Dear Elysia – National Poetry Day 2020
Dear Elysia,
One day the Old World got sick.
Spasms, coughs jerked into space from each continent –
ugly, inconceivable rockets.
Every land-mass had something similar but different to express, acting-out in ways one of the Support Workers at your school
would take care of with ‘mitten-hands,’ leading the erratic behaviour
out of the classroom, into the corridor, to the ‘reflection tent.’
Not you, you are an invisible watcher, like me. Good luck.
The world has no Support-Worker does it?
The highly visible ones are trying to figure this out ‘at pace,’ at ‘scale’ with limited capacity to integrate all shapes of information we are putting out, sharing, suffering into existence. Statistics
don’t come with a holistic user-manual and solutions, unfortunately
my darling, are as elliptic as Einstein’s rainbow bubble-bath.
What team gets along well enough to undress all the moral gaffs
beneath the numbers? People don’t.
The Old Fart World feels comfortable that the sickness started in China. Its grumbling mouths of lava-lakes were always skeptical of the Chinese take-aways. They were right about the dog-meat…
Don’t be put off the one on our street though, you can see right through to the kitchen and refrigerators. What you order is what you get and
we know the owner’s sister so…
Somewhere in the middle of a canopied forest, probably in Canada or New Zealand, people sit watching a New World tree.
Breaking bread together, they wish they could be on a committee somewhere, so they could share fantastic stories
about the tree’s neonatal life and why it looks so calm and healthy
in pictures, despite its relative isolation, before they started watching
…its wide coniferous spread is not self-conscious as
it has everything it needs…and this is my wish for you –
that your quality of air is good enough to survive scrutiny,
that you don’t need stakes to prop you up or drugs
or Mulch – which brings me to money.
When this form of Prefects was elected, they had an old-school plan
to turn the economy back into the rough and carousing, table-dancing thing friends talked of at their parents’ dinner-parties.
Ever since the technological revolution, Men, and Women who bought into it, have developed a thirst for proving their worth by evidencing
acquisitions of Mulch. It looks like: cars, houses, jewellery.
They table-danced in giant Goldfish-Bowls of acquisitional surveillance
where white men with short-backs-and-sides flashed Mulch and
women in clubs.
Fat names like: Trump, Weinstein, Epstein and Maxwell were put on
Bar pedestools for acquisitional pomp and ceremony, a bit like
when my Nana and Grampa acquired the first TV in their street, only not.
The Head Prefect is desperately trying to use the ‘pull-up-your-socks and fill our factories’ speech that his Great Grandad wrote, while
in a face-off with an audience who don’t have front-row seats
…beyond his bowl and froth of surveillance, at an increasingly unsafe distance.
He doesn’t know how to talk to them so he shouts paradoxes with mates like:
“Stay alert; go to the pub!’
‘Avoid the tube; get to work!’
‘Swim with your bubble, go ‘out out’ to eat!”
The Old World swills beer, splutters, thousands die, blub, splutter, blub.
‘Intelligent people’ are confused, Elysia, because they, unknowingly, felt their point was acquisition and surveillance of it. While odd fish, like me, blow bubbles about living loves and values while
swimming between a wrecked castle and a glittery rock.
For a while, it will be enough.
Meanwhile, the pock-marked world’s hurting face feels
wounds resurface in: Hong Kong, Palestine, Lebanon, the US – Mulch-lust, greed and poverty aggravating it – such a savage, bloody acne that destroys its host. I like to think that if you grow up to be kind and loved, your face will be free and unblemished.
I want you to observe all this through your Junior-Telescope – the: Prefects, bowls, wrecked castles, glittery rocks and bloody acne-scars
from a distance, where you can volunteer to raise awareness
of bowls, bubbles and possible ellipses, among watchers, breaking bits of the lovely tree into a Petri-dish.
This is where you exist now – as microscopic as a thought
in a sphere where the unimaginable takes place.
