Call Me Marlow in Neon
A cyberpunk field hymn for sovereign witness in the kingdom of spectacle
A cyberpunk field hymn
Call me Marlow.
I came in through the backwash
of a dead electric age,
boots wet with oil-slick rain,
face lit by failing signs.
Memes flicker in cyberpunk neon.
Bright ghosts.
Cheap gods.
Borrowed hungers in a thousand colors,
buzzing over alleyways
like flies around a wound.
I keep walking.
They sell salvation in signal bursts.
They sell identity in mirrored glass.
They sell desire in fragments,
and call it freedom
when the leash glows blue.
I know what I know.
That is enough.
The towers spit their static.
The channels hiss their little commandments.
Words come dressed as weapons.
Games come dressed as love.
Knowledge comes dressed as a mask
with somebody else’s face stitched inside it.
I let it pass.
What is false burns fast.
What is loud dies hard.
What is hollow echoes longest
down the steel ribs of the city.
Still, I keep my name.
Not the name they tagged me with.
Not the barcode.
Not the feed-name.
Not the password worn like a second skin.
I keep the older name,
the one the storm could not wash out,
the one the market could not price,
the one no phantom could counterfeit.
I walk under broken halos
and surveillance moons.
Drones hum like iron insects overhead.
Sirens bend the night into strips.
Every window glows
with somebody else’s dream.
Let them glow.
I am not hungry for their theater.
I am not thirsty for their approval.
I am not built for kneeling
before algorithmic kings
or neon prophets
with glass in their veins.
I know what I know.
That is enough.
That is the line.
So when the city leans close
and whispers,
Become this.
Buy this.
Fear this.
Desire this.
Confess this.
Perform this.
I answer:
No foreign signal.
No phantom law.
No counterfeit flame.
Memes flicker in cyberpunk neon,
but I am not their creature.
I move through the hell-scape
under my own seal,
a man with rain in his collar
and thunder in his chest,
unbought,
unsoftened,
unsworn to the lie.
Call me Marlow.
I saw the lights.
I heard the noise.
I passed through the kingdom of spectacle
and kept my soul.