After

By Christopher Bernard

After all the tweets are done,
and all the posts erased,
and all the insta videos
are drowned in silicon,

and all the newsfeeds freeze 
while panic-scrolling past,
and social media “likes”
are hated – yes! – at last,

and all the influencers
are swallowed  by TikTok,
and every troll is smothered
by every soul they mock,

and every “Facebook friend”
has ghosted all their contacts,
not knowing all their contacts
already ghosted them,

and all the digerati
encrypted and encased are
within a frozen chassis,
a whited sepulchre
where their data asleep forever.

and all the web and net
have smothered all their flies
and fattened like two spiders
till all their pixels died,

and all the household names
have blown to clouds and air,
and drifting smoke and ashes
are all the billionaires

into clouds of musk, 
and hell’s unlocked gates
smother the world’s last jobs
suckered to a mark
and a betraying oracle
and a final dying lark –

you and I, my love, my fair, 
shall hover above their shrines
that no one visits, in
a love that conquers silicon
to a quaint soft-shoe rhythm,
all the screen’s illusions,
and death’s algorithm, 

and there we shall dance
inscribed in these brave lines,
my fairest, sweetest, loveliest one,
till the very end of time.

_____

Christopher Bernard’s latest collection of poems, A Socialist’s Garden of Verses, won a 2021 PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award and was named one of Kirkus Reviews’ “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021.”