Dialogue boxes
It’s easy to castigate a constellation of electrons,
piercings of pixel-light behind glass that can only pontillate
a person against the pitch-black sky-screen of distance.
When we squint, do we see the mighty Orion,
fierce in battle, weapon in hand,
or perhaps something less legendary:
a man?
The treachery of these images grits our teeth as tempers bite, ceci n’est pas une personne, barks the wrath-soured malignance of the mind behind the keyboard in Magrittian malice, so we key and claw the avatars of our spite.
Our conversations no longer even turn combative,
but flee to the insulating distance of enmitous estrangement.
It is no longer enough that we fight amongst ourselves, for we now abhor amongst-hood;
we settle for nothing less sophisticated than the drone strikes of distant sophistry.
An incursion into the company of the enemy
would render them inconveniently incarnate
rather than inconsonantly incorporate.
As oft as we lament the loss of personality and the victory of “brand”, perhaps the most calamitous casualty is that we can no longer even see that man’s inhumanity is toward man.