As if to prove that organic truth-tellers
have been evicted from the capital layer,
which lays, like fatuous fog, over every
instance of America’s breaking news day,
No longer do her poets name things, as nature
would have it, but that work is done by hirelings,
fresh from school, instructed to go no higher than
to work for hire; where they were led to aspire
no higher than to where market trends send them.
From our transcendental origins, from Concord and
environs, we have arrived at this depressed outpost –
where artificial intelligence drives palm-sized devices
that couldn’t find their way out of paper bags.
Dave Read