An Apocalypse Fantasy

The Day Medium Writers Had Enough

Storming the headquarters

Failure came down like a rain, maybe an avalanche, like that gate-crashing glacier crushing six skiers to death in Italy

the stats were tanking, I already had my best run on Medium writing poems for pennies, satires for laughs and claps — it’s fun to a point

to a point

until that fun flops like a carcass on some country highway its dead animal stench coming through the aircon

competing with the bad breath of radio news about NATO, inflation, and cold war blues

I’m not in the algorithm’s good graces — few writers are

we’re all on the same sinking ship going down writing our lonely pieces

until one day the Medium App malfunctions and loses the whole million-strong library in the blink of an eye

and Ev scribbles a written apology a pathetic little bow out —

sorry suckers, game over!

and there is a volcano of outraged vanity as none of us were bright enough to save copies

so all of the world’s Medium writers came out of their run down little flats packing their 2nd Amendment guns of choice

so many lefty poets and satirists suddenly turned straight up Republican and marched to Medium Headquarters in San Francisco

no longer the free loving city of the ‘60s but the Silicon Valley of pirate techs stomping on writers like ripe grapes making wine from greed and gullibility

every pathetic writer a cross between Tantalus and Apuleus’ Golden Ass pulling in 50 bucks a month while Evergreen Ev is worth 2.1 Billion

I’ve got longer legs than Ev but it will be me scrunched up in economy class along with all the other unhappy cattle brutalized by a life of 9 to 5, faces run over by customer complaints

while Ev flies first class chuckling to himself and thanking the gods he’s not a Medium writer

© Carlo Zeno 2022

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