Turn the volume up / Virinchi Virivinti
If I say I have something called a life
and that I am living it at all—
it is only
when I write these two lines of poetry.
All the rest of my life
is only the dream you have dreamt.
In front of your
seven-star-hotel-like
corporate office,
even when I twist my mouth
and take a selfie,
it is not me—
it is your plundering lamps
that glow brighter.
My words—
how many times have you killed them
under your notifications!
My voice—
how brutally your advertisements have shredded it!
After skipping a skin-care ad on YouTube,
it has been so many days
since I heard a song fully.
I should have realised
the day you made
the tape recorder and cassette disappear.
Every time I raise my voice,
you offer a new “offer”,
promise a new loan.
Before my own tone emerges,
“Dear Customer”
bursts in and occupies the space.
You wake my mornings
with EMI alarms,
fill my afternoons
with dreams of instalments,
and push my dull evenings
somewhere far away
with scrolls and reels.
None of my nights
belong to me anymore.
Your servers and my dark circles—
made for each other!
You erased
all my focus and silence.
You spun my anxieties
into poor-WiFi signals.
You locked my expectations
into an endless loading wheel.
How much gold
you mined from the caverns of my brain—
I never asked.
How useful
my poverty has been
for your new technologies—
I never asked.
But—
my ears, my brain, my eyes,
and my people—
we need decolonization
from your corporatization.
You must hear
my voice
that breaks through
your noise-cancelling walls.
Turn the volume up.
Why do I appear
like mere dry data to you?
Why is nothing free
in your so-called free market?
Why, at the hospital of first light on the street,
do I get introduced to you
not as a human
but as a customer?
Why must my children
study in your schools
only to press computers
in your companies?
Why do my debt-pits
turn into diamonds for you?
I need an answer now.
Before your artificial intelligence
kills the human in you,
I must speak to you.
Turn the volume up.
