What Keeps Us Alive

I know reading and writing is almost dead.

   I understand what’s happening to our attention span.

There is no money in the arts.

   Yet, it is ‘the arts’ that keep us alive.

Music,

   Books,

Poetry,

   Love,

Meaning,

   Beauty ,

Sex:

   Are these not the things that make life worth living?

  Who you are after you read a poem is different from who you were before you read it, isn’t it?

    Certain songs change lives.

And books change consciousness.

   But in good ol America,

If it doesn’t make cents,

   Then it’s nonsense.

If it doesn’t fit in the market,

  Then it gets lost in the sauce of capitalism.

This new generation,

   That have had screens thrust in front of their faces since the age of two,

  They aren’t quite like me and you.

 They belong to the digital zoo.

    The internet is their cage.

  I wonder if they’ll ever read poetry some day,

Or, if they’ll be the ones that let it fade away;

   Or, if they’ll see it as a cage at all.

Go to college, they say.

   Pay your way to a degree.

Go in debt.

   Take out a loan.

  And then take your education in the arts—studying the things that make life worth living—

And see how fast it dies in the ‘free’ market.

   If it doesn’t make someone else cents,

Then it’s considered nonsense.

   Unfortunately 

That’s the reality 

   Of the country 

We live in.

   So today,

     This ‘poet’,

      Who has $4.57 in his bank account,

        Gives a middle finger to this country, 

And writes anyway. 

And it’s a good day. 

CH 4/17/26