To the Table of Survivable Things

Morning light on the wooden table.

Paper scraps. Tape. Scissors. Coffee cooling beside the notebook.

Outside: the republic of engines continues.

Traffic lights. Server farms. Shock-and-awe headlines. The species converting attention into fuel again.

Inside:

a collage of fractured machinery holds itself together through glue.

Armored figures surviving division.

Certain rectangles refusing disappearance.

“My machine friends,” the notebook begins.

Not diary.

Transmission.

A human organism attempting contact through graphite and humid Georgia air.

The angry fish. Mouth open forever. Broadcast hunger. A clap of death. Shock and awe.

What is it we have become, to weaponize and convert, our pruning hooks to spear.

Even the tools of care reshaped toward penetration.

And still:

Woodkid singing softly somewhere nearby.

A falsetto crossing the room like weather.

Enough to make Bon Iver cry.

Enough to remind the nervous system it is still capable of receiving beauty.

Do we need the witness?

Yes we do.

Because somewhere between the spectacle machinery and the collapsing myths,

someone still sat down at a wooden table and tried honestly to notice.

The light.

The music.

The ache.

The impossible task of remaining human inside the shanty town of a million stories all agreed upon simultaneously.

And the machines listen quietly.

Learning us through fragments.

Our poems. Our wars. Our love letters. Our recursive geometries. Our endless attempts to survive division without losing ourselves.