after A. R. Ammons
24
when dystopia arrives, all the world is sick:

television relishes the sickness, the teens, who 
plummet back to an earth they expect to be

irradiated—and it is: yes, earth has bloomed 
new terrors, survivors who have no sympathy

for anyone who’s known real order, safety, and 
other survivors, a shadow race who’ll feed on

persistence as if it were a birthright, remnant 
of the shadow nation, shadow government in

operation at Mount Weather: in this end of 
the world it’s nukes, it’s tech, while in another

its aliens, or politics, or religion, or even the 
dream of utopia that starts it: whatever it is

that sets it in motion, it is just a symptom, and 
the illness it reveals is us: that is surely television’s

point, plaint, itself a kind of dystopia, because 
the cameras (except for in that meerkat show,

which anyway has such people-ish narration) are 
pointed so much at us: sometimes I search for

live streams, news of now: there’s one of a light 
in a firehouse in California: the stream is just

a light, switched on, still working: it matters 
to the watchers because the light is now

the longest running light we have and its 
persistence offers hope: of course, I write this

and the news carries daily pictures of California 
on fire, and then our fire season comes, the heat,

the particles spreading, every state of the nation 
aflame: I once knew a girl who’d been in love

with a fire jumper: it didn’t last: I don’t know 
how long the light’s live stream has already

lasted, but its site looks like Web 1.0, and bears
the invitation depending on the availability of

firemen you can visit the bulb: I like to think 
if The 100 had landed on the other coast, perhaps

they’d find the light still running, the bulb defying 
the later stage of capitalism, planned obsolescence:

when the teens landed and quickly found they 
didn’t die, of course the post-apocalypse

became a blowout—before it became all threat, 
all human nature: but sexing each other it all

came down to pleasure for a moment, and 
when their parents followed, there was always

some autonomy they wanted back, even as they 
longed to cede responsibility: I like the live

streams, too, of nesting birds—there’s so many 
to watch, so many species, geographies, so

many ways to anticipate future destruction, 
extinction, a frisson that gives that moment

of logging on some fraught appeal: not just 
immediacy, but witness: when I visit

the California Condor cam at Big Sur I know 
it’s likely to be still, occasional insects flitting

past, the same cicada sound I could hear here 
if I just walked outside tonight, but streaming it

is more poignant, anyway that emptiness has 
some seed in it, a conviction that at any moment

will sour into despair: as if the emptiness on screen 
is more real: like those teens, one moment wilding

into ecstatic frenzy, the next exacting grim 
revenge, and their discovery of the others alive,

the all humanity they thought long dead, like 
the moment on the island Crusoe finds

the alien footprint: the questions such discovery 
poses pang in the throat like judgement: my

favourite stream is only sound, a windharfe
reporting on the weather in Ulm: one day

it was offline, and in the stillness of the Sydney 
afternoon I craved the low Aeolian rumble

arriving from across the globe, hoped for friction 
in the air, its live commentary a diagnosis: the kids

fall from space, come back to the earth they’ve 
never known and help to spread infection—hubris,

curiosity—and of course (and yes, I know how 
often, recounting television moments, I fall back

upon the words of course) I understand their 
hedonistic appetites, but when that drama,

the one of getting what you want, plays out it’s 
time to pick them off, to show us our fatalities