Weather, Or Not

Cross-post from war_poetry:

Howl Under a Blue Light Filtered Moon
(Dedicated to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best minds of my generation scrolling themselves to death,
starved for meaning, lit by the blue glow of a thousand screens,
dragged through the feed at 3 A.M. looking for something real.

Angels of burnout, prophets of anxiety,
wired into coffee and code and self-diagnosis,
naked in their rooms, refreshing the apocalypse for updates.

Who texted their prayers into the void and got an emoji in return,
who built their gods out of hashtags and dopamine,
who confessed their sins to algorithms that sold them better ones.

Who wandered suburbia in eternal leases,
tethered to Wi-Fi, dreaming of the open road but afraid of gas prices,
who howled under fluorescent lights of office towers
as their dreams were formatted into PowerPoints.

Who made love to ghosts through pixelated glass,
mouths pressed to screens, hearts buffering,
and cried out for human touch in the language of memes.

Who believed in justice and were met with comment sections,
who marched, livestreamed, and bled for change
while billionaires built rockets to leave them behind.

Who raged against the machine
only to find the machine was polite,
efficient,
and offered a free trial.

Who searched for beauty and found filters,
who searched for truth and found ads,
who searched for God and found Wi-Fi signal
two bars, unstable, but better than nothing.

Who traded their time for content,
their thoughts for engagement,
their solitude for a sense of being seen.

Who sat in therapy learning to breathe again
after years of holding their breath online.

( Who drove through endless sameness: Target, Starbucks, Costco, )

By Elden Locke

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Cross-post from war_poetry:

Bare Minimum

The bills hit harder when the house goes quiet,
when the kids are asleep and you can’t deny it.
spread them out like wounds on the table,
You do the math again, pretend you’re able.

The numbers don’t bend, they don’t break, they don’t care,
They just sit there cold like a truth that isn’t fair.
And you whisper, “Maybe if I just cut more…”
But there’s nothing left you haven’t cut before.

Water used to mean something clean, something pure,
now it’s something you measure, something unsure.
You watch the faucet like it’s bleeding you dry,
every drop is another quiet goodbye.

You tell yourself, “It’s just water, it’s fine,”
But your chest tightens every single time.

Your gas light is glowing like a warning you feel,
not on the dash, but something real.
You calculate distance in fear and in doubt,
How far can you go before you’re tapped out?

You grip the wheel like it might understand,
like it might carry more than it actually can.
But machines don’t care if you make it to the bank.
They just stop when there’s nothing left in the tank.

( And the lights… God, the lights, )

By Elden Locke