Computer screens may carry many toxins
The air within your home is never still
Screens were made for modesty in my day
Now that sound intention is inverted
Narcissists insist you buy on-screen
Anything they sell – a nothing thing
Yet you work unsocial hours
Ensuring that your children might excel
On newer screens that calibrate their work-rate
Covertly as their contents celebrate
Soporific trifles of celebrity misdoings
The cosmic mind become a factory-farm –
What pumped-up hyper-cannabis is this?
What lock-in bends you to its brew of bitters?
MARCUS AURELIUS BREAKS FOR NAKED LUNCH
If a man should visit from a distant star
His candid observation might set straight
Matters we accept in dull compliance
Concerning Poetics for instance
That consummate parasite
Of Persuasion Occupation and Control
Its strategy to prey upon the adolescent host
By paralysing Reason in its shell
Injecting a conviction it ‘sustains’ –
Historians conjecture I enjoy
Opium as daily medication
They are the ones who seek relief
From pain of selfhood staring at a screen
Hallucinating universal fame
Drip-fed micro-acids of celebrity
Bernard Saint
Illustration: Claire Palmer