Anarchism in PDF

 A poem for my hours in the Island.

I found anarchism in a PDF,

buried between hyperlinks and forgotten footnotes,

compressed into a 2MB file,

waiting for a revolution that never hit “Download.”

Ctrl+F: Freedom.

No results found.

Ctrl+F: Power.

Too many to count.

They said the state was a glitch,

a corrupted file in the system,

but here we are, buffering between oppression and update,

firewalled by fear,

blue-screened by bureaucracy.

Somewhere in the metadata of history,

someone whispers Bakunin like a lost password,

tries to decrypt Emma Goldman

before the algorithm flags it as a security threat.

Anarchism in PDF

a doctrine reduced to a digital ghost,

scanned but never read,

archived but never lived.

You cannot copy and paste rebellion.

You cannot encrypt a riot.

The revolution is not a hyperlink.

It is a heartbeat,

a matchstick,

a page waiting to burn.

I’m a stray animal 

drinking Barbados beer 

in memory of the dreamer 

who dreams that he is dreaming.

-ER

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