Stay-at-home order political culture

With Wifi widely available
the like-minded mingle
in chat room federations
of hashtags, Twitter handles
and over message boards
the private is now public
every post monetized and stored

It is an irrefutable fact
that most narratives are fake
doctored, weaseled and snaked
until the broader epic of human logic
slouches towards a Bethlehem
of more comfortable conclusions:

That our biases are correct
that intuition is the best hypothesis
that the rabbit holes of self-selection
are not driven by a loneliness
that comes from feeling powerless
in the face of so much money
and so many policy lies

That our biases are correct
because we are blessed
and favoured by a personal God
whether Hashem or Jefferson
the decalogue or the Declaration
an American Dream as unbreakable
as Sinai’s shattered tablets

But perhaps the most pressing question
is can we know each other
if we do not encounter
other bodies, other realities
accents, scents, smells
our own autonomic need for answers
that keeps us restless and rising from bed
to work and earn bread
while chewing at the bars of our cages
laboratory animals consuming our limbs
under the influence of hallucinogens

Bytes and bits
our bodies projected into avatars
while we remain here in the flesh
like farmed fish
swimming in memes
netted by a Gif encirclement
spending our lives spawning
in rivers of information
said to flow down from the mountains
or swelling with the tides
natural organic processes said to be
neutral in their naturalness
but bought and paid for nonetheless

While the coffee house coffee grows cold
or is simply never served
in our stay-at-home order political culture.

Jeremy Nathan Marks lives in London, Ontario. New work is appearing this fall in So It Goes, The Journal of Expressive Writing, Unlikely Stories, Chiron Review, Boog City, Bewildering Stories, and Ginosko Review. Read other articles by Jeremy Nathan.