Scroll
Scroll.
Scroll past the horrors
and the laughing
and the tawdry chaos that is
the two entwined
in our click-click world.
Scroll past the flinches
and the caught launching
and the revved-up pain
of past insult
in those little typed letters
thrown atcha on the screen.
Scroll.
Scroll past the reminders
and the forgotten
and the once-favorited yesterdays
that are too stale now to trend
or teach you anything new.
What was that again?
Scroll.
Keep scrolling.
Resumés
When you’re a child they tell you
when you grow up to do what you love,
but the world won’t pay for that –
so instead we fall into ranks of what someone else decided
we are qualified for,
based on the greed rumbling in the world’s belly
and the lust leering out its eyes this week,
just like someone before them decided that this was all
they were qualified for,
a long line of other people who know only your merest casing
deciding what you’re good for in life.
It doesn’t matter what you love.
The world loves extraordinary,
but banishes different.
It’s a hard place to get along.
And it’s not technology that’s distanced us
but the leeriness of what might happen if we really set to it.
There was always something there,
to mask that fear under the stank of unproductivity.
Fear is too subtle a scent to be detected under a louder assault.
And so instead of facing the constant possibility
that we might not be good enough,
we click on a new browser, open another tab,
and while away the hours with the distraction of others
doing exactly the same thing,
because we’re all afraid of the demons inside us.
Technology didn’t make them –
it’s just one more curtain we use to pretend they aren’t there.
Maybe we’re the ones that made them,
telling each other that in the end, it doesn’t matter what you love.
That this is all you’ll ever be good for.
Because we’ve been taught to size each other by the merest casings.
It’s hard, for a ghost to ever prove substance.
Just some wistful dystopian poetry for you all that popped into my head during what’s passing for my “this morning.”
Cell Phone Towers
We live our lives of drinking reheated coffee while we get up too early or sleep in too late.
We are anchored to our reality by the tether of cell phone wires plugged into wall outlets,
letting us know when we are about to lose connection to the functionality we have made of ourselves,
when we will lose our place as one more cog in the great spinning wheel
we have made of this earth, one large machine run by the breath of its inhabitants.
I do not rue the network we have defined ourself as, not entirely,
for there’s something to it, being able to have at least the merest scrap of you,
in the sound of your voice while you are in China and I am in Belize,
but I wonder if perhaps there would not be so much distance,
if we’d focused more on how to climb tree branches instead of success ladders.
Maybe we wouldn’t be drinking so much reheated coffee,
and maybe my perfume would be the smell of you, instead of this odor to mask the loneliness.
Quill Aquiver 
Against the Reader
4 Maysource
The public is a cruel beast. Fickle and finicky. They will fight for a hashtag today that they won’t even remember trending this time next week. It’s a short-term gratification like that, when you serve up an endless hors d’oeuvres array of choked-down phrases and coughed-up inanities. You can only fit so much lasting grit in a hundred and forty characters.
The public is a wild beast. Running here and there, grazing from whatever pasture happens to have seeded the greenest virility. Sweet and fresh, even the hardwood trunks must extend new tendrils to grasp any notice. It’s a sort of reversed food chain out there; if you don’t get a bite then you have no reproducibility.
They will rave, the public. Protest is too archaic an art form these days; throw slime or shout your garbled grumbles the loudest and it’s those stitch by stitch tears to rags that will gain you internet power. Meanwhile the authors will hide behind metaphor, saying we said something not what we said. Confuse them enough to ignore you and die dusty encased in the walls of your study; or ply a trickster twist on a trope masked enough to pass for ingenuity and garner your two minutes of fame on a Google headline. Leave the reader shaking and wagging their head – at least then it’s intentional.
There is no refined when even the gatekeepers have become so crude. Taste is torture in a bittorrent world.
Simile is useless. Nobody likes anything.
The public is a cruel beast, you see.
Tags: against the reader, age of, commentary, condemnation, confusing, confusion, digital, essay, experimental, hashtag, metaphor, poem, poetic, poetry, prose, public is a cruel beast, rave, technology, war