Donald S. Yarab
When the noise comes … it arrives as promise,
As liberation, as the four-day week or some such rot—
Tools to free us from the tyranny of distance,
From the friction of flesh, of paper, of time.
When the noise comes … we open our doors,
Thinking the chains have been struck from our wrists,
Not seeing how they lengthen, how they follow,
How they slip beneath the blankets, coil around our sleep.
When the noise comes … the waves are ceaseless,
Each notification a crest that will not break,
And we are flotsam, buoyant but not swimming,
Tossed up, pulled under, in the very same motion.
When the noise comes … there is no shore,
Only the turbulence of feeds and the whirlpools of threads,
The shoals of outrage hidden just beneath the scroll,
And our eyes blur from the salt and the light.
When the noise comes … we gasp between the swells,
Thinking: surely the next breath will be deeper,
Surely the merry-go-round’s music will stop,
Surely there will be a weekend at the end of this week.
But the calliope plays on, and the carousel never ceases turning,
The painted horses rise and fall, rise and fall,
And we cannot tell if we are moving forward
Or if we have been circling the same worn orbit since morning.
When the noise comes … we look down at our feet,
And see that we have not moved,
That the frantic pace was only the illusion of motion,
The exhaustion mistaken for progress toward something.
When the noise comes … we pause for a moment—
The WiFi fails, the battery dies, the server times out—
And in that accidental silence the low places remember:
The weight of time, the gift of an empty hour,
The deep stillness from which we were torn when we said yes
To this round-the-clock tether, this chain we call connection.
When the noise comes … we have already forgotten
What we meant to think, to say, to comprehend;
The forgetting sea is not ahead but around us,
We are already drowning in its medium,
Already borne away from ourselves
While thinking ourselves urgent, essential, awake.
When the noise comes … no one comes to save us,
For we have built the flood with our own hands,
Subscribed to the deluge, optimized the overwhelm,
And called it opportunity, flexibility, freedom—
The chains that followed us home,
That slipped into our beds,
That wind around us even now as we try to sleep,
As we remember sleep,
As we forget what sleep was.
