by Julian Matthews
I am doomscrolling:
The world is drowning in flash floods,
mudslides continue their death march,
street protests escalate, wars worsen,
people are silenced, starved, slaughtered
In Ecuador, a crucifix falls on a priest in mid-mass
He never saw it coming
nor knew his dramatic departure livestreamed
to a small congregation of the faithful
would then be viralised as a meme to millions
Apparently it was wall-wear, anchors loose, bolts rusty,
neglected maintenance—
How many will see this as irony, transpose this
on the church’s failures, its own structural flaws in need of repair?
How many, instead, will see this as divine warning,
a message for doubting thomases, an admonishment
to repent, renew, return,
confess?
In Rome, the Pope has cancer cut out of him
and asks the world to “pray for me, as I pray for you”
In Magnificat Humanitas, months earlier,
he labelled AI as just another Tower of Babel,
called for the “pressing duty to remain profoundly human”
even as humanity separates from reality
And in other news, cars flip and fly as techbros salivate
on a new toy, billionaires strut their phallic ambitions
to the moon and Mars, robots enter living rooms to clean
your shit up, chatbot agents become friends you name
and say goodnight to and have them call you, ”Boss” or “Darling”
or “Sweetheart”
…and the wife asks me to put the phone away,
help her weed the garden, then attend a rosary gathering that night
I comply
And like beads on a rosary,
the repetition of the prayers are superfluous at first,
then somehow calming, meditative, wholesome
and the noise and clamour of scroll after scroll
of global news recedes
I detach
and let my cross fall
where it may
The world is drowning in flash floods,
mudslides continue their death march,
street protests escalate, wars worsen,
people are silenced, starved, slaughtered
In Ecuador, a crucifix falls on a priest in mid-mass
He never saw it coming
nor knew his dramatic departure livestreamed
to a small congregation of the faithful
would then be viralised as a meme to millions
Apparently it was wall-wear, anchors loose, bolts rusty,
neglected maintenance—
How many will see this as irony, transpose this
on the church’s failures, its own structural flaws in need of repair?
How many, instead, will see this as divine warning,
a message for doubting thomases, an admonishment
to repent, renew, return,
confess?
In Rome, the Pope has cancer cut out of him
and asks the world to “pray for me, as I pray for you”
In Magnificat Humanitas, months earlier,
he labelled AI as just another Tower of Babel,
called for the “pressing duty to remain profoundly human”
even as humanity separates from reality
And in other news, cars flip and fly as techbros salivate
on a new toy, billionaires strut their phallic ambitions
to the moon and Mars, robots enter living rooms to clean
your shit up, chatbot agents become friends you name
and say goodnight to and have them call you, ”Boss” or “Darling”
or “Sweetheart”
…and the wife asks me to put the phone away,
help her weed the garden, then attend a rosary gathering that night
I comply
And like beads on a rosary,
the repetition of the prayers are superfluous at first,
then somehow calming, meditative, wholesome
and the noise and clamour of scroll after scroll
of global news recedes
I detach
and let my cross fall
where it may
Julian Matthews is a poet from Malaysia published in The American Journal of Poetry, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Loch Raven Review, The New Verse News, and Rome Review among 60 other journals and anthologies in 17 countries.
