Titanic Memories

I remember…
Mother calling my name,
Carrying us to a little boat.
Father smiles as they lower us away from him.

Cold water and air,
Chilling my bones.
Women crying as the unsinkable ship disappears.

Splashes of desperate men,
Hypothermic, dying in the water.
Screams, pain, no one is smiling.

I am small,
I don’t understand fully,
But I know that something is horrible wrong.

A ship!
Blankets, warm and dry.
Frantic searching.
Some reunited, others despairing,
Like Mother.

Squeezing us to her,
Mother cries, her tears a fountain of grief,
Sinking into my heart.

My father and three brothers, gone.
Three of us remain.
A piece of me lost with my twin,
Lost under the sea.

My heart compresses,
Producing tears,
As memory fades into the present.

Please tell me what you think! Thanks!

What happened to the tiny little African
girl in the tattered pink tutu?
A caring celebrity wanted to know.
As she recalls seeing her peer out
the mud-streaked window of a car rattling
down a dusty unpaved road in Congo.

She was one of the many refugees
fleeing from a not so forgotten war.
Just a war that no one seems to give a
damn about anymore.

Who is that tiny little girl in the
filthy tattered tutu? She is me and
She is you…she is our blond
haired blue eyed little angel that
we would move mountains to rescue.

How can we eat our gourmet food and
snuggle up at night in our warm cozy bed,
when our little girl is so hungry and
has no safe place to rest her little head?

Why do you think people don’t pay more
attention? The celebrity ask? Do you think it’s
because it’s so hard to figure out the good guys
from the bad?

How did she ever come across such a
thing as pink tutu anyway? Is it the
cast off cloths of the world that wind
up so very far away?

I am so very grateful to all the
celebrities in the world. Thank you for
giving a damn about the refugees and
about our little African girl.

untitled

what a way to live
to spend your life in a daze
or am i wrong?
does immunity somehow come into play?

for some it’s a tool
medication, an escape
for others a hobby
when there’s nothing at stake

but still the theory much hold to be true
impacts us all through internet and news

should we bother or care
what they do
how they spend their life
or leave them to dream
at least they’re happy right?

and is that the case
or do we assume?
maybe there’s deep down misery
and even some gloom

so to each their own
may God be with you all
life isn’t perfect
we all will fall.

The internet has silenced us
We cannot laugh or emphasize words
Our tongues are mute
Our ears are deafened
to the sound of the human voice

We speak with many buttons
a transformer of thoughts into
cold, bitter text
and the world deems this
Social.

This disillusion invades our minds
It decieves us with
words from a silver tongue
It murders our sociality
What will be left of mankind when all communication
Has no character?
No emotion?
No life?
———————————
The article (I removed the link so my poem would post) was about the median of two extremes–joining an unsocial network with little communication or joining a social network with alot of spam. My poem was inspired from the “importance” they placed on this subject of finding a median.

“HP Breakthrough Could Spawn Computers That Don’t Forget”
–TechNewsWorld

You knew me back in the day,
when it was all about the games
in bright primary colors,
riddles designed to train a young mind
but easily worked through,
or easy enough, comparatively,
before the trickier games my uncle brought,
worlds of simulated strategy to confirm my rightful place
in the realm of geeky preteens,
games where you managed a space ship, say,
then suddenly, just when you had control,
a dozen ships, and then the whole fleet at once,
and you kept silent, remembering it all,
the hours that went into those scenarios
when I ought to have been studying,
though even those games waned eventually,
giving way to the newer and subtler play,
the early AOL days, but you had nothing to say
about that, either, as I kept digging through the mail
for another free trial diskette,
uninstalling, reinstalling,
hungry to find the lost girls of the Midwest,
each of them pretending to be
as lonely as I was pretending to be,
as lonesome for the pleasures of the flesh
that, it seemed, we were all so very unjustly denied,
and so we bemoaned the limits of the early internet,
the stuttering slowness of communication
that made your breath catch
when you thought someone might be typing to you,
the fact that you couldn’t reach through a monitor
and touch a cheek, touch skin,
but you didn’t judge, you just remembered,
as it came time to draft a bar mitzvah speech,
which you probably know even though the original
was never delivered, having been rewritten
in entirety by my father, who felt I ought
to include a larger thank-you section,
and the early poetry I wish you would forget,
and the bad scifi novel I drafted,
the plot of which even I’ve forgotten,
though I’/m sure you can spit it out as easy
as recalling my first experiments with Quicken,
hypothetical numbers of what I might earn,
and then Money, during the early greed of understanding
that there was so much beyond my parents’ means,
and believing that I could make the impossible mine,
limitless wealth,
if I only planned it all right,
before I verged the other way,
toward fantasy,
playing baseball with made-up teams,
trying to win in a game where there was no prize,
all the while utterly failing to explain
“the internet” to my parents,
despite the many speeches on the subject
I drafted on your earliest word processing programs,
and maybe I lost all of my documents each time
I upgraded software, back then,
but you haven’t forgotten a single word, have you,
from the Get Well card for my first girlfriend,
to the time I crafted an entire website
in a desperate attempt to woo a girl,
to the nights I spent in college writing papers
arduously defending sudden (and fictitious) viewpoints
on metaphysics, or the genius of Herodotus,
or whatever,
making any old claim in order to earn the respect
of professor’s who patiently explained by email–
and surely you remember the moment
that everyone suddenly had email, even mom and dad–
that I had written a great deal of brilliant nonsense,
signifying nothing, and you must remember
the CDs I used to play through your speakers,
over and over,
whether to escape the loss of a hypothetical girlfriend
or, eventually, because that noise began to signify something,
something bigger than I had words for,
and maybe you missed all the time I spent learning to dance,
because I’m sure that the sum of all the emails I sent about it
never fully encapsulated the wonder and simplicity
of step-step-dou-ble-step,
but after I first danced with her,
whom I would later marry,
I’m sure you alone remember which friends I boasted to first,
just as you remember when the boasting
became something else,
the ceaseless nervousness of knowing a girl
whose goal, plainly stated, was to marry me,
back when I couldn’t imagine
what possible appeal I had,
but you didn’t care about that,
you just remembered it, and remembered
all of the emailed conversations, years of them,
as I came to terms with love, and with its limits,
and in all of that, I wonder, did you notice,
because I’m sure I didn’t,
the first moment I was genuinely happy,
or is that analysis still beyond what your hardware
can put together? I mean, is it just remembering
everything forever, and if so is that enough?
What use is it,
knowing the code for the senior project
I put together in computer programming,
or the software I built for Microsoft,
for now-defunct product lines,
to pay off my college debt,
or even the software I wrote for sheer joy
(the auto-expanding comic book website project)?
But if you’ve forgotten anything lately,
I’m sure you can look it up elsewhere,
because it’s all in distributed databases now,
and any competent hacker can probably tell you
the moment my Google queries switched over
from the usual background noise
to “cheap diamonds,”
to “wedding caterers,”
and then “shadow on her lungs,”
“Hodgkin’s”,
“outcomes of ABVD in treating stage 2B lymphomas,”
“false positives on PET scans,”
and still later, after some offline time,
to “pregnancy after cancer,”
to “child’s sleep schedules,”
to “baby’s first solid food,”
and most recently to “poetic forms,”
an odd choice that sends me full circle,
between the hours spent writing code for corporations,
to where I’m now writing this formless poetry,
to see if I can remember my life,
or at least a little bit of it,
on my own.