Harry Fagel is a longtime local poet. To hear him talk about his work and read this poem, click here.
Don’t panic the government isn’t watching you
You are not that interesting
With your low-brow pornography and your
Right or Left or Moderate or feeble or strong
Opinions
Your rant on Facebook full of vitriolic and self-righteous anger
Barely would raise an eyebrow in a roomful of evangelists
Compared to anything remotely mattering
Yet somehow compelled you are to
Share
Pontificate and remonstrate and really just mentally
(and physically I am sure) masturbate
I imagine your self-satisfied smug sense of smirking satiation
After reading the thoughts you have just published on the
World Wide Web
Is standing on a box and shouting really so different?
The anonymity of the internet makes strange actors indeed
If I really cared I guess I could ignore it or de-friend it or worse
Reply yet I can only wax poetic as my tears of laughter dry
Since when was this the fact farm? This landscape of
Muttering
This delusional truth this mess of things this backward unintelligible scrawl
Oooohhh did you see what she he they said?
BLASPHEMY
Only it isn’t it’s just a low grade echo of nonsensical shite
I can’t help but widen my eyes in wonder at the wasted passion of so many
Swaying someone's opinion is a fantastic torpedo of time
Almost all the time
Yet this is how so many spend their time
Trying to change my mind
On the internet
Come smile with me and laugh a little and shake your head and
Bask in the entertainment washing on the shores of this electric landscape
Everytime we go to evolve we find a way to shove ourselves back to some archaic watershed
Some vacant vacuum of vicissitude
Some tumbling torrent of tumultuous talentless-ness
Some alliterative agony alongside the acrimony of acidic alienation
Some hilarious joke!
Much like this poem the wasting of words is wonderfully wanton and
Permanently present in the posting of the planetary platitude of your opinion on the
Internet
Keep posting I am sure you will change the world before I can say
“Like”