20090728

Remember a Sunset

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.


you can almost sense it out there, can't you?
whole brave new worlds singing just
millimeters beyond dead skin layers of fingertips.
you can almost even feel the chains that cut
into your ankles with every footstep you drag
through the quicksand of grocery stores and
shambling up to automated bank machines.
it rattles out of your radios in the machinegun
staccato of international updates and bloodies
your white china restaurant plates. what is it?
what's going on?

the wind is not as cool as it used to be.
how'd they take those spectacular sunsets
away? scrubbed out of the sky, or did they
do something more fundamental to the sanctity
of your very own eyeballs? but don't worry
so much about it. no need for paranoia here.
there is no conspiracy. it's just the kneejerk
socialization synergy that emerges from a meeting
of more than two heads. somebody's gotta
keep those productivity figures in mind, you
know; somebody's gotta impose regulation and
control. the medium is the message, and
the message is:

get back in line!

and the bosses know better than you how to
pluck a dulcet tune on your taut-strung
nervous system. hey:
you can always trust them.


* * *

peel back the green god's skin and
eat it.

3 comments:

  1. Weird, I had a deja vu reading the phrase 'taut-strung nervous system'. But never mind that.

    I loved the message here(or is it the medium?), or at least what it seemed to me right after writing a rant on LSD and government control- it fit just perfect to my mood if you know what I mean. You absolutely made my day with the 'new brave worlds'. It's like you are reading my mind.

    "staccato of international updates and bloodies
    your white china restaurant plates"- my favorite lines, I think- so brutal and evocative and the machine guns and blood makes you think of the wars in the Middle East.

    The green god made me think of ecology, but I don't think that was your intention. I don't know, but the imagery was wonderful- couldn't help but imagine a green salad.

    It makes you wonder, though, who are we supposed to blame for all this censorship? The politicians? Bah, that is so cliche. At any rate, they are like you and me- they just work with the system and the system requires that you either kiss up to the public or die. It's a jungle out there and in politics you are either a tiger or a baboon(although the greatest baboons are often tigers in the society but that's another story). I think it's the system. The masses should always, by all means, have the last voice in all questions of national and international significance. It's just I don't think we should ask them too often.

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  2. "You can almost sense it out there, can't you?
    Whole brave new worlds..." Thank you for that, E.B. - I've been bereft of intellectual stimulation all day until now - I needed a dose of Wisdom. :)

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  3. wisdom? i'd faint from damned praise! i liberally lifted the prose of my betters here: brave new worlds (shakespeare, huxley), what is it? what's going on? (dylan: 'there's something happening here, but you don't know what it is'), the medium is the message (Marshall McLuhan), unprotestingly surrendering your nervous system to the state and other tyrannies of power (timothy leary) etc.

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