To bring vividly to the mind

[As requested by Andrea. I feel like it's stronger hearing it aloud than reading it off the page. But anyway, you tell me. Also I hate the way that blogger distorts the sound on videos...so sorry about the quality, it's not my fault...]

The moment of Realization
isn’t ever of a single particular realization –
people try to classify it, label it,
stick it in a really boring paragraph
in some overpriced psychology book
(or, like me, rant about it in a really boring poem)
where it is disregarded, undervalued
skipped over so you don’t think about it –
but whenever that moment of Realization comes,
it comes hard.
(That’s what she said.)

Kind of feels like you’re going through an anti-birth.
Pressing against mother’s womb,
banging with tiny purple hands begging to be let back in –
entirely disoriented
except for the deep down feeling that something’s wrong,
perverse, distorted, distended,
and you don’t know if there’s something wrong now,
or if there was something wrong before.
You reevaluate, reengineer, recalculate your view of reality
every second;
every time something happens,
it changes everything.
Every time you realize what you thought was untrue,
history is rewritten –
like in 1984
except Big Brother is that pained and pruney heart
and doublespeak is flirting.

The laptop is open at an angle
the one where the screen is always too dark or too light
and there’s nothing you can do about it.
You keep adjusting the slant, the brightness, the dimmer,
hoping to see right,
but you’re honestly just killing time
until you think of what it is online that you’d rather kill time with.
And meanwhile the screen bears the brunt of your boredom
and your obsession with an ideal
that you won’t even bother to define.

You’ve not been healthy for a long time
and you’re in a hole.
Remember that.
There’s nothing down here,
just like the refrigerator or the pantry
– junk and sweet artificial factory packed machine bred snacks –
and no matter how many times you open those cupboard doors
you’ve seen it all already and it bores you.
You can’t help but think about it in metaphorical terms,
relating what you see to your own state of being
because of course there’s meaning everywhere
– being an English major, I know that now –
especially when trying to find a sign for the direction of your love life.
The jaded cupboard doors open and close
with the familiar dull and empty clunk;
there's nothing for you there
but junk and the breaking of a self defined integrity.
You imagine yourself peeling plastic off an overly sweet and fat free cake,
that feeling of soon-to-set-in queasy.
Pointless to begin, you tell yourself,
looking at food and thinking of lovers,
but you don’t really believe it
because you’re starting to realize just how alone you are
and you’d rather begin futility than never have started anything at all.
That’s the way it works.
Because as you hit Realizations
and shed realities
from perceptive layer to layer

(talking about layers gets the taste of onions on my tongue and I always get thirsty
and need to take a water break)

you realize that you’re just too unique to conform
– especially not to the standard of relationships -
that conformity is stupid
that individuality is stupid.
You wish you could shake society by its blond shoulders and tell it to “Stop being so stupid! Ignorant! Insensitive!
So vain!
Society, stop looking at yourself in the mirror of the cosmos
you don’t exist there!
You just want to.”
And it goes ahead and overanalyzes the patterns and numbers anyway
to come up with answers that it doesn’t understand,
just to see the way it works.
The grand psychosomatic dissection.
Everything we do is to our minds,
probing the phallic rod of hard science
in cerebral gray matter to build the scar tissue,
make us uncaring, non-lonesome machines,
because if we’re kept busy enough we won’t notice
we’re all scientists
we’re all cyborgs
the amalgam of our fleshy existence
and who we see in the software of our mind.
We pretend we’re unaware of our growing inhibitions
when it comes to contact
that doesn’t have walls and likes and commenting
because then we can’t live in a society that promotes “company”
as the number one commodity –
we push into small virtual worlds
abstracting ourselves
like money, the concept of value,
the assigned meaning that only exists in thought
that used to exist in accountants’ books
but now stores in zeros and ones in memory banks,
coats six billion human lives
with an economical proclamation of the importance of numbers
and people in relation to them.
A network of theoretical concepts.
Somehow it exists.
You try not to think about how,
how an entire world was raised on such intangible mental fences,
but figure an educated guess
that blaming the Internet sounds like a credible claim.

You can’t help but think of the Internet spreading like Ouranos
as a blanket over Gaia
tucking itself in at the edges of humanity
blurring the lines of what is accomplished in reality
and what feels like it’s been accomplished
staring at the loading bar of Firefox webpages.

On that line of thought, you feel you ought to complain
about how Facebook never gives enough notifications,
and you don’t know how you feel about the fact that
you find yourself getting way too excited
upon seeing a number in a little red box
spring from the tiny planet Earth icon.
You have to stop from clicking right away sometimes
just to prove that this digital life hasn’t consumed you,
that you still exist
as a separate entity from your profile picture.
It isn’t worth bothering over though;
you’ve been brought up to feel that waiting makes you itch,
you just want to read what that notification says
which invariably will be to let you know
so-and-so has commented on so-and-so’s photo album
that you commented on three months ago.
You feel empty and you say you don’t know why
which is ridiculous because it’s clearly so obvious.
(Refer to the end of this poem,
if your neurons are so clogged with
Facebook quizzes
YouTube videos, overly furious YouTube comments,
Snorgtees, TeeFury, Threadless, Zazzle,
cyanide and happiness, lolcats, DeviantArt,
The Oatmeal, The Onion, xkcd,
FML, MLIA, MDT,
Vevo, MegaVideo, Memebase,
Troll Physics, Twitter, College Humour,
Hotmail, Gmail, Torrentz, Demonoid,
Chatroulette, Seshroulette, Redtube,
Post Secret, Failblog, Pirate Bay,
Blogger, Tumblr, Flickr, Wimp,
World of Warcraft, Wikipedia,
eBay, Craig’s List, Amazon.ca,
even MySpace [though that was so 2006]:
refer to the end of this poem
if your neurons are so clogged with all of those
that you don’t know what the answer is
or even what the question was to begin with.)

Still, you can’t help but look through Facebook
in pursuit of elusive comfort
always forgetting to realize that Facebook friends aren’t real people
just good intentions.

So much time combing msn lists
scanning Skype and Adium
for names to hit a chord of interest
to speak
to grow friendship
to love from a distance
safely between typos
from tangled fingertips
swimming across a keyboard
through the waving water sways
radiating from the smoking ends
of tight rolled joints.
Maybe drugs are just a way of finding interest again
in this world of jaded sculptures
static preserved moments
that had meaning once
before artists tried to capture feelings
and got it all wrong.

Sometimes you don’t know why
people like artists
or believe in their profundity,
they’re less sane that anyone you know
– especially goddamned writers -
and the fact that they define the world
through the abstraction that is culture
is unnerving.

That doesn’t stop you putting your iTunes on shuffle
in a 21st century last ditch effort for fate’s intervention –
for Apple to find you that one song you need
but are too lazy to really put your aural finger on.
You know there’s something you want to listen to.
You know it would take that edge away
that smarts and burns like that slice of pseudo-cake
if you get a corner piece
when there’s too much icing
and your stomach tightens in biological protest
reminding you that what you’re consuming isn’t food.
Leaving you paranoid with glossy sugar crisp lips,
your iTunes shuffles
giving you songs that make you wonder
why you have so much crap in your library
trying to remember where you got it
vowing to delete the useless albums –
but never getting around to it
just like that book you were going to write
and that letter you were going to send
and that phone call you were going to make.
You’ll do it all after the song on your playlist is done
but you need to let it reach the end
so it can add to the play count.

Sit at home alone
beside outlets for easy plug access
to charge phones and iPods and laptops
with screens that never hit a good and proper angle.
Maybe you can charge your brain one day
and eliminate the need for coffee
that is overpriced and undercaffeinated.
Have this thought meander
while feeling lost and aimless
in the Ambien zombie land of limbo.
Look up random directions on Google Maps,
zoom for street names, drag for street view.
How navigation used to work is beyond you,
without global positioning precision
the sense of self dissolves
in a Wicked Witch of the West puddle
melting into a panicked pancake batter
of general confusion.

You don’t fit into this modern world
because you are a product of it

and that realization makes you a little bit crazy
because you know that you’re just you
and that the chances of finding another person that sees the world with your same “talk-about-layers-and-get-onion-taste-in-your-mouth” way of thinking is on the few-and-far-between side.
So you get used to loneliness
it becomes yet another thing
to desensitize yourself to.

In two thousand ten
two's a crowd.