Another world,
Not on the streets,
In my hands;
I do not live there.
Sun overhead replicates day.
Cloud passes, a different grey.
Rain, a sound-bite of forecast weather,
Falls in a morning.
There is no true colour in sixteen million;
Not one colour I can touch and feel.
Now news
Is only newness,
Oldness, being old,
Takes on the pallor
Of the dead.
As if I should want to be
Everywhere at once or,
Imprisoned by simultaneity,
See everything reflected
On a glowing screen.
The heart in the end lies
Where the eyes impeccably look:
Scrutiny, vision, the casual filtering of light
As it enters their darkness; so illuminated,
A single thought fires the mind into tomorrow,
Like sunrise or the sun itself exploding,
I am seeing the world
Second hand, already used.
Someone else’s vision before mine chose this.
As if I could look at it, believe my own eyes
And not still be blind, not be blinded
By a trick of perspective where lux and lumen,
Photons, tiny pixels, tell me nothing of the sky above
But trip off another’s digitally forked tongue,
A lie through tooth and claw, as if this was real.
Oh, Maya, if illusion is your name,
This is more of it: the same enchantment,
Glamour, or some such, pushes into me
Like a dagger, tearing my heart to shreds;
And I feel no pain.
© BH, 2018
“Like a priest with a pornographic watch
Looking and longing on the sly
It’s stricken from your uniform
But you can’t get it out of your eyes.”
Joni Mitchell - The Boho Dance
Indeed, it felt like a series coming on. More on enslavement by device, totalitarianism of telecoms, mesmerism by machine intelligence. This one came from seeing a BBC page on how we can’t stop looking at our phones.
BBC
Tech Tent - Glued to Our Phones
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-44412033
I remembered Joni Mitchell’s lines from ’75 and thought ‘that’s it’.
Joni Mitchell – The Boho Dance (from Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975)
http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=38
Paradoxically, I read it online, researched it and put it up there. What does that say about me? Who’s the e-slave now?
So, this became the second in the series about enslavement by device, totalitarianism of telecoms, mesmerism by machine intelligence.
Series -
The image is myself again looking through an optical illusion at a glowing smartphone. Note, I'm not looking away. More's the pity.
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