In a Time When We No Longer Think, Feel (Or Even Hate)

In a time when television sets wipe clean the mind’s slate and we no longer think or feel or even hate- our brains now completely blank, as we sink into super-sized sofas holding 3 liter drinks and watch our digitized selves burn in the new reality TV show starring you called the midnight news. and later at night when the windows fill with artificial light we laugh ourselves to bed.


 Then wake at eight to sleep through 4 years of a class-filled fate, in order to forget everything we’ve learned about causes and humane concern, minds no longer molding metaphors or similes or any kind of creative imagery, instead repeating forever ending never bending equations of right and wrong and why we die balanced out on both sides with proofs that prove religious grace is metaphysics and no more.

Minds purged of all we’ve ever dreamed, or ever gleamed from poems poets and drug dreams; stand on a crowded stage to smile, fixed gaze, eyes glazed, into the faces of the people who made us who we are- the retired revolutionaries and rock stars who now drive big expensive cars and tutor twelve children to get into Harvard.

Those of us destined for deeds truly great will enroll for 4 or 6 or even 8 more years at businesses that masquerade as what were once called schools. Prepared for life we’ve been convinced is real, we scan papers, screens, and tuck our tails between our legs that we might impress the self-proclaimed best with our knowledge of their favorite Starbucks drink.

Married now, no longer young and barely begun along the path to fame for which we’ve paid, with interest, every month for 30 years; we forge false families in high hopes the press will cast us in a virtuous light, misdeeds clearly out of sight, and boost our ratings by .5 percent. Elected, promoted and empowered, we buy and preach the same misdirection that soured truth and all free speech which we now police in reckless home security. Wage wars while taking corporate bribes, killing a thousand nameless tribes and talking politics at home. CEOs that we’ve become increase insurance rates and blot the sun with chemicals no one can see. Hospitals take helpful hints and turn away the ones they promised once they would protect, sue the heroes that defect. Writers write and Bloggers blog, all paid off to ignore infants sobs, about the hours of their every days and why the new technology speeds up stock trades.

If history repeats, in heaping piles, the errors of one generation’s downward spirals, will the poets of our age come of an age when bills paid are more important than lives saved and early working hours leave inspiration, revelation and morning flowers forever floating in their daylight fantasies?