Tell me again about your love,

Smear those sentiments through the screen,

Shiny fragments of life, moments polished and embalmed -

Why?

I fucking cleave to these aspic joys, mainlining the Kodak moments of others

– and for what?

Some bitter thrill,

Some mordant compulsion,

I want to hear your life's drab melodies, to hate and to love them,

Such addictive torture - this endless spiral,

My hopeless hunger for the image, my shudder-dance of pixels and bile.

Surfing past the grand store of human knowledge,

- no free Shakespeare today, no open-access wisdom of the ancients for me -

and wash up here, again, wanked-out with self-pity.

Shame, shame, shame - everyday the shame of

getting dumber,

Forget it: Scream with rage and expand the Reddit thread of human endeavour,

It's not fucking Hamlet; it's not Mathmatica Principia,

But it's some beery something alright - a clusterfuck of words 

that devolve and stare back at us like the attic-painting of our collective unconscious, 

Blood-clot memes, haemorrhages of culture, 

Click-bait for us hollow men with the wit to laugh at everything.

Go tell the homeless about their humanity,

So holy there, shivering and pissed-on 

underneath bundled sheets –

sheets whose stitch and weave were made far away

(in places of which we do not like to speak),

textiles sweated-out by dark labour,

shipped and packaged and consumed and used

so they could be recycled by a man who eyes you now from between society's

inching cracks,

Holy holy holy those homeless day-sleepers,

Such regrettable human trembles, shivering from hunger and press-hysteria drugs.

Regrettable their pullulation in streets built by savage wealth,

So wholly without what you, hot-coffee-clutching human, have and have and have.

So what if ours is not a greedy love,

The kind that preens and needs the birds to sing for fear of silence.

Which doesn't come tinselled in ceremony and the hearty back-slaps of tipsy in-laws, 

Nor is eager to out-shout the lives of others, 

Which is quiet, private and ours, immune to drowning bells and rote occasions of Valentine, 

Content in shadowed meadows of flower, grass, and briar,

With closeted bones not meant for the prying,

No dreams of image-perfection; this air is thick with hauntings, we know.

But beauty glimpses through from blemish, 

And life makes graves of Disney lies,

As forever burns to rags our failings,

And a chiming beat persists in spite –

Then so what?