Not Poetry. Quatrain Verse in English & Swedish. Dagsverser. On the Mundane & the Arcane.
From turgidity no rest
while life’s journey thwarted
Grab hold rigidly with zest
hurry, get it sorted!
So wake up, go & aspire
or find your life wasted
Do so before you retire
or suffer lambasted!
No peace found in breathless rushing
or pride felt from slack-jawed gushing
Hooked on voraciously soul sucking screens
in their eerie sheen ubiquitous
Been had by corporate marketing schemes
To celeb culture obsequious
No flirtation. Hit hard on
by forces hellacious
in consumer-tech’s brash con
its pursuits vexatious
Our culture predaceous, duplicitous
a future crashing in crassitude
in a society iniquitous
we languish feebly in lassitude
Been trading snug solidarity
for barbed & smug insularity
Lives desiccated deprecated
desecrated by vanity
Human habitat depredated
with hubristic profanity
Most could surely have been averted
yet why do we not feel ashamed?
While a few moved for change concerted
most found wanting – but not all blamed
Too weak to act, lost heart, guts & shirts
Temperatures & oceans rise
Serving on children our ‘just deserts’
heaped in gleaming china of lies
Looming starkly dark
on lonely heath
hear death’s howling bark
with growling teeth
Warm colors faded to bleached
erstwhile joy jaded to sorrow
Voices chalk on blackboard screeched
as we cower from the morrow
Outlook cruel, bleak
no place for the weak
+)
heath = here: earthly life
When death by beheading
just the targets die
No bystander shredding
when children’s limbs fly
Nor any hospital wrecking
cultural desiccation
drone obliterated wedding
whole country devastation
Mass killings industrialized
by U.S. Exceptionalism
propagandized as ‘civilized’
though slaughter by Imperialism
Casualties mere ‘collateral’
when by Western Technology
While ‘war crime’ by Those Fanatical
of differing ethnology
Still each death an execution
under whatever delusion
In one by one retribution
or in conveyor profusion
No one may be a belittler
of the Evils brought by Hitler!
Still what is now holding sway
in ignorance fabled
to History’s sheer dismay
others are now labeled:
Like Hitler! Not like but worse
claim elites Americanized!
Unhinged, untenable curse
lie kept alive propagandized
You may ask what I’ll be doing today
of what is left for me to aspire?
If listlessly wiling the day away
why would anyone want to retire?
Gone now ‘prime of life’ energetic
barely just passably kinetic
But no, am not mired in an impasse
Boyle’s law explains it in this way:
Chores behave like decompressing gas
while few they fully fill each day
Now my life (on whose behest?)
is wantonly waning
am adrift, feeling bereft
of what joy remaining
On many days flatly harrowed
unmeritoriously
up paths steep & ever narrowed
shuffling laboriously
Led a life inglorious
deftly dissipative
Even found notorious
as opinionative
Scripted snappy talk ‘on the surface’
passes now for civility
like spouted in customer service
with breezy ease & certainty
While on screens placidly self absorbed
aloof from solidarity
is this where we think ourselves adored
embraced in popularity?
Shall (in a world harshly hackable)
head down texting keep us placable?
Through fully opened sluice
words gush profusely
wave follows wave obtuse
ashore diffusely
Conveyed in smarmy smooth style
modulated, attuned
words customized to beguile
glibly, quickly communed
Words mindless of direction
locked in obduracy
empty of much reflection
pound in profligacy
If you take to heart much of what blurts
then you shall receive your just deserts!
+)
just deserts = (idiomatic) punished in a manner appropriate to one’s actions (plural only & indeed spelled ‘deserts’ while pronounced as if ‘desserts’)