Ziqr Peehu
SPOTIFY WRAPPED COMES OUT AS
Spotify Wrapped drops like a priest’s robe,
a holy unveiling: you are 97% melancholy,
a top listener of rainstorms recorded in tin buckets.
Somewhere in Seoul, the President scrawls martial law
like a toddler with crayons, blunt and trembling.
The streets answer in pitchforks and foghorns,
a symphony of breathless mothers and students
with gasoline hearts. For three hours, the nation
is a mouthful of broken teeth, until the people
swallow the law whole, chew it down to pulp.
At dawn, the decree retreats like a wet dog,
tail between its legs, the ink on the paper
still drying, still reeking of ash. On my phone,
Spotify chirps: Your favorite genre is destruction.
Meanwhile, in New York, a healthcare CEO
is unstitched by a bullet. His chest opens
like a Velcro wallet, and inside, nothing but receipts.
On the streets, the people rejoice—
not with candles, but with fireworks:
sparks caught in the teeth of the night.
Spotify suggests a playlist for the mood:
Songs to Mourn Corrupt Billionaires.
I imagine the algorithm is sentient,
and somewhere in its digital brain,
it’s weeping—over us, over itself,
over the world’s tendency to bite its own tail.
I listen to the sound of glass being swept,
of cities exhaling, of monuments crumbling
like sugar cubes in coffee.
By evening, the headlines are a Picasso painting,
shattered bodies, crooked timelines,
colors bleeding into each other.
The President releases a public apology;
the people remix it into a club anthem.
The CEO’s obituary reads like the back
of a cereal box: Ingredients: greed, neglect,
a pinch of humanity.
At midnight, I watch my Wrapped one last time.
It tells me nothing about the year except
that I am human, that I prefer crescendos
to silence, that sometimes the most-played song
isn’t a song at all, but the sound of the people
dragging themselves through the wreckage,
singing off-key, but still singing.
—from Poets Respond
__________
Ziqr Peehu: “I wrote the first version of this poem titled ‘Spotify Wrapped Comes Out As Danny Materson’s Jury Rules Not Guilty’ last year, also for Rattle’s Poets Respond around the same time in an almost helpless fashion talking about how people don’t care about things that are truly important and are happy being in their little corner talking about their favourite artists and nothing else. This year, South Korea’s martial law was declared then taken back within hours on the day Wrapped was released and Brian Thompson was also shot and killed, both invoked the same kinds of reactions from the people, mass collectivisation and joy, and it’s brought back a level of certainty in my life that I have not had in so long, a sort of faith in the way this world works and hopefully will continue to work. That’s it, I think. That’s all there is to it. I feel safe about the world for now, however next year may be.”
