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Open Poetry #46
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On my own, Again
| Open Poetry #46 |
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On my own, Again |
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Dadygoose Member
since 2010-01-01
Posts 162A Communist country |
On my own, Again It is Morning. I am at the school for the blind, and it seems that we are graduating. But we are not just graduating, but graduating in some special way. We sit around on the floor and talk about it. It is Afternoon. It seems that, because we are graduating, we are each supposed to get a bar or two of chocolate. I imagine hard, smooth squares of Hershey. Then I notice a hydrant, and it is running off an gooey gooey stream of chocolate like endless unrolling spaghetti, and that the chocolate machine can not be turned off. I have to pass out the chocolate quickly so it will not be wasted. I hand a classmate his "bar" of graduation chocolate but forget to tell him how very, very messy and mushy it is. He complains wordlessly about this. I tell him that the real world is the way it is and get use to it; and remind him that, because we are animals, Life is going to be messy, And you might have to just sit on the floor and eat it. It is Night, the last sequence of the graduation ritual. We are outside. I hear a voice say hydrogen, hydrogen. I'm holding a baggie in my hand, inverted, so it can hold hydrogen. There is a high, metal tower called the Mother Ship. When someone climbs the tower, it hums and shoots out pyrotechnic energy and sparks. We play on the tower to make it shoot sparks like fireworks. I must tell a classmate good-bye, and as she climbs the tower, all aglow with fire and live, high-voltage sparks, I climb beneath her so that she will not fall. She reaches the top of the tower. There is a whooshing sound and she is borne away from it. As I climb down, At the bottom, there is a tiny window to a kind of music store. It has a tiny touch screen, which of course, I can't work with at all but it's interesting. A woman explains you can select music by just touching the screen. I do this accidentally, touching invisible menus and boxes, resulting in a jumbled blur of mixed up music. So I just tell her what I want to hear and she just touches the appropriate buttons. You can buy the songs you want. Make payments with pay-pal. It's fast, free and .... This is all so fascinating! I ask her whether it is possible to select a year and then have it play the top 100 songs of that year in a smooth, uninterrupted sequence. She says that, yes, this can, indeed, be done, but I have to bring my own device to interact with the computer because this is a public terminal. I wonder vaguely whether I have been keeping her too long, that she has to work and I shouldn't be bugging her. We are gathered together at the foot of the tower. The instructor comes out and says: Okay, guys. You're on your own. I strike off in some random direction, trying to walk a straight line against the wind and blowing snow. I ponder that there is nothing to run in to, just a vast expanse of snow. Then it dawns on me that I will have to stop sometime, somewhere, that I am going to need food eventually. I don't know where I am, or where I am going. Mechanically, I keep walking and walking and walking and walking through an endless, trackless waste of snow. And I am on my own. |
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| © Copyright 2010 Jaime Fradera - All Rights Reserved | |||
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Robert E. Jordan Member Rara Avis
since 2008-01-25
Posts 8541Philadelphia, Pennsylvania |
Yo Dadygoose, I like this poem. Yes, you are on your own, just like everyone else. Keep up the good work. Bobby |
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Alison 
since 2008-01-27
Posts 9318Lumpy oatmeal makes me crazy! |
Jaime, This is an intriguing poem. Yes, we all are on our own - but that chocolate hydrant sounds like a dream come true to me. A |
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