Cagliostro’s Apocrypha

At last

The charlatan has made his

Vice a virtue

Applauded all for

Making it easy for anyone

To defraud the whole

World.

_

Hidden behind codes

Apocryphal mockery

Of human creativity.

_

But the disguise still

Holds,

Snake oil and alchemy still

Hold their hissing

Charms.

_

And

_

The ugly endless

Churn

Of content

(Not content to merely

Supplement but to

Supplant entirely

To swamp and smash and

Choke)

Churns on.

_

Art humbled

Humiliated into the

Algorithm’s prompts.

Writing broken down

Tokenised

Into meaningless matter

Endless content

To feed the

Churn

In the endless grey winter

Of the human soul.

_

So lost we

Can’t even

Write

The end

Of our own wasted story.