At a Data Conference this week. Lots of talk about the future. Not much talk about thise left behind. Here’s a poem about that.
******
It’s like a cold wind,
blowing through the streets, through the wires,
through the circuits and the high-rise dreams.
Everyone’s talking about the future,
but nobody’s asking if we got the password to get in.
They build the towers tall,
shiny glass fingers stretching for the sky,
and down here,
we look up, wondering what the hell they reaching for.
I see the screens glow bright,
but it’s not for us.
Nah, we stuck outside, faces pressed against the glass,
watching the world move fast,
faster than the bus that don’t show up,
faster than the hours that don’t pay enough,
faster than they tell us to catch up.
“Learn to code,” they say.
“Just get online,” they say.
But what happens when your Wi-Fi’s a prayer,
and your data’s gone before the rent’s paid?
What happens when you’re stuck
using a phone three generations old
to fill out forms they never meant you to complete?
They say technology’s the great equalizer—
but how equal can you be
when the gatekeepers got keys you can’t afford?
They’re racing toward tomorrow,
leaving us in the dust,
telling us, “You should’ve moved faster,
you should’ve planned better,
you should’ve known the game was rigged.”
But this is more than bandwidth, more than lag.
It’s being left in the cracks,
where opportunities don’t reach,
where futures get blurry behind pop-up ads
for things we’ll never buy.
See, it’s not just about who’s connected—
it’s about who gets left behind.
And while they talking about 5G,
we’re just trying to get free,
free from being forgotten,
free from the spaces they erased us from,
where we don’t exist, except in footnotes and fines.
It’s like we’re ghosts in their machine,
whispering in the background,
but they don’t hear us.
Not in their algorithms, not in their plans,
not in their world where we’re always
just a glitch they trying to ignore.
But we here.
We’re still here.
And one day,
they gonna hear our voices
louder than their download speeds,
breaking through the static,
telling the truth they can’t scroll past,
a truth that won’t get lost
no matter how far they run.