The Swan Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

A parody of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”

A digital-age rewrite of T. S. Eliot’s modernist monologue.

S’io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s’i’odo il vero,
Senza tema d’infamia ti rispondo.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us scroll then, you and I,

Let us go then, you and I,

Through the hashtags and warnings of AGI,

When the evening is spread out against the sky

Like a madman wandering a modern fable…

Like a patient etherized upon a table;

Let us gorge on code-curated feeds,

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,

The sexual misdeeds

The muttering retreats

And comic slights from corporate tools and trolls

Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels

The thirst trap swimsuit picks and rabbit holes…

And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:

Endless sniping after venomous arguments

Streets that follow like a tedious argument

Where the moderate relent

Of insidious intent

To trap us all in maddening dissension.

To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh do not ask “who is it?”

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

It is “self” we must exhibit

Let us go and make our visit.

At the desk, we see the CEO,

In the room the women come and go

Smiling at what the data show.

Talking of Michelangelo.

The captured clicks that chart our path across each new domain,

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The captured time that marks our interest in each new domain,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Mapped our wants inside our stomachs and our psyches,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Pitched us modern drugs for ancient pains…

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Exposed our private selves to masters known and faceless,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Pulled out our smartphones, heard a plaintive beep,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And noting that an email thread was now on fire,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Left cookies in the browser, and tabs to creep

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

And alas, we burn our time

And indeed there will be time

With enraptured eyes that scroll along the screen,

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Feeding ourselves a drug for all our pains,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There’s always time to waste more time

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a life to greet the avatars we greet,

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There’s always angles suited for your taste,

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the selfies, trips, and plans,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That phantoms at their screens will validate.

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for work and time to flee,

Time for you and time for me,

And time still for these infinite digressions,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for new impressions and obsessions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before a Slack chat or the need to pee.

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

At the desk, a beaming CEO,

In the room the women come and go

Watching the count of addicts grow.

Talking of Michelangelo.

And indeed there will be days to ponder… “should I care” and “should I share?”

And indeed there will be time

Years to suffer in screen despair

To wonder, “Do I dare?” and, “Do I dare?”

With a numbness from the trending fare

Time to turn back and descend the stair,

(We will judge, “she’d look better, were she thin!”)

With a bald spot in the middle of my hair—

My profile pic, my filters adding luster to my skin,

(They will say: “How his hair is growing thin!”)

My status, pithy, modest, but embellished with a witty spin,

My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,

(They will check where my threads begin)

My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin—

Am I sexy in the metaverse?

(They will say: “But how his arms and legs are thin!”)

In a nanosecond’s time,

Do I dare

Lurk selections and connections that an algo will disperse.

Disturb the universe?

In a minute there is time

For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.

And they have tracked us all already, mapped us all,

For I have known them all already, known them all:

Have cached the clicks and likes and meme cartoons,

Have known the evenings, mornings, afternoons,

We encapsulate our lives with text balloons.

I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;

We see the metrics revving as our bodies stall,

I know the voices dying with a dying fall

We gain engagement from a distant gloom,

Beneath the music from a farther room.

They’ll follow, I presume?

So how should I presume?

And we have trained the bots already, trained them all,

And I have known the eyes already, known them all—

The LLMs consume each token-laden phrase.

The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase,

And when we are tokenized then, data under skin,

And when I am formulated, sprawling on a pin,

When crawling, parsing, querying each call,

When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,

Then who are we within?

Then how should I begin

To notify and receive the affection we crave?

To spit out all the butt-ends of my days and ways?

And what will be subsumed?

And how should I presume?

And we have watched the reels already, watched them all,

And I have known the arms already, known them all—

Posts from exotic beaches, windswept hair

Arms that are braceleted and white and bare

(But in their backgrounds, towns in disrepair)

(But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!)

Is it FOMO, fear, or stress

Is it perfume from a dress

That drives us to impress?

That makes me so digress?

Faux-perfection, views, and labels, each story to enthrall,

Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.

Is this what we consume?

And should I then presume?

The source of our chagrin?

And how should I begin?

In dismay, we see facial flaws and hit delete,

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets

Asked gen-AI for perfect prototypes

And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes

Of grand, imagined visions, filling up our windows

Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been another crypto-bro,

I should have been a pair of ragged claws

Selling a shitcoin dream and NFTs.

Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

And the aftermath, the transformation gradually,

And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!

Reality whimpers,

Smoothed by long fingers,

Create…waken…the model simpers,

Asleep … tired … or it malingers,

Fed by the words, pictures of you and me,

Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.

Should we, after pic and app entices,

Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,

Turn existence into pings from our devices,

Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis?

And though we have slept and wakened, day by day,

But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,

We have watched our world (beyond the screen) dissolve into the ether.

Though I have seen my head (grown slightly bald) brought in upon a platter,

There is no bugfix - this fact is a feature.

I am no prophet—and here’s no great matter;

As we scroll and sell and buy and bicker,

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,

We embrace an immortal algo like some AI vicar.

And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,

And we all should be afraid.

And in short, I was afraid.

And would we ever have the wherewithal,

And would it have been worth it, after all,

After the cash, the dreams of each VC,

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Amidst the images, the tokens fed to GPT,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Will fantasy beguile?

Would it have been worth while,

Will we aggregate the snippets and compile?

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To reduce a lifetime’s acts to protocol,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

And present it as an neural net’s expression

To roll it toward some overwhelming question,

To say “here! perfection! optimized life!

To say: “I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

Designed to please you all, I’ve impressed you all!”

Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all”—

And thus, viewing a photo from your feed

If one, settling a pillow by her head,

Should read: “That is not who you are at all;

Should say: “That is not what I meant at all;

That is not you, at all.”

That is not it, at all.”

And what of you has value, after all?

And would it have been worth it, after all,

All your actions fill a file.

Would it have been worth while,

After filtered compositions, is your insight obsolete?

After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,

After the profile, after the reposts, after the preferences the app can store,

After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the

Is this the only core?

floor—

It is impossible to reach beyond the screen?

And this, and so much more?—

But as if an algorithm just injected endless dopamine,

It is impossible to say just what I mean!

Would we still just smile?

But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:

If one, checking for upvotes, doom-scrolling through it all,

Would it have been worth while

And opening their window, should see,

If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,

“You are not here at all,

And turning toward the window, should say:

You were never quite real, at all.”

“That is not it at all,

That is not what I meant, at all.”

So we were never heroes, nor the narratee,

No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;

Just docile scenery, in this milieu,

Am an attendant lord, one that will do

To form the corpus, click a link or two,

To swell a progress, start a scene or two,

Foment and fade, take note of what is “cool”,

Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,

Inessential, numb to the abuse,

Deferential, glad to be of use,

Nondescript, ersatz, and illusory,

Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Digital presence, but a bit diffuse,

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse;

In fact, the diet is delusory,

At times, indeed, almost ridiculous—

What did we learn in school?

Almost, at times, the Fool.

So we’re sold…and we’re polled,

I grow old … I grow old …

We absorbed the content other scripts controlled.

I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

What is private in my mind? Is there anyone to reach?

Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

Any sovereign thoughts of value to step into the breach?

I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.

No attention left for learning…who would teach?

I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each.

I wonder what will be fed to me.

I do not think that they will sing to me.

We have watched stocks heading skyward as we slave,

I have seen them riding seaward on the waves

We are the product as we slave on Slack,

Combing the white hair of the waves blown back

When we send newer content up the stack.

When the wind blows the water white and black.

We have wandered through the wasteland of our screens,

We have lingered in the chambers of the sea

As sirens call from AI in the clouds,

By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown

A digital narcotic for the crowds.

Till human voices wake us, and we drown.