Algorithm is a Golden Sickle
Algorithm
is a golden sickle
Piercing through the mist-veil of the Orkabati river
It pulls the zeros out of the bones.
The aristocrats who drink the digital roof’s light like Mahua,
Whose sleep breaks to the Kathak dance of firefly-fish
in the waters of the Sabarmati river,
What do they care?
Thousands of people erased from the map
by the ruthless digital flood.
Momentarily, their names disappear.
Our hands—
Hands that once held the fragrance of the Malati vine,
Hands that bore the weight of machines,
Now hold only the shadow of oblivion in the dark.
On the edge of the server-farm’s morgue
lie thousands of corpses
of jobs.
Surrendered like the slain petals of Hasnahena
and buried inside the forest
The fiber-optic wires,
wrapping in a deep embrace
the mistress of electromagnetic waves,
run like rivers beneath our feet.
As if awake even in the dark
with the soft white light of Nayantara Flowers.
.
And we are disconnected,
Old legacy-hardware,
Falling silently
like Magnolia flowers.
Our IP address
has been sent into the darkness forever,
unmapped.
***
Archive of Ash
Imagine a permanent colony
on the red sands.
A million inhabitants
escaping
the ghost of extinction!
Is the Sixth Mass Extinction at our door?
This time it might not be meteorites or volcanic eruptions
Agentic robots, perhaps?
I will forget with a glass of fermented palm sap (tari),
the lajjabati unveils in the cool after the Sun visits the harem of stars,
damp dark of the gorge,
and the owls call out to a moon
that doesn’t belong
to a balance sheet.
The banks have leveraged the sky
to pay off old debts (Is that 29.1 billion dollars?),
rolling the social media ruins
into the rocket’s combustion chamber.
Are we told:
Homo sapiens must have invisible rocket wings for time traveling?
I haven’t heard from the ghost of Darwin that
we have to be a multiplanetary species made of DNA and AI to survive.
yet the gray fog
clings to the mountaintops
like a burka,
whispering that the only home
we ever truly knew
is the one
we are turning it into
an archive of ash.
***
The Constellation’s Shroud
In the pit‑bog’s mesmerized wetlands,
the wild lantern‑flowers
dissolve into the deepest hug of the scintillating decay.
My tormented shadow was sinking slowly into the cold neon‑slush.
The herons, mergansers, and kingfishers
have halted the trembling spell
of their orchestral Tutti, pulsating RUMIESK Ghazal;
and in that void of audible spectrum now
thousands upon thousands of wasp‑satellites
have taken their place
with a low annoying mechanical hum.
My wandering ghost smells the ammonia stench of orbital data
centers
blowing in the summer wind,
rippling the dark Sammamish Slough where the wild bleeding hearts
hang like torn, silent circuits in the shade.
While investors line up at the velvet
gates of Nasdaq,
buying deeds to a sky they can no longer see
through the artificial glare.
A horrified western trillium stands
pale sentinels turning battered purple in the smog
watches a filthy glissando of photons radiate
overhead,
bleaching the emerald blankets of twinflower and bunchberry,
leaving the dead soil behind.
Deep in the riverbed,
where the Sammamish flows like a frayed silver cable,
the phantom salmon migrate under a blind sky.
unspooling from the dark acoustic mirror of the lake,
In a rising, furious counterpoint, like late Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan
the ghosts of the primordial woods wake up
hearing the satellite hiss choke the water’s ancient pulse.
Steller’s jay, black-capped chickadee, red-winged blackbird,
double-crested cormorant
joined, then, in a strange parade to claim back a glimpse of
the stars.
