character limit reached

live-streamed anxiety and fear 
vie to be the next sounding board of corruption
since delving deeper than newsfeeds
to reveal moldy particleboard promises
would exert too much effort

(more convenient to validate self-worth
with digital façades and seek protection
behind ideological masks smeared with emojis,
ensuring a continuous spew of hateful rhetoric).

comfortable affluence
silences those in crises
enabling money to pour unhindered
into garish scrapers of clouds.

villages are flattened for towering dams,
cancers and preventable diseases run rampant,
all in the shadows of golden buildings
withering beneath a shredded ozone layer.

meanwhile,
one-hundred-forty-character attention spans
remain ignorant of such atrocities -
devalued histories, a dying earth,
languishing humans.

when the newsfeed goes quiet
(when even one-hundred-forty-characters is too much),
then the inheritance
of future generations
​dies
in this increasingly
disposable world.

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