Lackadaisical Shades Of Lazy Gray

If Brevity were equivalent to the span of one's life, the number of years one is to live upon this planet, the time we have to cherish Life here on this Earth, just how brief, would you have it be?

Lackadaisical Shades Of Lazy Gray

Written By Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham

Copyright © 2016 Marvin Thomas Cox

DBA: Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham

All Rights Reserved

In tragically lackadaisical shades of lazy gray,

what would those writing greats think of today,

a -- Video, go fast, got no time, hurry in a flurry,

Social-Media-ized, Flash Fictionalized -- world,

where brevity truly reigns supreme as a king,

over a slovenly slothful society much too lazy

to delve into depths of more than a few pages

scrawled by the quills of such Literary Sages?

If Literature's great writers were alive today,

would Dickens fall prey to life's slim pickin's,

to see Poe relegated to a home on skid row

-- Tolstoy to trash his epic novel War & Peace;

Hemingway learning for whom the bell tolls;

a starving Steinbeck devour mice before men;

disgruntled Faulkner never set words to pen;

as Harper Lee kills mockingbirds for supper;

James Clavell telling the Shogun to shove it --

'cause today's publishers will have none of it?

Their works deemed as being much too long

(non-contextual intro to climax seeker throngs

with vocabulary limited to scribbling names)

-- no time for real Literature or works of merit,

time is consumed by video games that wear it --

the world geared to that thing called brevity,

dictating those of few words inherit longevity,

to see a time when a story, one word shall be

 -- one word summing up all in climaxing singularity.

(Written March 18^th, 2016)

Author's Note

Brevity is not all that it is commonly cracked up to be ...

Reviews

[Vol]

MTCFTGDG:AAR,
Well, at least a couple of things come to mind, Churchill said, "Short words are best, and old words when short are the best of all.” On the other hand, 95% of required reading written before 1900 is reason enough to write poetry instead of novels. In addition, a professor friend of mine, Dr. Mark 'Tiger' Edmonds once told me over weed and coffee, "You know Vol, we are the last literary generation." I am sure he Is right, though this site would say we are not the last literary individuals.
Your observation is one I share, it is difficult to find anything of quality these days. Has there been a philosopher of note since Camus, Baldwin, or Zappa? Is there an artist whose name easily recognized by a person on the street? A literary novelist (Tom Robbins, maybe)? A poet, composer, architect, or musician?
We, like Bilbo, are like butter spread over too much bread and have lost all our flavor. Western culture is in the process of descending into chaos. Your poem captures the malignant malaise that has come upon us.
Vol

[Marvin Thomas Cox-Flynn de Graham]

Vol,

Thank you so very much for reading, and for understanding ... I, by nature of who I am, am a long winded, wordy, Adjective-Man, and so I do understand and grasp the concept of keep it short, keep it brief, and to the preciseness of reaching easily grasped conclusion's point, but you are correct to assess that we are in an intellectual mind willing to take hold of worthy works decline that I do sense and feel shall be the end of all that Man's Humanity thinks to have attained and gained to date thus far, because we have allowed Society to transform us from HUMAN Beings into Human in appearance only Sheeple-People-Cattle chewing the cud of subservient complacent docility one dumbed down bite at a time, as we have come to fear brain-freeze-styled choking on too much upon our plates of going to school to graduate without a decent vocabulary that was more than common when I was in grade-school's third grade my very self same self ... Kids, young people, even older folks have succumbed to the Societally magical spell of allowing themselves to be dumbed down ... And they think that they are intelligent ... They are as per my self coined terminology: Intelligently-Stupid ... Men without minds, women without intuition, children without gumption ...

Marv