Tick tock
You cannot stop
Scrolling
Your
Time away
Tick tock
You cannot stop
Endlessly consuming
The slop
Tick tock
Tick tock
Tick tock
You cannot stop
Images
Rolling
And scrolling
In and infinite loop
Never giving
Enough of what you need
Tick tock
Tick tock
You cannot stop
Giving you life
To the machine
That feeds
And feeds
And feeds
From your attention
But never returns a thing
Tick tock
You cannot stop
Tick tock
You cannot stop
phone
Scrolling – a cautionary tale
It seems such an innocent
Picking-up-of-the-phone
A moment of boredom
Fleed from -
The first video watched
Then a second
Then the endless stream
Of promises never kept -
Searching mind
Looking for the end of a rainbow.
To disengage
Is like tearing our sticky eyes
From the screen’s magnetic touch
As we pop back into the real world,
Shocked at how far we fell
Under its influence.
Someone conceived
This hand-held drug,
Intended the capture
Of the mind,
Wished the restless hand
Fidget for the scrolling picture
Which feeds on emptiness
And delivers more of the same.
Casually, we’d say
What’s the harm in it?
And yet all of us know
That half the walking world
Are caught in the phone,
And scare even look where they go.
It’s as if an evil hypnotist
Had created a magic device
Into which he bid us all look,
Yet, hid the dire cost;
His corporate wish
To enslave us to his corporate tool
And make us forget
The route home,
Calling us to climb into our phones
And never look back.
Forget your bodies, he says,
You no longer need them.
The End Of The World Is A Phone
With but a look
I am entranced,
Sucked inside the screen
And away
From my body,
Away from the world.
With but a look
I am inside the flurry of images,
And away from outward stimulus,
And for a moment
Or an hour
Or a day,
That physical place
I call the outside
Ceases to exist at all.
My iPhone And The Cloud
In to the phone’s world
I look,
So varied
So shiny
So new.
In to this
I download my memory,
My images,
My thoughts.
And all the questions
I might ask myself,
Both profound
And mundane,
Away I merrily Google.
The world
In one way widened,
And yet
One way closed
As life shifts
Ever nearer,
Ever closer
To the outside mind
Of the irresistible cloud.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
The Life In My Phone
In to my phone
I look
As if there was
A life
Held magically inside,
A world
Interesting and full
Of images
And lives lived
So fast
And so newsworthy
And so,
Ever so, momentarily brief.
My eye
Caught for but an instant
Before the
Next colourful thing
Arrives in
An excited flickering
And is
Gone with the very next.
© Ben Truesdale and distilledvoice, 2015.
