Brushes With The Dark Law

 To be published in December, 2024 by Periwinkle Pelican

 Loki and His Law Practice

The world is left in our hands.  Its muddy clutter, our clutter, drops on our doorway at dawn.
 
There, the highways,
early in the day,
fill with the delivery trucks:
Pantalla Inc. responding
quickly to the human
need for more,
for anything
that disrupts
any thing the
1,000 anxious eyes set.
 
Boxes of cameras
are left on stoops
captured by cameras
and laws are not
the only thing broken.
 
Delivery isn’t freedom
for our members.
It kills.
 
Loki’s business model,
his scheme of felonious rebellion,
is to sell us on this practice:
 
Smash every screen.  
 
Do not
simply turn them off,
unplug, nor employ
the temporary discipline
of your virtual selves, 
reducing use
in the brainspace’s 
“appropriate use” naming. 
 
Smash: VERB
violently break (some thing)
into pieces.
Then wash the threshold.
Fix the eye on the sun; 
it rises one more time.
 
Loki plans to teach
that in such pieces
we can become whole again.
 
So practice freedom
from suffering. 
Ungraspable smashing.
Smash the open sky too
before it fills with riddles.  
 
We are so close to losing it all.
The lights in the rearview mirror
are not cops.  They are
an ambulance.
 
How’s that for a broken punch line?