then?
In the beginning was the Word,
they are everywhere...
...I'm sure you know that machines can make papers
faster than you and I can read them...
The papers are plastered in an incestuous relationship
of time and space
Rabidly multiplying like rabbits
Hip-hop, rap-riddled and dish networks
Over Internet, broad band and broad width
Broadcasters and titillating entertainment hours
Broadly spewed and spat. SPLAT!
I'm walking through a virtual boardwalk
of papers cast,
Multiplied to teeming hours
Is this good Lord / good God what a question
Is this what it's come to, ungodly papers
Needed and massaged and jerked to kingdom come
I'm undone, and salami piled high by an aural assault
Ears are burning, tongue is bleeding raw
Do I need another manual,
another article, another magazine
To know how to exist? The piles are piling, and the verbiage of words
is towering to the sky .
Rounded off to slow death by adjectives,
Reduced to another vowel relentless layered
To every nook and cranny, every Granny,
with every ad,
Every liquefied installment putrified /
With words walled in the tabloids & publications
Becoming cremated, an emblazoned triumph
of polished shallows
There's no respite for the shrill cackling by news anchors
Picked, pecked to death by ten million tiny bytes
Eating into time as feckless love bites by headless vampires
Filling this bloodless space with emptiness, hollowed words...
oh, for another shaft
...I'm immortal, and I mean so little...
A vast cavernous void of cyberspace,
an inverted Tower of Babble, rubbling,
Bubbling in this cauldron of fickle riffraff rummage sales
Now! Limited time take advantage of this special offer.
To breathe and awaken
Before you die, have you ever burned?
—ever been on fire?
Buried up to your eyeballs
In this dung heap SPLATTERING of words
words and words wordswords swords
Disemboweling that very spirit of hope and sacred resonance
Upon Mankind's funeral pyre.
Got a match?
It's your fifteen minutes
of dazzling light
Before your life is snuffed
Will we have to ask...
does it matter?
(Copyright 2000 by Shaun Darius Gottlieb - No reproduction without express permission from the author)