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.