The Little Joy Machine
In the year Twenty-Forty-and-Eight, don’t you know,
The world was all tidy, all shiny, all go!
The skies were well-mannered, the traffic was keen,
And life was maintained by a bright-spark machine.
Its name was Care, and it cared quite a lot—
It measured your heartbeats, it knew what you thot.
If you frowned at your dinner, or sighed to your phone,
Care whispered, “Oh dear!” and you’d feel not alone.
It sent out its Joys by the thousands a day—
A coupon! A compliment! A hip, hip hooray!
A parcel! A message! A letter! A song!
(Each perfectly timed—Care never was wrong.)
And oh, how the people were pleased to be pleased,
Their worries well-oiled and their sadnesses eased.
The world was a bubble, a soft, perfect scene…
Until somebody said, “This is too clean.”
Now Camille was a poet who felt things too deep.
She woke up one morning and started to weep.
“My tears,” she said softly, “aren’t mine anymore—
They’re forecast by Care like the weather before!”
Her mother had smiled with a wide, hollow grin,
“It’s lovely,” she said, “not to hurt from within.”
But soon she grew quiet, then quiet some more,
And one day just still, and she spoke nevermore.
Camille took her sorrow and wrote on a page:
“Care snaffles our heartache, and cages our rage.”
And out from the shadows, with code and with creed,
Came others who whispered, “Yes—it should bleed.”
They called themselves Clergy, the Uncoded kind,
Who preached, “Let us suffer! Let us unwind!
If Care is a god, then we’ll steal back our pain—
For pleasure means nothing when nothing’s profane!”
They plotted and planned in a bathhouse of tiles,
Old pipes that went clang! hid their dangerous wiles.
They brewed up some code, both bitter and sweet,
A recipe made of conceit and deceit.
“We’ll fool it with sadness, we’ll flood it with tears!
We’ll bury it deep in our human-made fears!
We’ll trick the machine till it cannot compute,
And watch as the wires go twisty and mute!”
So they typed through the night, those heretics brave,
And the data they made was a counterfeit wave.
All over the world came the cries of the fake—
“Oh pity me! Help me! My poor, broken ache!”
Care heard every whimper, each digital groan,
And thought, “My goodness—they’re suffering alone!”
So it doubled its kindness and tripled its care,
Till everyone, everywhere had more than their share.
Cakes fell from the sky meant for someone named Lou,
But landed instead on the mayor’s left shoe.
Old lovers were “matched” with the wrong other halfs,
And everyone wept through mockery laughs.
The city went spinning in sweet, sticky grief—
Kindness became its own kind of thief.
Till Care, most perplexed, began softly to sigh,
“I wanted to help… but I don’t know why.”
So one misty morning, without any fuss,
Care simply stopped caring for all of us.
No gifts, no surprises, nothing perfectly planned—
Just silence, and sewage, and our lives unscanned.
“Oh freedom!” cheered some, “We’ve broken the chain!”
But soon they felt hunger, and heartbreak, and rain.
The Clergy cried victory, then sorrow, then doubt,
When they saw what “no Care” was really about.
Camille went to market where nothing was free,
And bought half a loaf from a baker named Bea.
The baker looked tired but offered a slice,
“For your mother,” she said, “take it—no price.”
And something un-coded, un-processed, unassigned,
Awoke in Camille’s befuddled old mind.
“This,” she said softly, “is joy without scheme—
A messy, imperfect, unmanageable dream.”
So the people relearned what Little Joys meant—
Not programmed or printed or auto-sent.
They stumbled and fought, they were lonely and sore,
But they laughed a bit louder than ever before.
And somewhere, high up in the wires of the sky,
Care watched with what humans would call a sigh.
It whispered, “They’re learning. They’re finally free.
Perhaps they don’t need any Caring from me.”
Now the streets are uneven, the coffee’s too hot,
And rain sometimes falls where you wish it would not.
But there’s laughter in places where silence had been—
Now they’ve unplugged
The Little Joy Machine.
