Plato and Socrates Inventing Twitter

by David Tuvell

keyboard
You know me, if words
hit harder than crack, I’d push them,
blow up blocks. Small talk can’t see me.

What you’re suggesting, though, there’s no right way to do it.
The idea’s like carrying my wallet in the wrong pocket.
Sure, to keep a secret, you have to hide it
in plain sight. What wicked metonymy, the appliances
of technology. What’s identity
to slug lines? AI’s well-lit workflow’s not unity,
it’s ethnic cleansing. Hear this:
Globish was a dark and stormy night,
and you were drinking whisky by candlelight.

The good news is that users will see
only timelines and trending hashtags.
So many fronts encourage the burning of bridges,
those blunt thoroughfares,
and the philosopher can finally ask:
“discover or choose?”
On so many gilded timelines,
people can kill their cats over and over
just to moisten their eyes with tears
while Pinteresting them like Amazonian bugs.

Passion likes pride like a woman likes pawn shops.
If I could drag demons out of shadows, I’d show you jewelry,
and, really, isn’t that what it’s all about,
wars and rumors of wars during the latter days in Afghan caves?
So some martyrs are raised from the dead.
What if the internet archive empties its trash folder?
Not that we should allow candles among Alexandria’s stacks,
but just imagine what we could resurrect textually.
You can’t come back until you go away.
One day we’ll really see that vision thing,
or Rush Limbaugh’s The Way Things Ought to Be.

Couldn’t you instead write a poem about your boss,
titled “National Take Your Gun to Work Day”
and nail it to the door of the break room?
Why must conversation sound like a modified muffler?
For that matter, why milk the cows
when you can buy the dairy?

What if this noise is important, and people actually notice
the things said between the professor and the madman?
I can’t recall anymore, were we discussing
the human condition or a human’s condition?

Dialectic? Try diabolic. You know
that once you swallow this
feed, you’re going to have to stick
with it. You know that, right? So go ahead
and say something if you must, say
something deep, in Russian, and I’ll text you my lols.
If bae has no chance of stumbling into the sublime,
maybe what the romantics desperately need are memes.

 

Category: Poetry, SNHU Creative Writing, SNHU online creative writing