Technofirma

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Technofirma

“It has become appallingly obvious that our

technology has exceeded our humanity.”

--Albert Einstein.

There once was

this halcyon period when science

fiction was ensconced 

in pulp magazines,

comic books, fantastical literature, &

many lunatic asylums;

just bug-eyed

monsters whose fierce fangs dripped

with murder &

mayhem, earth portrayed

as this dusky gem ready

to be plucked

& plundered, just

nasty alien creatures who wanted

the earth’s unpolluted

fresh water, or

endless natural resources, just megalomanic

hordes wanting to

enslave mankind for

their own nefarious dreams & plots;

mysterious mother ships

of every configuration,

hovering malignantly over earth’s greatest

cities, just randy robots

running amok, from

vicious vacuum cleaners to towering

metallic warriors shooting

lethal lasers from

every blinking orifice--and yet

after centuries of

conjecture, the fiction

is wearing thin and the

science has integrated

itself deeply, profoundly

into our homes & our

daily lives, like

lascivious lichens, like

callow carcinogens, like idiotic ivy;

busily smashing atoms,

breaking helix codes,

while extolling the virtues of

nuclear power even

as we fear

its instabilities, using science to

smarten our weapons,

shrinking our spinning

planet by letting a plethora

of satellites orbit

our immediate outer

space--serving the media; embracing

new technology as

we would a

new lover, letting it provide

a lusty hunger

for the sensation

of constant stimulation, welcoming it

blindly & fervently;

compelling our youth

to glue their attention to

their phones, notebooks,

watches, & laptops,

wearing headphones, never looking up,

wandering the streets

like asinine automatons,

becoming completely addicted, dependent, hooked,

their insights blunted, 

obsessed--overloading outdated
power grids, overstimulating 

heretofore undiscovered cortical provinces, evolving

into some kind

of cyber-lemming, blissfully unaware

of the camouflaged 

cliffs they march

toward, as too many of us,

boomers & crones,

feel left behind,

excluded, out-of-touch, labeled

as luddites, wearing

self-consciously our

fading expiration dates, watching fearfully

as the youth

rush headlong ahead

of us, oblivious to the 

greedy fiends who

are the sentinels

of the sensorium, the perilous

programmers, the cryptic

keepers of the

kill switches, invisible restraints &

the control rooms. 

Glenn Buttkus

Posted over on dVerse Poets Poetics

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