Cadence
You are not your Blackberry.
You are not your 3G network.
You are not your mortgage crisis,
Your student loan,
Not even your blog,
Even though it’s okay to admit that you own one.
You are not your soul-sucking cashier position
At Wal-mart.
You are not your rising gas prices.
You are not your peanut butter recall,
And yes, I miss my Reeses,
Don’t we all?
But you are not your fertility treatments
And you are not the children they may produce.
You are not the American Idol,
But you may be an idle American,
And if the president is black,
What is that?
Nothing but a pigmentation
A figmentation
Of someone else’s imagination.
You are not your Iraq war
You are not your foreclosed store
Just because you like to kiss boys or girls
Does not make you a whore
And if it does,
Who cares?
You are not your third ex-boyfriend.
You are not your Facebook.
You are not your YouTube.
Your MySpace belongs to someone else
And your college degree probably does too.
Your reality TV lacks reality
And in all actuality,
Let’s hope it remains so.
You are not your laptop,
You are not your hybrid car,
You are not your compact fluorescents
Or your antidepressants,
And you are not your growing waistline.
You are this: a human life,
A single second in the tick-tock cadence
Of this eternal marching clock.
Please,
Make the most of it.
Comments
Apr 5 2009
Excellent pop culture references. The way you somehow wind it back to something more meaningful is fantastic.
Apr 5 2009
i cannot look at a reese's anymore without that line coming to mind - hurray for impact
Apr 9 2009
Actually, this strikes me as an older piece, it has the feel of overused cliche clinging to it tenaciously. I think that's possibly the doing of the last two lines all by themselves. With so many other pieces that present old ideas in unique perspectives, I'm unsure why these particular closing lines are so... Typical. I think it could be changed up a bit to give it a better punch. Even taking off the last two lines would be an improvement.
There are a few references that seem to be lacking power, but once the reader gets into the groove of the entire piece I think they're fairly easily overlooked.
I must give credit to some of the pop culture references though and the way stanzas 3-6 were put together was positively fantastic.
Overall a piece with serious potential and I think it could benefit marvelously from some revisions.
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