FreezeRay:  Poetry With A Pop
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Stephen Lin

 Black Box Trading

You.have begun by giving yourself more riches than you could earn in a lifetime

Despite.this the money has no weight

You.have given yourself as much as you can hold

You.have increased your capacity to consume

The.market has yet to buckle under the new influx of currency

You.have bought out every store in every city across the continent

Despite.this the stores are restocked tomorrow

Despite.this you are weightless as well

The.market clears away the evidence of your interference

Despite.this you return

You.have flooded the market with products no one else can buy

Despite.this goods are exchanged

The.market continues to sell narcotics

You.have made the black market the only market

Despite.this people still go to work

You.have increased your wealth

You.have increased your wealth

You.have never seen so many zeroes in a checkbook

You.have never seen so many healthy shoppers

The.market executes a script

The.market executes a shopkeeper

The.market steals from a fruitstand

The.market was never meant to produce anything

You.have redistributed the wealth


You.have invested infinite wealth in every merchant

You.have ensured that no one will starve again

Despite.this the market persists

You.have killed everyone

The.market continues

You.have found the inventories of the corpses are randomly generated

You.have pocketed every item from every body and erased inventories from the market

The.market crashes

Despite.this everyone continues shopping

Despite.this, no one makes any money
​
You are over-encumbered.


You Wouldn’t Download a Car
​

Except I definitely would, scrape the gestalt machine
into scraps, each of its pieces made infinitely available
until it’s all endlessly worthless. We’ve begun crowd-sourcing
hospital bills, electric bills, water bills, bikes, rent,
mortgages, highways, all the assets we can’t afford,
the snippets of code we can’t own that still beggar
our storage space. When access is asymmetrical, it
is easy to throttle, squeeze its pulp, thresh its body
from the user, tell them there isn’t enough bandwidth
left to survive on. Maybe I remember the early game,
maybe you skipped that quest or never even triggered it.
Point is, I am armored in the viscera of every bandit
I’ve encountered. I know you are the same, that we fill
the holes in ourselves with riches so nondescript
we enumerate them as a form of abandon. Remember
when we too were small and starving, called it a proxy
for when we would begin to live? Remember how long
it took to assemble enough of yourself to venture out
without fear that every random misfortune would end you?
At some point, every door came unlocked for us and
we forgot if it was by crook or by fortune. It doesn’t matter.
What matters are the keys we collect and lose in the sprawl
of the endgame inventory: the location of a soft bed,
how to compile for oneself the string of digits that encode
your accounts, the name and size and location of everywhere
you will ever be. Let us not try to monetize this as well, or,
let the swarm of everything we can give to each other
become torrential. Let us swim across the broken landscape.

How Can There be a Civil War When the AI is Turned Off
​

Place.at.me the sharpest sword in the game

Place.at.me the weakest NPC in the game

Place.at.me the butcher block, the infantry, the unkillable dragons

Make.peace with bombed buildings

Make.peace with particle effects after the crater

Toggle.gravity and watch blood become an apparition

Toggle.gravity and watch the dragon’s wings give way to sunlight

Place.at.me every man, woman, but not child in the game

Make.peace from the collapsing bodies

Toggle.gravity until everyone who dies accrues infinite mass

Make.peace with the black hole that grows from the screen

Place.at.me the big baddie and let us become a singularity

Make.peace center us in its crosshairs

Toggle.gravity for the drones to take flight

Place.at.me a drone strike

Toggle.gravity so the drones crash and make crop circles

Toggle.gravity so the drones take flight

Make.peace as wreckage becomes a kind of sword

Make.peace so the weakest NPC in the game can walk over the mountain back to his home

Place.at.me a god so big it fills the screen and makes the map unplayable

Toggle.gravity for the dead to rise like we were promised they could

Toggle.gravity so we never lose sight of everyone we kill

Place.at.me a marker so I can come back here if I lose all my progress

Make.peace out of my loot

Place.at.me a simulacrum self, uncontrollable and fragile
​

Stephen Lin is one of the founders and editors for Everything in Aspic.  His poetry has appeared in Pressure Gauge Press, Philosophical Idiot,  the Edges zine, the Guts zine, Pretty Owl Poetry, and Cartridge Lit. His  chapbook Field Theory was a finalist in the Hyacinth Girl Press  chapbook contest. He is an editor at an immigration law firm and, like  most Pittsburghers, can’t cross running water.
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