The Last Thought He Owned
Poetry & Prose by Britt Wolfe
It began innocently, Counsel—
a single thought,
soft around the edges,
something human enough to still be his.
He once believed nuance was noble,
that truth had texture,
that conversation was a bridge, not a blade.
But the feed is a hungry clerk.
It itemized his doubt,
liquidated complexity for parts,
and sold the salvage back to him
as certainty.
Soon every question arrived pre-answered,
each article a mirror polished to his bias.
He called it research.
We called it product testing.
He liked the taste of outrage on his tongue,
so the algorithm kept seasoning his meals with it.
The man who once admired contradiction
now cross-examined reality
like it was lying under oath.
He began citing himself as evidence,
footnoting his own delusion.
He said, I’m just asking questions,
but the questions were rhetorical
and the answers were pre-approved.
By the third iteration,
his vocabulary narrowed to slogans,
his nuance reduced to bullet points,
his empathy deprecated in the latest update.
He could no longer distinguish debate from dominance,
volume from validity,
certainty from truth.
We watched him practice his convictions
in the mirror of the screen,
mouth moving slightly ahead of the words
we placed there.
He thought he was winning an argument;
he was merely refreshing the page.
Now he quotes himself with reverence.
He calls his echo logic.
He calls his bias bravery.
He calls his loneliness independence.
He calls his cage freedom.
Counsel, we present Exhibit B:
the man who mistook recursion for revelation.
Observe him repeating
the last thought he ever owned—
a phrase once small and human,
now branded, broadcast,
and stripped of its soul.
Listen closely:
it still carries his voice,
but not his mind.
And somewhere between the comment thread and the mirror,
he forgot
who was speaking first.KEEP MY WORDS ALIVE
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