December 8, 2024Spotify 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