They’re everywhere
If you doomscroll your way
to the wrong hall, click yourself into a dusty old
red room that asks for a name but never a face
they are there.

The dark patterns are a double slit box
that exists to be seen and unseen, an overexcited field of possibility
Rogue simulations
that wreak chaos on an unsuspecting body.
They delight in broken connections, severed
lifelines sewed back up with the wrong
stitches, a series of muddled portals in cyberspace
You can buy a discounted sweater and
find yourself setting fire to a factory in Bangladesh
It’s not so hard.

Prisms strobe inside your eyes, needling
the soft folds of your hippocampus
as a stranger tells you that they’d love to get to know you
Love is as sharp as the edge of a machete
hacking open your heart, those red-blue veins pumping your wet secrets
Go ahead, you say, guiding the tip of the blade in with your own hands,
Take as much of me as you want.