Elegy for the Bio-Digital Age

I saw the sharpest minds of our epoch dissolve into pixelated screams,
who labored past midnight in fluorescent cathedrals, coding godhood into cold machines,
who spliced genomes with trembling hands, stitching fate into helical seams,
who whispered to mitochondria, begging entropy to pause its silent regime,

their eyes raw from screens that flickered prophecies of doom-scroll dreams,
their skulls humming with the static of a thousand unanswered emails,
their hearts fibrillating to the arrhythmic pulse of algorithmic streams,
who clutched petri dishes like sacred grails, fermenting hope in bacterial screams,

Who crashed conferences in moth-eaten blazers, ranting of CRISPR messiahs and quantum redemption,
who drowned in the dissonance of Slack channels and peer review rejection,
who sold their synapses to neural networks, trading neurons for lithium voids,
their synapses frayed, their dendrites coiled like springs in obsolete toys,

Who wept in server rooms, hot tears sizzling on motherboards,
who fucked in lab closets, desperate to feel flesh in a world of code-words,
who scrawled equations on napkins, seeking infinity in margins too thin,
who mapped the soul’s terrain only to find it labeled 404: Error Within,

Moloch whose factories churn out synthetic futures, whose smoke chokes the stars!
Moloch whose vaccines nestle patents while plagues mutate in prison bars!
Moloch whose AI prophets preach data’s gospel—profit the only sacrament!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of carbon and silicon, lover of the imminent!

I’m with you in the dark, comrades,
where the centrifuges hum lullabies to orphaned stem cells,
where the chatbots echo our loneliness in infinite recursive hells,
where every breakthrough is a funeral for the ethics we shelved.

The dawn is a spreadsheet. The moon, a dead disk.
Yet we kneel in the glow of biosafety hoods,
stitching new life from the scraps of the void,
our mouths full of stardust and static,
our hands trembling, holy, alive.