Thursday, June 19, 2014

poem of the day 06.19.14

well....i've reached the bottom of the poetic barrel once again.
it happens.  such is the hazard of doing an almost daily poem blog.
hey....at least it isn't a "best of" poem today.


steve jobs

reading richard hugo poems
i’m not really reading richard hugo poems

i’m listening to some woman cackle

she’s bent over an iphone
head to head with her cackling friend

the two of them are laughing at a video

it is an ubiquitous experience these days
albeit still a bit jarring at the volume of their braying jollity

all the same it makes me wonder
what the world would be like now
if we didn’t have these little gadgets to amuse us so

if that bald, black turtleneck wearing
white sneaker sporting nerd
hadn’t forever punctuated the silence
with his magical and entertaining gadgets

oh, it would probably be someone else in the hot seat

i put down the richard hugo
there is no point in even trying with the noise
emanating from these two broads

i watch my fellow passengers

each person bent into a device
curled into it on a hard seat as if communing with a lover

and i think of the strife
the mass murderers, the dictators, the disease
the famine, the planet warming at an uncontrollable rate

i think of the virtual slave labor that it takes
to make just one iphone out of the millions

and i wonder anew at what the world would have been like
if a guy like steve jobs had put his money and his mind

into people and the planet
instead of all of these technological toys

how he could’ve maybe reached the same end
that he was searching for all along

progress.

                                                

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