the things we need again: engines, flight, missiles,
bringing us everything before. The living are exiles.
This is how we discovered the fuel was never old dead things,
it was always young blood, distilled by those who would be kings.

Enough of poetry, let’s be direct. We are Homo-Nihilist.
No species has killed itself, and every other species with it.
We fell for the trick that if it rhymes it bears repeating.
We are a trick not worth repeating.

My phone’s shrill beep, still getting emails through.
What we call communication.
Would I like 10% off my next laptop.
All the stores are shrapnel.
Would I like 15% off two-for-one toothpaste,
while our teeth are burning.
They will keep coming in after I am dead.
Billions of inboxes selling
and receiving things no one is left to buy.
Though we have replaced the need,
the urge will live on. This will be our legacy.
Unlimited content unintended for the discontented,
the oldest religion: verisimilitude.
Our meaning, the sun’s endless travel
towards an inevitable evening.
Like a lover, it awaits our meeting.
We shall excavate mystery until
what lies beyond need, has no foundations.

I wonder how long they are automated.
“This is your Summer Season collection, 2086,”
when all the world burned to death in 2026.
All the libraries are smouldering.
The capability of everything,
We left it burning.
But left, there will be abundance.

TikToks, Reels still running on servers
dug deep into glacial data centres,
powered by volcanics,
terrible nurseries between plate tectonics.
And when we are discovered in the future,
not by our descendants,
we will soon be cinders, there will be no others.
So perhaps by aliens or AI gone gnostic,
because they will know
that even though we were their creators,
we were not gods worth worshipping.
Something will connect to the WiFi, its password:
“WHATSINITFORME”
or
“JUSTONEMORE”
see what we have left, see what we have seen,
and say something evil was ended here.
Something wicked died.
For God’s sake, leave it buried. It must not survive.

Our leaders and our betters? Let them desert us.
As they always have in spirit, now in presence.
I hope they fly up on a rocket. Let them survive.
Please, let them live.
Let them watch the blue orb turning grey,
like a cataract clouding over.
Let them watch everything they’ve ever owned dissolve.
Let them realise, finally,
that the algorithm, the bitcoin, the trillion dollars in leverage,
the next generation of AI,
progress for its own sake,
was not worth a single fucking baby’s smile.
Let them stare at the digits in their bank accounts
through the latest iPhones in augmented reality,
more numbers than screens can hold,
so they needed the panorama of all reality.
Knowing they can buy nothing,
having extracted everything,
all they have is capital.
Now nowhere left to spend it.

This is the last poem.
Let it never be read.
As useless to you
as it is useless to the dead.
If you find it,
destroy it.
My last word was silence.
And the silence was unheard.
This is the doom scroll.
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