Breath & Shadow
Summer 2025 - Vol. 22, Issue 3
I Worry About Elon’s Neuroscience Developments
written by
Terry Trowbridge
How we harass the people
with our own desires
who once believed themselves
the only ones on earth.
-From Rosemary Clewes. (2017). Witness. The Woman Who Went to the Moon. Toronto: Inanna.
Elon Musk wants to be in your dreams.
Perhaps dreams are the last lonely place,
last true horizon beyond which nobody sees.
The Arctic Circles of closed eyelids,
shimmering metamorphic Borealis and Steve,
blankets of bedroom igloos.
And soon, like his satellite rows in the sky,
Elon Musk will intrude, and project limitations
on our creativity in the last free place,
meeting us there, delivering components
of a graphic designer’s creations
run through generative iterations
then optimized by sweatshop humans
being dehumanized while the dehumanize us
won REM blink at a time, sending data packets
and other informatic corpuscles to jump
our precisely targeted synaptic electron streams.
We will have no privacy, then, and no way to retrieve it.
His free-speech absolutism will reveal us to him
Meanwhile he will ban journalism and information
he dislikes, while letting in all the voices of Twitter
and asking us to pay for the Blue Check
to validate our own presence inside of our own presence.
Canadian researcher Terry Trowbridge’s poems have appeared in The New Quarterly, Carousel, subTerrain, paperplates, Dalhousie Review, untethered, Nashwaak Review, Orbis, Snakeskin Poetry, American Mathematical Monthly, M58, CV2, Brittle Star, Lascaux Review, Carmina, Progenitor, Muleskinner, Sulphur, Northridge Review, Ex-Puritan, Perceptions, Granfalloon, Literary Hatchet, Calliope, New Note, Confetti, Pennsylvania Literary Journal, and more. He is grateful to the Ontario Arts Council for grant funding during the polycrisis.