Kyle Dargan
Infinite Leisure Loop

 

Have you noticed how the news has stopped

referring to nations as nations? Nations,

instead, are now named economies, and ranked.

 

We fall asleep in screen-cast light. We stir,

reluctant, when the sun double-taps us.

Statistics and GDP slather our eyes as hiber-

 

nation sets in. There it enters us—osmosed

through the membrane-body to our hearts.

Our arteries constrict with worry over occupations

 

snuffed by export tele-commutes. New industry

promises. We can’t shake belief that manpower and labor

force still share a body. The horse knows this

 

is not true, that we will soon gauge droids, their work,

the same as we rate motors, except we will be the forgotten

beasts of measure. __________-power. The torque

 

from turbines that animate processors crammed with 1s

and 0s. The distance between data and dollar rendered

nil. What need is the negotiated work day or week

 

to the drone that is each product and bearer

of product and consumer (we drones) of product

—that palliation of becoming alien to our work?

Found In Volume 48, No. 06
Read Issue
  • darganphoto
Kyle Dargan
About the Author

Kyle Dargan is the author of five collections of poetry. His most recent, Anagnorisis, was awarded the 2019 Academt of American Poets Lenore Marshall Prize and longlisted for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. He lives and writes in Washington, D.C.