The Poetry Marathon

Obsolete Technology Prompt (Hour 17)

Fragile, polycarbonate plastic,
spiraling rings of data embedded within your layers.
Our favorite stories transferred onto shiny discs,
accessible, with quicker adjustment settings.
Your place in time rapidly dissolving
You fill large bins in the middle of superstore aisles,
Buckets of forgotten cinema burying one another,
Until somebody wants to try and push through the top titles
to see if anything good lies beneath the surface.
Remember this? What a deal.
To take you home and play on the old model console
he has hooked up to the tv he keeps in the basement,
his once glorious collection now stacked in the corner,
where he watches B-rated action movies while he works out.

My Hands are Typing

Typing on the computer I can feel them moving by themselves.

First, they say a word then a sentence than a few together.

I hope it comes out well my hands worked hard for this.

They are talented even with the critiques.

Keep going you are almost done.

Flipping Flip Phone (prompt 17)

His hands shake so badly he can’t tap a smart phone.

That didn’t matter until last year.

Every college kid I’ve taught in the last ten years

writes about their first phone, but this one will be his last.

He’s 86 with familial tremens, the least of his old age ills,

and first we had to get a phone with big keyboard letters.

And that served him many years, just pressing a big

letter “A” programmed to speed dial his sister, son, me

his bridge buddies, his poker buddies, and his old buddies.

He’s older now, though; they don’t make them any more.

In his creeping demented brain, he asks a hundred times

a week, “Why can’t we just get the same phone we had?”

“They don’t make ’em any more, Dad.” And he sighs.

The smart phone rings and he taps, taps, taps, nothing,

the caller gives up, and I have to call them back for him.

The missed phone calls, voice mails, all he can retrieve,

He misses his wife, his card games, and his flip phone.

Obsolete-Hour 17

The cassette tapes

Were talking to the CD’s

Seems they never get touched anymore

Ignored

Placed on a shelf

While the digital music replaces them

 

The albums are long gone

Victim to one too many moves

They all wondered where they were now

In a landfill perhaps

 

The cassettes lamented how they loved to be wound and rewound

How they were soothed when a pencil saved them from certain doom

The CD’s in their high and mighty way

Talked about how they missed doing the shuffle on a Saturday night

 

They shared grand stories of giant stereo systems

With AM/FM radios

Speakers that took half a room

How their music pounded the walls

Until the neighbors complained

“That was rock and roll,” the cassettes sang

” Those were the good old days,” sang the CD’s

 

They looked at one another

Longing for the olden days

They stared at the MP3 player gathering dust

” It’s all in their phones now,” it said.

“We have been sold out by microchips and convenience.”

They all sighed

Wondering if they would end up

In a second hand store,

In the garbage

Or left on a shelf forgotten

The future looked bleak for them all

 

 

The Irish Stewing

 

24 Poems: “The Dinner Party”

 

The Irish Stewing

 

In France it’s Boeuf Bourgignon

In Hungary it’s Goulash so hearty

And Belgium, Carbonnade a la Flamande

But in Ireland, it’s just stew, still hearty

 

One simmered in wine

The other a paprika smother

The other in golden beer

But this is a Guinness smother

 

Sadly, the alcohol dissipates as it simmers

Yet, the deep robust flavor remains

The beef will be fork-tender

And there likely will be no remains

 

The waxy potatoes

and sweetness of parsnips and carrots

I ne’er forget the deglazing

This is grand exalted my guest of carrot

 

There were looks of concern

So many stomachs full

Did I serve too much

But my confidence is full

 

DeaBeePea  6-27-20

 

Keypaded Touchscreen(Prompt 17)

welcome all here gathered,

we are all gathered to lay to rest the phone with buttons,

date of birth wasn’t recoreded,

sometime around the 2016s

but it fought a good fight,

bringing about long battery life and snake games,

oddly enough to die it had to bite itself,

but we grew and as her children moved,

the mother was pushed close to extinct,

here lies the grave of keypad phones,

you fought a good fight,

but couldn’t keep fighting with the changing of times and modification and greater personification of the model device,

so here we lay you to rest,

rest easy,

and peaceful,

i don’t see my generation resurrecting you anytime soon

-Ropa

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT

Hour 17 (Marathon Prompt – write about an obsolete or soon to be obsolete form of technology)

EXTRA EXTRA READ ALL ABOUT IT

Ink on paper soon could be

Obsolete technology

 

Daily news in paper form

May soon no longer be the norm

 

On a screen you’ll need to look

When you long to read a book

 

Cards and letters won’t come by mail

Best hope your internet won’t fail

prompt 16 hour 16 – the “l” word

prompt 16 hour 16

the “l” word

 

open arms to a closed heart

reaching out to

places hidden,

knowing there was more there

than met the eye in the mirror

that looked more like mine than yours.

 

holding me up

without me knowing

so I never had a chance to push you away

again

when you were only trying to help.

 

flowers for no reason at all

because you wanted to

bring beauty to days you just knew

needed some

for no reason at all.

 

you win every time,

even when I didn’t think I was playing

you win;

but I get the best prize.

 

© r. l. elke

#17 The Call

The landline rang breaking

the silence of the quiet morning,

I awoke, but didn’t get up,

It felt like a forewarning.

 

It’s shrill song pierced my ears,

I froze on my bed, eyes filled with tears,

My mind screaming over the racket,

‘Ignore it, it will make it not real’

 

Mum’s in the hospital,

Tubes down her throat,

She can’t be getting any better

If someone’s calling at 4.

 

I hear my father pick up,

His silence is loud and clear,

I hide under my blanket

Wisps of hope destroyed by mounting fear.

 

I don’t want to hear it,

The terrible news he brings,

I shatter, I break when he speaks,

what I knew had happened from the very first ring.

Protected: 17: Ode to Discman

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