Alkaloid: The Digital Loom

Lyrics

The quietest factory in Atlanta.
Morning light cuts across the sealed concrete floor.
Seven-thirty AM.

My coffee is from a place in Krog Street Market.
It smells like burnt caramel and ambition.
The only dust in the air is what the sunlight finds.
Not the fine white powder of Capitola Flour.
Not the ghost of 1898.
My hands rest on smooth, black plastic.
An ergonomic curve.
Not the splintered handle of a dolly, or the rough hemp of a bale.

This is the digital loom.
The shuttle is a blinking cursor.
We are weaving with threads of light, not cotton.
Here at 691 John Wesley Dobbs,
the loudest sound is a new idea arriving.
A quiet click. A finished thought.

I look up at the heart pine beams above my standing desk.
Dark wood, thick as a man's chest.
There's a gouge near the sprinkler pipe, a deep scar.
I wonder what machine left its mark.
What weight it was meant to hold.
The rumble from the tracks below isn't a freight train anymore.
It's the soft percussion of running shoes on the BeltLine.
The ghost of the Virginia Cotton Docks is just a whisper on the breeze through the open patio door.

This is the digital loom.
The shuttle is a blinking cursor.
We are weaving with threads of light, not cotton.
Here at 691 John Wesley Dobbs,
the loudest sound is a new idea arriving.
A quiet click. A finished thought.

The glass walls of the conference room hold silent meetings.
Blueprints on a shared screen.
No shouting over the din of a grinder, no union whispers in the break room.
The labor is invisible.
It lives in the cloud, in the hum of the Wi-Fi router on the brick wall.
Are we building something as real as this building?
Something that will last a hundred years?
Or just signals in the air?

The cursor blinks.
Waits for the next command.
Another line of code, another sentence.
Another thread woven.
The sun climbs higher over the Old Fourth Ward.
The work goes on.
In the quiet.