Safe

What are the greatest hunters of our age doggedly pursuing?

Safety

Where do we feel safest, least in danger and most free?

Online

When did we cease to vacation next to volcanoes?

How did fleeing the world into glowing hallucinations become so bloody fashionable?

Achilles ached to lived as a smeared wretch in the dirt among the living

Rather than count out eternity as a hero in the inky quicksand of Hades

How free are those who dwell in a digital safe?

How many epics are they bound to get caught up in?

Falling in love with robots is pathological

But we will stop at nothing to make them irresistibly seductive

While we waddle wetly toward ignominious oblivion

What kind of culture teaches you to yearn for safety?

A culture that wants to keep you under wraps

Safe as an alabaster chamber pot

Tedious and soft and obedient

Deep in your desultory DoorDash doldrums

Not just a domesticated animal

A tired servant

Without dignity

Unable to spell outrage

Without automatic correction

Stay here, where it's safe

It's a safe, that kind of myth

A locking heuristic fiction

With an anesthetic lesson

When you are free, you are responsible

When you are safe, you are irresponsible

The fault lies elsewhere, in the dirty crowd of the world

You have things to download

Breathing, yawning, smelly, awkward

So random

The others and the world they keep screwing up

Will they ever learn?

Such warm, soft certainty

When you need only like and comment

Without doing anything worth liking or commenting upon

Invulnerable, in the chat but not of it, irony clad

A smirking oyster in a cybernetic shell

Taking notes from language talking to itself behind an ad

For the productivity gains promised by the integration

Of bionic bullshit artists and slithering slop slingers

Into our bland, analog lives and jobs and relationships

Oxymorons: greedy saint, wise tyrant, artificial intelligence

All technological revolutions have had regrettable casualties

They are as leaves in the tempest of power and wealth that approaches

Pay them no mind

You're safe, after all

Isn't that what matters most?

Never mind that your home is being pillaged by lusty suitors

Or that the bones of Elpenor rattle with impatient desire

Knowing that a decent burial is all that separates us from the swine

Stay here, you'll be fine

Sure, mediocrity is a luxury

Broccoli costs what a bridal gown once cost

Stream this documentary

Fasting is good for you

Eating out is such a hassle

Everyone delivers, now

Only Hermes delivered to Ogygia

The better to get the hero off his ass

Onto a raft and into the salt spray of life

Alluring sea nymphs and vengeful tridents

Only masked to get the better of your foes

Sure that restoring justice to your rocky backwater

Was more honorable than lotus eating

Unsafe

The greatest hunters of our age

Unworthy of the name

Since we leerily left the leaves

We have hunted dangerous life

The only diet we love