Let's workshop this poem about a people in need of extreme stimulation to cope with their situation, which they get personalized through pain-pump screens that only make them more sensitive to despair
Intrathecal Pump
The tabloids that devoured
straightlaced newspapers
decades ago by prioritizing shock
would seem too prissy—
too tamed by reality—for us
today, hyperalgesic and hooked
on tailor-made jolts
from despair over death and life
mainlined with every thumb flick.
“We need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”—Kafka (against the safe-space cancel culture pushed by anti-art bullies, left and right)