We

A Poem by Ron Sanders

The price of progress.

We is a free verse celebration of Modern America. Ah, we’ve come so far--let our voices ring out in solidarity!

We were forged in sap and circumstance, are circumscribed by myth.

Mystified by genders are we.

We find clarity in gossip, sapience in rags, purpose round the blaze of our mindless, soulless Web.

We personalize in lockstep, make love to software, sleep in electric tombs.

Capering for The Lens, we shake our collective booty, desperate to impress our mindless, soulless peers.

And, failing that, we cry foul.

Jealous unto frenzy, we hate what we hanker, savaging our “loved ones” to the jangle of nickels and dimes. Pulling wings off of angels, we amble into doppelgangers, aggrandize children, infantilize adults. Hell, we publicize our privates, for Christ’s sake.

And, failing that, we cry foul.

So we champ for the carrot, stoop for the stick, deify our celebrities, anthropomorphize our deities. And wonder who killed the party.

We set ourselves bad precedents, rest our weary wheels on shaky ground, emancipate freemen, cry foul.

Victims of paradise, we chum broth gone mad in riots of chrome. Yea, prisoners of Eden are we; indentured, lovelorn, snatched from inertia and crammed into bliss. Sated are we, rotund and weary, our fancies of fame diminished to…new couches to conquer.

So who are we?

Seers dazed by cathodes, peering into shadows, waiting to be cued, begging sympathy of mist. Overworked, overwrought, ineffably overlooked, we purchase preachers, worship phones, wear rings round our gullets, laugh at all the wrong places. And cry foul.

We are born in battle, are felled in bed, think our drives are thoughts, dream our lives are real. And so we gaze into the cosmos, waiting to be cued.

But, frustrated by all that, we cry foul.

We take selfies of strangers.

[email protected]