With minds dulled by not-my-reality TV / rocked to sleep / in the back-and-forth / of political sweet nothings
utopia is not for short-sighted goldfish
In 2020 I had the opportunity to participate in a poetry class with Writerz & Scribez, the organisation I interned with the year before. We would often be given lines from other poems, themes, words, from which we would have a few minutes to write something. I don’t know what the specific inspiration for utopia was but I do remember the session it came from. I was sitting in a tent in Cornwall struggling to maintain the hotspot connection between my phone and my laptop whilst also trying to produce something remotely meaningful to share with the rest of the group. Whatever the inspiration was it clearly sparked something for me because my brain was unusually full of ideas for this poem. Once the session ended, as the darkness descended, I stayed exactly where I was and scribbled until I’d produced something suitably solid.
When I was asked to do another Black History Month poem that year, I decided to return to what was, at that point, a nameless poem, and build on it, making it slightly more relevant to race. However, as you will tell from reading/listening to it, the poem isn’t heavy on the subject of race because I think the problem I am addressing limits are ability to productively engage with many social issues, not just racism.
The world is too large and dark a place for the human attention span. Utopia rests on the horizon of our understanding She crouches in the shadows of this stubborn present, just within a visionary’s realm of sight but before we can fix our gaze on her, begin the hard march to that blessed horizon, we swipe left, onto the next fleeting feather of a thing hovering lazily within our grasp stealing our willingness to strain our eyes. With minds dulled by not-my-reality TV rocked to sleep in the back-and-forth of political sweet nothings we crown ourselves warriors amidst the roaring applause of black squares on screens. Utopia taunts us. Once or twice an age the sun breaks over her shadows and she asks, “Who will make the journey to my untouched shores?” “Who will tread the paths paved by voices that have cried for generations, whose stories last longer than 24 hours?” “Who is brave?” “Who seeks after truth?” Her call steals a moment of our screen time and we forget that we are but fingers and thumbs the distance across our keyboards the scope of our adventures. But then the moment is over and we are whiplashed into submission by the vacillating sway of cultural approval. Her call is drowned by the hypnotic ring of “X retweeted your...Y liked your...Z shared your... more than this is required of us and yet tik tok, time’s up, scroll down, refresh utopia with something easier. As the shadows gather around her again, obscuring her beauty in the idealism of myth she leaves us as she found us, like a receding tide that leaves no mark on the coastline Our necks remain bent, faces hinged on screens. The horizon is higher than our eye-level. Congratulations if you made it to the end of this poem.
stay curious and well read
The World in Verse 