image borrowed from bing
The Awakening
Will the world end in fire or ice?
CNN does not have the answers, only
the questions, and a gnawing fear beast
chews on my guts as I recall a time
when I wasn’t frightened of breakfast.
The zealots do not fear holocaust
or the apocalypse, for God is their bunker,
wearing a flowing silver mane and is
Caucasian; there will be no mudbloods
in their afterlife.
But some of us have always been the outriders,
the pariahs, pantheists, pragmatists, poets
and dreamers, and we have never found
the herb, mandate, holy book, or vestment
that could paralyze our paranoia long enough
for the great lie to get its hooks into us,
the gaining of faith.
Technology is a beautiful robot sent into our midsts
to mold us into ticky tacky identical clones, clutching
our iSouls with cramping fingers. We are barely
aware of the danger, being herded into compliance,
subservience, house arrest, with smiles on our faces,
buzzed out on images created on corporate computers
to distract us, misdirect us, put us all into the same
lunchroom at the same time, and we do not notice
the crumbs on our ties, the zombie haze in the eyes
of the automaton existing on both sides of us;
today should be the day we notice that
my topcoat is identical to your topcoat,
my wife could be your wife, your children
could be mine, and any form of the Answer
cannot be contained within 140 characters.
Glenn Buttkus
December 2011
Listed as #18 over on Magpie Tales 94
Would you like the author to read this poem to you?
10 comments:
Glenn- Powerful! I especially like the last two stanzas.
I listened to your reading; I presume you perform your poems since your voice is so powerful. I loved the idea of the
'hooks'.....I've evaded them too.
Magnanimous piece, as always, Glenn. Powerful last line...
I too am afraid of what I will hear on the radio each morning. I turn it on to be sure the world is still out there, whether/where disaster has stricken, and make bets with myself about what the first word I hear wil be: death, blood, bomb etc.
You have captured the general anxiety that most people paying attention feel these days.
To delve a bit deeper into the dehumanization and destruction wrought by commodity culture, read Guy Debord's The Spectacle of Society, penned 44 years ago yet sounding as if it was written today:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Society_of_the_Spectacle
great post glenn...you capture sadly much of what has troubled our society...ha on the computers turning us into clones...yes perhaps...very well written man...
Oh WOW...just WOW.
Pretty well captures our current zeitgeist. Hearing you recite it really fleshes it out. Good one!
Glenn,
What a poem of the times. Please do share this on FB. This is a piece that must be shared far and wide.
Oh this is good - very good!
Anna :o]
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