Respond to 2025: Algorithm
Algorithm
The last time I fully inhabited this fleshbag
was in the hours after my iPhone 6
joined me for an ocean swim. Since then I’ve learnt
more about the algorithm than any sapien should.
I mark the passage of a day not by the sun’s primordial arc
but by ideal story times, the hours of peak engagement.
I ghost the dead zones where meatspace movements
preordain my audience’s absence from the cloud.
Where to draw the line between dopamine hit
and digital affliction? I tried to touch grass once but now
even the Windows background has husked to an arid brown.
Elsewhere in the Americas a data centre guzzles
another great lake and expels its vapour,
the steaming maw an abscess of hot coals.
Freshwater fish putrefy beneath a catastrophic sun.
Two thousand times a second the machine god vomits slop
like evacuations from a flaming anus. The old god gave me
two front-facing eyes for excellent meme perception,
two thumbs to kiss unyielding glass.
Hot off the melee of too many engines agitating
my microprocessor to fever, in the evening window,
my mechanisms clink and churn. I stroke the apps
until they dump their chumloads into my lidless skull.
Unclear if I am the ocean or its sharks.
Dopamine and cortisol are two phases of the same moon.
Each reel rises like a ghoul from a Ouija board,
each static tile a fresh haiku of horrors
ripening against the limits of its lines.
Beside my sunken iPhone sleeps my smoother brain,
an AI virgin who couldn’t dream the things I’ve seen:
TikTok edits of Bill and Donald’s lovers’ quarrels,
the Labubu left at Marx’s grave. Fatted bin bags
glinting like cracked screens in rain. Time to post.
Troy Wong is an Australian poet writing on Gadigal land. His work is published or forthcoming in Antipodes, Australian Poetry Journal, Cordite, Griffith Review, Island, Mascara, Palette, and more. He was shortlisted in the 2026 Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize and won the 2025 The Nomad Review Poetry Prize. His debut collection, Three Durians, is forthcoming from Cordite Books in 2026.