The Cobbles Know Better
I trudge over Ancoats cobbled stones,
twenty-eight degrees in the shade
but I’m not complaining.
I know these streets. I know their bones;
Sat in Elnecot, by St. Peter’s Church —
now here is the thing I cannot untangle,
the thought arrives sudden like the Angelus:
how Google finances both sides of hell,
Like General Motors forging Nazi steel,
or Washington arming Iran and Iraq —
both triggers pulled, both wallets fat,
(and calling the carnage progress).
Billions spent on Gemini. Faster, smarter,
churning out text, image, and noise.
Then billions more on the other arm —
to hunt down and kill that very voice.
Search engines need a human touch.
A beating heart with a WordPress login!
Because Google’s claws come down like a flail
on writers who dare abuse their tool.
(Who is the master? Who is the fool?)
And here is another knot I cannot untie:
the advertisement is Google’s alibi.
It demands our eyes on a website’s page,
yet AI Overviews summarize the screen.
No one arrives. No clicks are made.
The traffic starves; the engine dies.
That is the glitch within the trade.
The mechanism feeds upon itself.
The algorithm searches for people like you and me —
with a pulse. A flaw. A heartbeat. Such
as cannot be coded, cannot be faked,
cannot be trained or scraped or baked.
The Hallé Orchestra sits silent today;
like big tech, they are out eating their own lunch.
AI knows the weight of every stone —
so why am I the one who’s tired?
I drain my cider, nod to the bartender,
then step out to Sainsbury’s on Oldham Street.
Melting through the Manchester heat —
Skendong. Raw and unrepeatable.
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