I’m too tired to write a story
about a YouTube Scaled Abuse
Analyst, & maybe you are too
tired to read it, so here
is an outline instead: Tim wakes up
at 3:37AM he’s on call
some terrible sequence
of things has been posted
and he, Tim, the Desensitized,
bands together with the algorithms
to try to stop one kid from seeing
whatever heinous thing is in
the video(s). Also it’s Mother’s Day
and his little independent
contracting entity is called 30Ag
and it’s a running gag
whether it’s pronounced “thirty agg”
like Virginia Tech or “30 AG”
like a little mishearing of the year
Jesus starts his ministry.
The story doesn’t work because either
a) I have to think up something horrible
to be in the video(s) or
b) I Infinite Jest it and the video
is an unknowable black box, for to know it
is already to be lost, & neither
of those gets me far enough to want
to continue with it, even though I think
it’s a good premise, the idea
of the scaled abuse analyst as a real
job gels so cleanly with my ownexperiences on websites full of terrible
things when I was younger,
the casual infliction
of evil through depersonalized means
that now is just part of the fabric
of internet existence, you
can hardly avoid it, this guy on Twitter
with two ✝️s in his display name
liked a poem I posted and I saw
his pinned tweet was a blog post: “How
To Protect Your Family
From Adult Content” I’m thinking a Playskool
bucket meeting the mid-Atlantic
when you read Houellebecq
his poems have this kind of stuff
happening on trains, sidewalks
the seeing of something
a certain type of mother would deem
unclean
annunciation’s opposite
Houellebecq’s poems are oddly tender
for every “Nous avons passé
la nuit sans délivrance” there is also
“J’ai toujours eu l’impression
que nous étions proches,
comme deux fruits
issus de la même branche.”
Surprisingly green flowers of early May
coffee late
in the morning, the fog already burned
off the mountain
I used to think A.D. meant After
Death but then with the B.
C. meaning Before Christ what
years did he live?
That actually wasn’t enough
of a problem to change
my mind about how it worked
it made total sense that someone could live
outside numbered years
that a religion would accept
its earthly King by not counting time
until after, like a flood
of gossip after the party, like communismafter the party, like cleaning up
rivers and other bodies
of fresh water away
my iniquity
like a Razor
scooter to the shin
drawing blood
& a little bone & a few views
before being taken down
a few pegs
to pray

---

Tom Snarsky wrote Light-Up Swan.