I’d like a typewriter
so I can’t easily erase
my mistakes I’d much rather displace
from your memory of me
and my talent.
The idea of permanence no longer abhorrent.
Instead, I wonder what it would be like if
we were encouraged to show up and riff
off the cuff. Let our thoughts in a stream
reveal innermost grievances and untold dreams,
as though the permanence of being fully present
meant less sorrow, regret, and lament.
Speaking what is otherwise kept silent
by our inability to tolerate
anything slower than immediacy.
No longer meaning in the concept of privacy.
All the while all of us privately dying imprisoned
by the swift erasure of cancel culture’s chasm.
Conditioned to impatient entitlement,
unbending like cement
poured into a shapeless mold;
the kind the warnings from times of old
have brought to pass, now fully alive
in our technology dependent minds.
I wish I knew a way back to
the days before the first computer
made it’s way into my first grade classroom –
before we became so obsessed with sooner;
because later is now the villain
our insatiable greed tries to fill in
with next-day shipping
and reliance on AI-driven quipping,
to land us a date or coveted promotion.
We’re giving all the wrong things our devotion!
I know I sound really old –
like the dinosaurs of my youth.
Had I known how society would unfold
I would’ve stayed further removed
from the busy-ness of what today
is the modern picture of success –
living beyond our means and fully indebted
to the ones who promise to bless
us with more than can possibly be kept
or looked after with care.
It’s no wonder our lives are so bare
when we throw big fits over tiny delays
in screens loading to keep anxiety at bay.
We’re more anxious than ever, I’ve heard.
I wonder why that’s not true of the birds?
Who so smol in existence,
abandon our obsession with resistance
to the natural flow of what’s given,
not theirs to choose which way they are driven
by seasons changing and weather
calling them forward into a new chapter.
The opposite of preoccupied
with the underlying why.
Only listen and response –
the dance with nature of which I’m so fond
to ponder and ask
questions that never outlast
the span of time. For I’ve found in speaking
with natural spirit guides who see me seeking,
much of the desperation I create
would subside if I were willing to wait
long enough for my silence to reveal
past the answers I claim are concealed.
Instead, finding that which I obsessively long for
lives deep down inside in the place where I store
some semblance of truth and the wild
wells of creative power.
Within me a garden of flowers
kept hidden well by the endless ocean
of my soul, also kept alive and in motion
despite the technology all around.
Outside me, greed for my inner wellness abounds.
But nature is such a funny friend,
so nearby and willing to lend
wisdom in the form of a mirror,
so that I can see what I already see, just a little clearer,
past the veil the computers of today
have created thick in their layers. An array
of horrid and predicted distortions
we honor now without any question
of how we are draining
the life-force; depleted and straining
from our cultures and societies,
so all that’s left is the shell of empty bodies,
no longer human and fully mutated
into something we have always hated,
disintegrated to the dust of our ancestors.
there will be no one to call us the predecessors.
That’s why I’m trying to go back to the roots
I remember from my broken youth,
even if those roots are also intertwined
with the technology of a dying kind.
I wonder if I’ll make it back far enough
to leave behind all the buying of stuff
that fills pockets and bellies so swollen,
fully empty from all that was stolen
by a deal that seemed too good to be true.
We’re like the boy in Willy Wonka, so blue,
nothing left now to undo.
our fleeting loyalty gone so askew
and madly in the wrong direction, off course.
Have we really no remorse
for all the havoc we’ve wreaked ,not only on bodies,
but on every creature’s future legacy?
For those that call earth home,
I’m unsure of any kind of hope
worth investing in now
other than learning to bow
to the wealth of knowledge
found in nature, if we have the courage
to humble our egos into surrender,
break our ties from the monetary lenders
that have us by the throat,
before we let them fully implode
our own psyches so twisted up,
caught in what’s unreal, like a once in a lifetime flood.
Let me remind you, in recent years we’ve seen
the full power of nature that we seem so keen
to dismiss and ignore.
Natural disasters are the powers that came before
and will come long after we’re gone
out to pasture.
Will it take only the worst of disaster
for us to yield to the nature of Wild
Living we currently revile?
For it’s only in following the truth
of the natural world we so earnestly refuse
to defer to in our arrogant intertwining
with a technological Shining
that will not cease to strike
once we’re too weak to put up a good fight
and devour us into obliteration.
We’ll find soon we made our bed in limitation
from free and full fellowship
with the natural world who is more aptly equipped
to guide us into sustainable future
where words like these aren’t stored away in controlling computers.
No, I want to go back to the days
before typewriters were the only way
to leave marks on the hearts of my peers –
the humans I love and hold so dear,
the ones for whom I truly fear
danger has drawn deceptively near;
for the ones who I know, just like me,
would rather not see
the effects of their blind apathy.
The situation we’re in is more than dire!
Burn it down like an all consuming fire;
the reality I hope never comes.
My prayer remains that every day under the sun
is an opportunity to learn gently all my lessons.
This remains my ask of the universe, too,
for you, my beloved; the one I knew
in a previous lifetime before all this terror
we play down now like a comedy of errors.
So, I hope you’ll stay with me in rhythm,
away from the inevitable destruction
we both are squarely walking toward,
blissfully unaware of the cost ignorance affords.
Now you know and so do I
that it’s our choice to remain in the lie.
I hope instead you pivot, even if only crawling;
quietly listening to nature who is calling,
speaking directly to the depths of our hearts,
showing us the way back from being apart,
and into a life that by human standards will
never measure up to a life of chasing after dollar bills.
All the same we’ll be much better for the wear,
for leaving behind all that others didn’t dare
to let go of in their nauseating greed
for more than more of all our needs.
Instead, we’ll be the good stewards of
a life of abundance
in simply enough.
Parker Stillwater 