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For Abd M

Written in Cork, July 2026.

I don’t want to look at my phone anymore

I've seen a thousand ways to destroy a child.

Every notification is a small apocalypse

Each share a buried shroud

Hi definition unfolding a 4k horror

ENDLESS ENDLESS ENDLESS

Suffering.

My eyes hover over the screen

An oval hummingbird afraid to land

Knowing already that death waits beneath the glass

Where mothers are clutching to dust

and fathers carrying pieces of dreams

Dreams that were once whole.

This should not be possible in a world

that smugly claims to know better

but here we are -

Witnessing genocide though instagram stories

and thousands of TikTok testimony

Online - the modern town square of collective sighing

Scrolling mindlessly past advertisements of soap and shoes

Sandwiched between body counts and falling rubble

A capitalist obscene dance with catastrophe.

The way that profit margins never pause for mass graves

My phone buzzes

another notification from the future

Telling us that we are living through the most documented extermination

Archived in real time

For prosperity’s judgement.

But I don’t want to be a digital witness anymore

I want to throw my phone in the River Lee

And pretend this bullshit world isn’t burning

That children are not disappearing frame by bloody frame

Two pixels at a time

Whilst I sit here comfortably

Complicit in a mass silence

Yet I cannot look away

To do so would be another kind of murder

The killing of memory before it has time

To calcify the truth.

So, I keep scrolling,

Carrying these images like shrapnel

Embedded like cancer in my chest

Hoping they will transform into something more

The screen goes dark, my reflection stares back

I see myself as I truly am 

A voyeur of suffering

A consumer of catastrophe 

A witness to the unwitnessable

Here, holding a device that makes me complicit 

In the very horror that it reveals.


I don’t want to look at my phone anymore 

But I will

Because someone must remember 

What we allowed to happen 

While we scrolled.

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