Not Poetry. Quatrain Verse in English & Swedish. Dagsverser. On the Mundane & the Arcane.
Your demands way gratuitous
so won’t change our behavior!
So ain’t it just fortuitous
Hi-Tech shall be our Savior!
Our likes are inviolable
so let change happen ‘out there’!
Our habits not abdicable
thus change cannot happen ‘here’!
We don’t care if action may redeem humanity
distracted we’ve lost traction mired in inanity
We grin while from all sides beset
gleaming gadgets stock-piling
slogging in usurious debt
but offers so beguiling!
When jokes rarely hilarious
what remains entertaining?
In crowds we fake gregarious
Clarity of thought waning
Jaded discouragement reigning
fizzled our aspirations
Interest, engagement feigning
parched by drought our flirtations
Energy too quickly drained
Events uninspiring
Faculties eerily strained
Even sleep turned tiring
Taste blandly the same most meals
Phone & computer hacked
Distracted by doltish deals
Life’s precious china cracked
So, would it not be overdue
to leave Life’s ‘silly season’
where way too much has gone askew
and instead pursue reason?
Saving time only to see it squandered
on ‘easy come, easy go’ paths wandered?
Time rules in our enslaved existence
so we keep up the frantic fuss
traipsing the ‘path of least resistance’
and allowing it to own us
In ‘me first’ scuffles we collude
amidst unrelenting rush
Noses to multiple screens glued
Gush, much fuss. Not enough blush
So then why not let ‘mindful & slow’
rather than ’scurrying nonplussed’
prevail as the default way to go
chancing to let settle the dust?
Living at our own pace
let’s us wander with grace
I do hear you, sure
but my ‘pastime’
silly, bit obscure
is quatrain rhyme
Perhaps corralled conceit
shuffling in dull dance?
Mere bleats from verse effete
in limping cadence?
Surely slight nuisance compared
to all that what you’ve been spared?
edited 07/14/24 0835
Words coolly glitter
dashingly dance
observe them flitter
in pompous prance
Though off the wall
bouncingly banal
displaying gall
amongst their cabal
Disturbing distraction
when smoothly spouted
in make-belief traction
sense, meaning flouted
Haphazard words careen
noisily trenchant
in mangled phrases preen
as is their penchant
Phrases splashed
‘in’ words flashed
Grammar trashed
unabashed
All the while grasp gashed
facts, logic lashed
mushy meanings mashed
’same old’ rehashed
Words flow in overabundance
in hyperbolic redundance
Why do conversations unravel
and veer off in periphery?
After that someone springs a ‘cavil’
it’s downhill, and not gingerly
Scattered in off-subject traveling
swimmingly darts the ‘red herring’
In all directions unraveling
of logic, reason despairing
The cavalierly cavil
far from the Holy Grail
rather ‘diversion devil’
seldom been seen to fail
Leaves us to watch the verbiage chase
once again a ‘facts jumps the tracks’ case
‘Smartphonies’ engage at a flicker
on their ubiquitous gadgets
spouting latest cool banter quicker
regressed in abysmal habits
Hail, Time Gobbling Vulture
of the texting kind!
In virtual culture
why exert one’s mind?
Mindless grazing, gazing
in screens’ greenish sheen
inviting, debasing
shackled to routine
‘Smartphonies’ slavishly lock eyes
with Siren Screens seductive
enticing, devious device:
Crisp, collusive, corruptive
Their attention scatters feathery
while enfeebling human memory
+)
‘smartphonies’ = those who traded their pacifier (a gateway ‘drug’) for a smart phone
States, people not united
What passes for Congress
off in fantasy, blighted
least harmful in recess
Corporations prevail
Progressives backslide
HighTech to scant avail
as outlooks collide
Celebrities & brass
lie to cover their ass
The globalized economy rumbling
crushing many a society
while humanity’s habitat crumbling
in existential anxiety
Inequality as polity
conspired by the power elite
In gated, yachted frivolity:
the ever ‘rent seeking’ Wall Street
Thus condemned to poverty hollow
why do people just meekly follow?
Is it the elite’s confident stare
fashionable dress, wealth & gall
their scripted chatter, freshly blown hair
that subjugates us in their thrall?
Or rather this: What could more endear
than those lies we so eagerly hear?
Thus the teller of the truth is doomed
as we cannot handle getting informed
We are the automatons well groomed
to just pretending ‘happy unconcerned!’
+)
-‘rent seeking’ = (economics) activities which do not create societal worth, just redistribute existing resources
subject to rash off-key abuse?
Just dumped in to the impatient fray
like ever-so-smooth TV news?
Trying express ourselves clearly
seems taxing work, so we balk
rings socially too austerely
Try listen? We’d rather talk!
What if blabber became the umbrage
while restraint conversation’s glue
in enjoyment of graceful language
shared beyond a literate few?
But as for that prospect chimeric
we’re subjected to ‘reporting’
which the blabbermouths find mesmeric
too often outright transporting
+)
‘reporting’ = unsolicited droning on about one’s own mundane doings