IN XANADU....IT'S...COMPLICATED. . .
by @donall-dempsey
IN XANADU....IT'S...COMPLICATED. . .
"Life should not lived
in black and white...
...but, in colour!"
Coleridge thinks.
"Man should not believe in
'No-can-do"
but in 'Yes...
we can!'
Even a legless man can
dance the Can-Can
with the uppermost part
of his body and
dancing with imaginary
legs!"
Sammy( sometimes he )
displaces himself into
the third person
decanting the fine wine of the mind.
"Naw...scrub that line
don't know where in hell I was
going with it.
Gawd! This laudanum is strong!"
And so, he sits, sips and pens
in a vision or a trance if you like
a dream of future-time
where people can be made
into paper replicas
of themselves.
The "picture-graph"
he calls it
for want
of a better word.
And now he pushes the boat out
pictures that can talk and walk
so that even the dead
will flicker for a second
back into the life
they had.
A world going to pot
and other such drugs.
Machines that can take your voice
and fling it over to...say...Japan
and back and forth
again.
The world shrunk to your hand
" a miracle of rare device."
Just think!
Think of it man!
Or to be Blake-an about it:
"What is now proved was once, only imagin'd."
"I have a dream..." the poet proclaims
beginning to sound like a speechwriter
"...that one day man
may fly...sitting down in the sky!"
Oh I'm really getting going now!
Laughs at his mind's daring derring-do!
Gawd....this laudanum is strong!
And that one day facebook(sic)
will come to be.
"...things unfathomable to man!"
These the dark caverns of the mind.
Cute cat videos...selfies
whatever!
"Look here is a picture
of my dinner!"
Relationships: It's...
...complicated.
He crosses out "unfathomable"
writes "immeasurable" above it.
"...miracles of rare device..."
So good I've said it twice.
Such "...mingled measures..."
will life be really so?
Suddenly a 'ping" or some
such thing!
A message request from
Kubla bloody Khan.
Now one is being poked
by some bloke
an Alf
from Porlock it would appear.
Good Gawd is that really his
Profile Pic...he looks sick.
Claims to be a Jehovah's Witness
and can he come 'round and
have I found
Jesus?
Jaysus no! Delete...delete!
This facebook is
"...a savage place...
as e're beneath a waning moon
was haunted..."
Bit flowery that but
it will have to do.
Now damn it all to hell
where bloody was I?
And now...now...this very now
a poem put upon my timeline.
My timeline's mine!
Yet another poem by some
"woman wailing for her demon lover."
Is it my imagination or
are there more demon lovers around
than this time
last summer?
Humming some damn tune
by that Olivia Newton John.
An annoying earworm.
Ada Lovelace
wants to be my friend
even though she isn't
even born.
Oh get a life!
Do I 'heart' Byron"
"Wot...that ass!"
Describing her mindset as 'poetical
science."
Goes on and on
about an analytical machine
and how individual and society
relate to technology
as a collaborative
tool.
She makes me feel
a fool.
I deign to
decline.
This stately "pleasure dome"
device is not for me.
I delete my future
account and listen
to the dear birds
( alas no albatross )
in my lime tree bower
as they twitter.
Make myself a cup of tea.
No sugar.
Constipation is
killing me.
Eat an egg out of a tea cup.
A fat slice of ham.
Gawd! This laudanum is strong!
I do not like things
"...flung up momently..."
"I close my eyes with
holy dread and cry
Beware! Beware!"
Have... God...
damn run out of laudanum!
And so set out
for Porlock
avoiding Alf
if I can.