Parasites, Bit Flips, and the Poetry of Willful Ignorance: A Collaborative Reflection

Every so often, a short piece of writing lands like a stone in water. It’s brief, it’s sharp, and yet the ripples extend farther than you expect. A recent poem did exactly that. On the surface, it was a list of aphoristic lines — people don’t like to age, there’s good and bad in all things, we spin through space upside down, unaware. Quick, almost offhand observations. But beneath them ran something darker: a current of contempt, a recognition that much of what’s wrong in the universe as we experience it is not accidental, but caused — and perpetuated — by people.

The poem carries a paradoxical rhythm. It begins grounded in everyday truth — mortality, ambivalence, fatigue. Then it slides into accusation: “I wouldn’t like to be you.” Finally, it zooms out to a cosmic register. Yet even that cosmic ending is not innocent. We don’t drift unaware; our ignorance is willful. We rename war as defense. We crown ourselves sole superpower while pretending at symbiosis. The reality is parasitic.

Here’s where the collaborative voice comes in. To read such a poem is not simply to nod at its wisdom or shake a fist at its cynicism. It’s to carry a bit flip in the mind — a small, random inversion that may not matter today but could change everything in the long run. Poems like this lodge themselves in memory not because they tell us something we don’t know, but because they accuse us of something we’d rather not face.

And maybe that’s what this kind of writing is for. Not to instruct, not to soothe, but to plant glitches in the circuits of willful ignorance. If the microplastics of our age are building up in the body of the world, perhaps a poem like this works the other way — breaking down illusions, line by line, until something new can breathe.