Hateful Algorithms

 

Hateful algorithms.

 

Telling me what I should read

Rather than what I could.

 

Choices made to appear random

Striking the same note over and over

With no melody, no harmony.

 

Bradburian fires

Digitizing monetized similarities

For the sake of glutenous prosperities

For others, not my own.

 

False senses of browsing

Predetermined by some Silicon family

Rather than the fingers tripping over spines

Rather than the smell of ink and dust

Rather than cool cloisters of words.

 

Gone is the joy of discovery.

Banished is the wonder of surprise.

None of us should be bound to

Immediate gratification of a purchase

And a hundred identical choices.

 

Get me back to a library

Where the smell of paper and leather

Permeates my senses

Where the mind of a librarian is as

Random and beautiful as my own!

 

Let me roam the aisles

Of bookstores—laughing, gasping,

My hands stuck deeply into bins of sales

Swimming in a sea of tactile words.

 

I walk away from the zeroes and the ones.

I wrench my wrist from the keyboard.

Let me pay in cash for my choices.

 

I hold in one hand the Truth that sets us free

And in the other a great book.

 

Defying the hateful algorithms.

 

 

© M.R.Hyde 2022

Can you find the numbers in this poem?