Wash away the sin
Wash away the pain
Wash away the thoughts
Of drowning in the shame
Slake the harvest’s thirst
Slick the streets and drains
Flood the towns with righteousness
To unite every name
From the clouds you fall
From the gods you came
From the end to the beginning
You form life’s entire frame
Teach me to be humble
Teach me with your grace
Teach me as I kneel in awe
While tears stream down my face
Looking at the world through a handheld screen
While imaginary monsters hover
Over the landscape, their colors vibrant
A little golden, electric rodent
The green, leafy toad with a guileful grin
Some reddish, pyromaniac lizard
The child’s mind dims, spatial awareness dies
With a soft, thoughtless glide of fingertips
Across the illuminated surface
As they toss forth virtual prison orbs
Stained red and white, divided by black bands
Designed to capture and incarcerate
Those which are considered to be wild beasts
Now commodities, property pieces
Trading tokens, pawns in an aimless game
Built from the ground up as misdirection
Guiding feckless youth and adults alike
Toward the blank isles of a fool’s paradise
While all the floor planners and programmers
Unseen hands and eyes of intelligence
Mold reality, studying movements
Through the keyholes of the camera phones
With abundant digital data streams
Profiling the planet’s population
Of boys, girls, men, women, doesn’t matter
The user’s age and sex is trivial
With people devolving to living dead
Vacant faces glued to flashy gadgets
Promoting false senses of unity
Buffering human connection instead
The tap water’s been laced with chemicals
To distract us from the house burning down
Predictably, it’s super effective
The sun has risen
Illuminating us all
My spirit awakes
First coffee at noon
I sit riverside and soon
I sweat my balls off
The last time I cried
I stood alone in a dream
You ran far away
Brain in a deep haze
Wakeful, yet stuck in slumber
I stay fast in bed
KYLE SLEDGE 