iGod

The Earth’s a shiny hulk

Orbiting around a lightbulb

The filthiest dirt is microchipped

And trees are spraypainted metallic

The papery moon’s a new Eden

Coveted for its inertness,

Its blank slate for beeping machines

Human hearts pump electronically -

Consciousness is chemical

The sun is blocked out

Gates led us out of the caves

To Jobs, the Buddha incarnate

Whose MacBook

Is more spiritual

Than nature

Nobody dies a pneumonitic death

Souls are saved to disc

Google Maps links the galaxies

The problem of sex, mechanically solved

But if the epochs could be rewound

I’d travel backward, before engineered embryos,

The Sino-American star wars, CDOs and ICQ

And prescribe a cult of poetry and song

To preempt the atomization of focus

People would die, but they’d have lived

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I was to write a poem inspired by the Irish poet Paula Meehan. iGod partly took inspiration from her Child Burial, a beautiful and powerful piece that rewinds time and almost invokes “the Fall”, and was also partly inspired by Death of a Field. The poem's a dystopian vision of a world saturated with technology, and I’m obviously not the first or last writer to address this. In fact, after I wrote it I was watching a Charlie Rose interview with Franzen, Wallace, and Leyner where someone mentioned how there’s no downtime anymore - how even in airport waiting spaces there are TVs. To compare this complaint in the nineties to our current world of smartphones is quite instructive. My poem is entirely without meter, which is a bit of a departure, as I find meter a good way to frame words, a convenient way to brainstorm even. People liked iGod and I’m pleased with it overall. Of course, the last line is rather redundant and the whole backwards thing happens too quickly.