“I am waiting / for the meek to be blessed / and inherit the earth / without taxes / and I am waiting / for forests and animals / to reclaim the earth as theirs. am waiting / for a way to be devised / to destroy all nationalisms / without killing anybody” — Lawrence Ferlinghetti, “I Am Waiting”
The speaker presents a long, meandering list of things they are waiting for to reveal a snapshot of the concerns of his time. Write a poem that lists what you are awaiting, perhaps reflecting on current issues, both national and international. Try referencing characters from your favorite works of literature, as Ferlinghetti does with Tom Sawyer, Aphrodite, and others.
I am waiting to have the apparatus surgically removed, the electronic banshee that shrieks every 15 seconds in my ear. Kurt Vonnegut invented the apparatus in his story “Harrison Bergeron,” and some free marketeers read it as a parable of something like the hubris of programmed equality and decided it was a useful story about the nanny state or communism.
I bet they made the shitty movie based on the story – the one with the actor that played Rudy and later Samwise in LoTR – I bet they made that using money from a Koch think tank as subtle propaganda for the free market.
Irony of all ironies, someone with venture capital and a grand vision thought, Yes, let’s do that Harrison Bergeron apparatus, but in the name of disruption or disintermediation or global connection or whatever bullshit. Let’s do it for freedom!
Now, here we are, in the stupidest of all timelines, programmed stupidity at a global scale thanks to the technological networks, and the shrieking apparatuses, and the endlessly streaming saccharine stories of hope, yes, but also of horror, love and lust, adventure and intrigue, a cornucopia of corny bullshit, a global free market of cultural slop and slurry, engineered to prod us neurologically with cascading waterfalls of chemicals like dopamine and adrenaline.
I am waiting for people intellectually stuck in the mid 20th century, like some ideological equivalent of the mosquito suspended in amber that gives rise to the dinosaurs in film Jurassic Park, to realize that the threat to freedom is not the state or some phantom called “socialism” or “communism,” or the woke mob that is going to cancel you, but capital itself, that lecherous Kraken, its tentacles twisting around and squeezing the state and society, but more than that, embracing everyone, and each of us, individually, with its ever smaller slimy tentacles, worming their way around us and into our ears, each tentacle singing at the level of a whisper a siren song about the happiness and fulfillment and fun and the feeling of power and domination you can have if you just have the right mind and the right body and the right spirit. Ah yes, the spirit of capitalism indeed!
Forget the obscene grafting of Greek myth onto Scandinavian myth onto Hollywood film in this extended analogy, like bad postmodern pastiche, like some botanical monster.
Just know that, in this analogy, the T-Rex that chomps down on us while we sit scared, sweating on a toilet, and then swallows us whole is that feeling that you can’t quite know if what I’m saying is the rambling conspiracy theory of a madman fit for a sparsely trafficked sub-reddit or an accurate if idiosyncratic description of contemporary reality.
Am I crazy, or are you?
So, yes, I am waiting anxiously. Plummeting downward, I am waiting for the bottom of the hole, the end of something, a place on which to stand, some kind of ground in the nauseating groundlessness.
I am waiting with frenetic mind, treadmilling out of control.
I am waiting with urge and impulse, needful, in a world of want.
I am waiting, in a posture of anticipation, suspended, again, like the mosquito in the amber, for god’s sake, to see if, as Dr. Ian Malcolm played by Jeff Goldblum in the film Jurassic Park says, “life finds a way.”