AUTOMATION OF SLEEPWALKERS

Introduction: Canadian media theorist Marshall McCluhan wrote about how technology’s medium was the message. With television for instance, McCluhan theorized that television’s main impact has nothing to do with what particular programs were aired, but with how television-watching changes people’s perceptions and lifestyles. This poem looks at the impact of some technologies on the human condition:

Skyscrapers aspired to earn their names
electrifying a century of perpetual dawn.

Rooms and pockets filled with mesmerizing screens
and soon fewer detected scents and wedded hands.

People frolicked in the mechanics of language
foresaking significance; it did not require knives
to cut them to size.

The pace of the street increased
as if cities were tops of invisible cogs, conveying
all through an unspoken gate,
or did I mean fate,
or is this din appetite?


AGE WITHOUT HEROES

Introduction: What if the world had no heroes? What if everyone was just tainted and “good for nothing!” as many uncles and aunts have famously lamented? This subject is wrestled with in this poem.

The only known heroes loomed in bronze memorials,
grinned in dutiful closed books on alphabetized shelves,
while we met every dare with smirks and chuckles,
lingered at the cinema and sipped aperitifs.

Big blimps advertised ten-step salves
for aspirational aches.
We grew second faces
and peacocked like kings.

Yet in the spotlight of the sun so common
few noticed, untold heroes gave off sparks
which leapt toward fire. If light causes masks to crack
some will name this pain healing, others hate.


Gregg Mosson is the author of “Season of Flowers and Dust,” a book of nature poetry from Goose River Press, and editor of Poems Against War, an annual journal with a Web site at www.poemsagainstwar.com.