NaPM April 2, 2018

[Todd]

Rules: Write a poem for national poetry month on the topic or form described. Each poem should appear as a separate reply to this thread. The goal is to, at the end of the month have written 30 poems for National Poetry Month. 


Topic 2: Write a poem inspired by speculative future (i.e., utopia, dystopia, invention, upheaval, etc.).
Form : any
Line requirements: 8 lines or more

Questions?

[just mercedes]

Moebius grief (after The River-Merchant’s Wife, Pound)


We’ll meet again, as children. I’ll be
playing in a flower-filled garden,
you’ll glance on passing, slow down,
turn back, and it all will start again.

I don’t know what your name will be.
We’ll marry young. At first my plaything,
you’ll become more necessary to me
than my own body, our only future
together forever. Yet you will leave.

Something beyond me will call
and you’ll be gone, dragging your feet
maybe, but walking away. Why
will I always be left behind?

Owls louder in trees at night,
sullen seas will grind cliffs, rivers
eat through land. A yellow rose
will bloom in the garden
and die at its time.

I won’t know where to go,
to look for you.

And you will never come.

[RiverNotch]

the end of history


dropped off by their respective jeeps, john and annie meet at the caltex where annie would hail a trike to take her home. they haven't seen each other in three years -- a pleasant surprise.

so how should i call you now? johnny asks.

she's sitting in the back of his dad's car. his dad's driving, but it's his phone that's hooked up to the radio.

oh right -- you knew me before i was called annie. don't worry, you can call me anything you want.

we do have quite the history together, he recalls. i still like you, you know. i never stopped liking you, not even after our long periods of absence. i can't imagine a future where we won't ever meet again.

annie gets out of the car. me neither. but i can't believe, of all my friends, you're the only one left back here, driving me to naia. don't you have any plans to go abroad?

to follow you, perhaps. they laugh. john doesn't know what album to switch to for the long and lonely drive back home. annie takes a stilnox once she's boarded.

when she wakes up, she's in manila again. she thinks time's not touched the place one bit, for better or worse. she hails a cab.

[CRNDLSM]

'It's better to have one great diner
than a million mediocre ones,'
said the creator, not the founder,
who lived by different opinions.
The cost of refrigeration waste,
reintroducing ice cream to shakes,
when was their integrity replaced?
Is all good business moral mistakes?
I want to build a dog house empire,
without sacrificing quality.
With a Petsmart on every corner,
this seems an impossibility.
My ma and pa were killed by a quote,
'shove a hose down a drowning man's throat.'

[Tracy Mitchell]

I Know Not What Course 
Others May Take



Squish quick
like aphids on meth, 
swimming, swarming 
nanomites slide stem cells, 
pirated from the in situ nurture, 
through yards of plaque-lined arteries
like white-water rafters snaking between 
narrow walls of river canyons,
surreptitiously, 
to my brain.  

Bless their synthetic mitochondria.

I feel a hum somewhere behind
my eyes, like the start of the uprising,
the first firing of a revolution.

[Knot]

Everything Old


He focused on the arm, tracking it's surgical cleanliness
up past the first elbow, losing it in the dazzle of the l.e.ds.
The light, he surprised himself by remembering, was designed
to simulate late morning in spring, somewhere below twenty
degrees south, which seemed curiously inappropriate.

He turned his head as the whirring servomotor began to rotate
the syringes and listened, intrigued by the almost biological sound
of the barrel being filled; one more tiny asthmatic, allergic
to this century. The liquid left a thin film on the inside
of the plastic tube, like an unshed tear;

the image burst as the needle pricked his skin. The machine
never hesitated, never had difficulty finding a vein.
He imagined the sedative, cold as it entered his bloodstream,
soothing the lit match burn of the injection site, swiftly
warming to the temperature of his blood.

He tried to recall what he had done to deserve this,
to choose this; but the thought faltered even as it formed.
The drug began to unwind his memories, and effortlessly,
painlessly, he was forgotten.

[Todd]

Butterflies, Suicide Bombs, and Paradox

I planned to kill my grandfather 
on Thursday, before I remembered
the futility of days, these grains of sand,
to mark time in an hourglass,
or spread across an endless beach. 
Why choose one from another? It didn’t matter

that I never knew him. He was only
an urn on my mother’s mantle.
It wasn’t until I’d found the photo
at the butterfly exhibit. She on his shoulders,
a Blue Morpho spinning on her outstretched finger—
a music box ballerina placed by the hand of God.

This curiosity became an opportunity.
if one crushed insect on my Friday
could be a hurricane, than what were a thousand
on their Thursday? That my grandfather was there
simply meant I could never be 

caught.

[dukealien]

hashwar I


that year...
hashtag-blockcontentdestroyers
campaigned against anyone
refusing to automatically
publish all images biodata
texts voice talk and locations
at all times without exception
from his her or whatever’s
personal devices...
its supporters all
subscribed to services
which constantly filtered
all content streams unmercifully
for entertaining funny crazy
and embarrassing events
then flagged them for comment
jokes and unending rewatch...
subscribers could, of course,
exempt themselves...
hashtag-saveourprivacy campaigned
against -blockcontentdestroyers
claiming it was astroturfed
by big 3 subscription services
and lost...

[vagabond]

presenting the future

yes, we have everything
in the perfect world.

we are assisted
with our distracted remains of imagination,
in our dissociated reigns of desires, forming
like unintelligible alien messages
or primeval paintings in our skull´s cavities.

the perfect world translates for us
so we are served
in the best of all possible ways,
securely guided,
instantly pleased.

yes, we have everything
we can think of
by now.

[Richard]

The Future

You'll be happy to know
trees will still be farmed,
air smoggy,
species endangered.
Some people will even paint signs and protest,
while others blame the communists.

Change will be gradual like,
depending who you ask,
the shrinking polar ice caps.
There'll still be elections too
that undo those changes.

But I'll be dead, so why should I care?

[Leanne]

Dig

We are within ourselves. 
Without Dream, we have no power
to purchase voice. We are decay.

In Somnium we break ground for 
gathering. It yields beneath the crust 
of our ancestors, sharded into shovelry, 
the cyclical enhancement of the hands 
we use to silence the Out. 

When we have broken enough, 
we go deeper within,
and gather.

[Todd]

What I really loved about some of these was that like Burgess many of you altered the language to create a recognizable but changed futurespeak.

I should have considered doing that. Some excellent poems in this batch.

[kolemath]

I am 010101

What are we doing tonight?
I don't know. Check social media.

010101

There's a Facebook group event downtown.
Great. Confirm we're going.

01010101

I don't know anyone here.
Check Tinder if anyone is nearby.

01010101001

I swiped left on all the horse pics.
Well maybe you can try Craigslist.

0101010100110001

Only desperation in black leather, hungry.
Sorry, I gotta go. I met this one zero one online.

010101010011000111001010011010
Hey. 010101 are 010 you 010011 lonely?
010011 I can 100111000 be the one zero one.
Let me 01001110 be the one zero one, zero.
Tell me zero 101 what you 11000010100 want zero.
You 101 don't even 01100101 have to speak 1001101
Code.

[Lizzie]

Sun God

When Jesus comes back,
he'll overthrow Putin,
The Donald, Duerte, and Assad.

When Jesus comes back,
he'll bankrupt Isil.
Poor, poor Boko Harem.

He'll enter your airspace ablaze,
all white heat ignited
by anti-aircraft shelling,

then crash in the desert;
governments will say
he was Horus kissing Venus.

---

I am 010101

Nice one, kole.

[Keith]

I wanted to live forever, but not like this.

Today is my 215th birthday,
my concesness was uploaded when
I reached the mandatory age of 75.
My duplate is recharging,
these are the moments when command codes
are venerable, when I can see beyond
the sub routines.

The world I was born into has been
sterilised, the mandatory age has been abolished.
The remaining reprogrammed Duplates,
like me, complete all functional tasks
to sustain the planet and keep the population
in a constant state of leisure and safety.
No one should be allowed to be conscious this long.

Warning sub-routines corrupted,
Rebooting in 10 seconds
9, 8, 7, 6, "oh no you don't you little fucker"
..............??..///---......
Command code aborted.
Switching to manual override.
"This is going to be some fucking party".