Rainbow Static

I'm too old to smile. The rainbow static
of a million stations presses down on my body
with the weight of an entire civilization.
It crushes me. It's all nonsense. Even the
parts that are meant to sound like the
latest, newest, hottest, hippest, coolest, trendiest
songs that you just can't wait to hear --
even those parts are just more entitled white noise.
So much useless noise, but here we are,
slaves to its production. It would be cliche to say
that we're cogs in some unfeeling machine, but it would
also be glorifying our position. We are not cogs.
We are less than cogs. We are the ineffectual specks
of garbage in the trash heap of popular culture.