DESIRE-A-DAY

Welcome to the poem-a-day club. I’d like to think it’s ‘automatic writing’, but no, it’s work. Automatic writing was all the rage for a while with the Dadaists and surrealists and psychics and psychoanalysts looking for shortcuts to the ‘inner self’, as if what’s there might simply be downloaded on to paper. That was a golden age for art and literature and even science, too, the years 1900-30, the age of relativity, quantum, cubism, surrealism, pragmatism, positivism, and more, literally an age of knowledge that we have yet to supersede, despite all our technology. Those were the good old days of silly-eyed optimism and belief in endless progress. Now that we’re swimming in the fruits of that progress, we don’t know what to do with it. We’ll probably end up blowing it, arguing about who gets the biggest piece of the pie, without appreciating the fact that the pie didn’t even exist a century ago. I lived in a house during my childhood that wouldn’t even be considered ‘livable’ by middle class standards in the US now, regardless of the fact that my father died in a house very similar, by choice. Desires are somehow very adept at keeping up with the Joneses.

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