infinite content ocean & our thumbs

there is an instagram account
that posts stills from every spongebob episode ever. 
it's been going frame by frame for years.
i think of the crouching person
& their fingers. the glow of their phone screen
in the dark of an apartment that smells
like wood & cats. how, in many ways,
the work of humans is the work
of librarians. of fishermen. of what is
taken to bed with the moon. in the car
on the way home, we talk about limiting our screen times
& i get frustrated. you say, "there is a program
that can lock yourself out of the apps."
i know i am an addict to color & light & desire 
but also at the same time to the idea that i am small
& that everyone else is just as hungry.
i want a portal without advertisers. i want
our rampant kelp forests & midnight songs.
to run out into the street & find piles of photographs.
i have a vision of an ocean of all the posts that
no one else has seen but their creators.
the unwatched youtube videos. a man holds up
a snake found in his bathtub. he tells her,
"i am sorry." a girl eats a flower. someone is
convening with ghosts. a stop motion where every still
is from a separate fractured story. 
gushing spilling ocean. every day the world becomes
more & more unknowable. i find relief in this. 
in the vision, i hold my breath. witness
what fires i can. fill my skull with their warmth 
& their burns. my fishbowl without any fish.
we used to have anchoresses who lived apart 
from the world. locked in rooms. prayed 
& talked to god. we are becoming the opposites.
tethered to the fullness & the flames. 
but yet still maybe, talking to fragments of 
some kind of divine we hold between us.
past the feed machine & into the blood.
the place where our strangenesses dwell like eels.