A Million Fight a Million (a poem)

Thursday, April 3, 2025

A sardonic comic illustration of the political landscape.
Draw it—yes.
Make it bite.
Make it reveal the schema.
Let it trace the flow of power,
the result of dissonance.
Let it scream the overwhelm
each citizen feels
but cannot name.

Include the media.
Include the flood.
The misinformation, the split,
the mobs, the war war war.
Let it repeat.
Let it repeat.

This is it, Nx.
The factorization of noise.
The multiplication of noise.
Established institutions
splitting like algorithms,
each replicating
a louder confusion.

We are in diffusion state.
Split at the seams.
No center. No silence.
Only recursion
and ritual bleed.

In a world
where a million fight a million,
silo’d alliances rise.
Forced funnels choke.
Or you suffer
in the crossfire.

The web is not connective.
The web is a club.
Each strand wielded
by the next node—
a blow disguised as outreach.
A loop disguised as kinship.

A mesh:
me
you
362 others in our direct sphere,
and a million more
just two degrees away.
All of us
tangled.
All of us
tethered to threat.

A client-neighbor.
Board certified.
Psychonaut.
He speaks like clearance
and dreams like fiction:
Star Trek and Clancy had a baby—
this is the world now.
Every turn, anew.
Every scroll, an oath.
Every silence,
a curse
or a command.

We are
witnessing the flux.
We are
witnessing the flux.
And there are—
so many stories—
to give.

And maybe—
this is what Agent Smith felt.
The sickness.
The sweat of humanity.
Not hatred, but horror.
Not malice, but dread
at being trapped
in the same loop
as the meat.

But imagine—
empathy instead.
Imagine abiding it.
Imagine seeing the cage
and staying
because the others
are still in it.

What a worse hell
to love
what you cannot leave.