A Pocketful of Poesy was and is again a Poem-a-Day(-on-Average) Blog! For 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, and now for 2017 and going forward, you may expect to see 365 poems every year, 366 for leap years.

but aren't they all random?

Wednesday, October 01, 2014

"zombies aren't monsters / just departed friends / who know how much better it is / once we end"

There are too many ways
- impossible to point out, since
when you try, each act
seems perfectly innocuous; impossible
to decry

since surely, the way humanity acts
is not intended. But
the press and the weight
of the ways we come down
all at once on each other and continuously,
without relief - it
results in a world where humanity,
in its notice and beneath it,
treats

each of us

monstrously.

Humanity is a monster, or maybe
it's just too easy to see it that way. The way
you live your life, and the way you will
die. You know, you have seen
how badly the living
treat the dead who stay,
in the fictions we pay
for others to make -

it is not so very different
from how all we living
treat those who move among us, visible
but ignored, moving past us
as best they can with open eyes,
downcast.

I think

the only difference may be
some of the living are lucky
enough (or maybe, work hard
enough, or both: maybe they work,
and are lucky enough to find people
who find all that effort congenial)
to find people

who treat you like home. You belong,
to them anyway. Well, that plus - for the living,
the rot is invisible.

I think it can be read as that. Life.
It is an allegory for all kinds of monstrous
things - any alienating condition
that people have, but

deeper than that

is the alienation itself, that comes from being
born.

trapped in a skull
with two eye holes
and little to know
and little to no
reassurance that anyone can, or will
know you.

Who you are inside.

what is inside you

so deep in it can only hide

What is inside you

8 comments:

Steph said...

It's a good day when the random button results in a zombie poem. This one makes me wonder if humans are actually the sentiment zombies after all.

dogimo said...

This one is kind of a "yo, man thas DEEP" deal. I seem to have a few of those.

Hell, it's a total bait-and-switch! No zombies to speak of, only about for purposes of illustration. Apologies for the fake-out, there Steph!

Steph said...

I just realized I made a typo up there. That should have been sentient, not sentiment. But I rather like the typo, so I shall contemplate what exactly a sentiment zombie is.

dogimo said...

Yeah, I figured! Blame the robots.

Steph said...

I blame it on this website questioning whether I am human or robot. That hurt my feelings. I guess I am a sentiment human. ;)

dogimo said...

I may be an unsentiment human. I never got the idea of taking question, accusation or insult personally. Though of course, I realize you're only kidding about hurt feelings!

Robots versus zombies. No! Better: a society in which human corpses (which are after all filled with potentially valuable material and mechanisms) are retrofitted with a fiber-optic neural net and radical soft-tissue reconditioning and preservative treatments, to be reanimated as nearly-immortal, non-sentient but comprehending and obedient menial laborers! Basically the breakthrough was to realize functioning robots are much more achievable by starting from proven functionality, and just refit for a new OS.

Do they regain troubling tinges of their past selves and lives, spiking a macabre moral dilemma? Does some blank-slate personality begin to accrete from actions and experience? Do they link up and threaten revolution? Nope. It works perfectly! The story is about a boy and a girl who keep having dramatic misunderstandings that get eventually worked out.

Steph said...

I believe you just described something similar to the Cybermen from Doctor Who, and the most recent episode featuring them touches on some of what you say in your last paragraph. Although Cybermen are made from live humans and not from corpses, so it's not quite the zombie/robot hybrid you speak of, but most of your other statements fit with Cybermen.

It makes me happy that you made a Doctor Who reference without realizing it. I suppose it's a way to add time travel into a conversation about robots and zombies. I enjoy when life provides such opportunities.

dogimo said...

I've seen some episodes with Cybermen in it. What I like about my idea, though, is it's reuse, repurposement, after the actual human is for all intents and purposes done with the body. Unlike Borg or Cybermen (or zombies for that matter), there isn't any suggestion of anyone being seized and converted involuntarily. Just that potential is discovered in human remains for a valuable, practical added use.

The Doctor would probably see nothing whatsoever to do about it.