Tying my shoes thinking

I’m lucky I can tie my shoes,
——————————-—counting out

a hundred-ten years’ war,
——————————-—imagine,

AK-47s, AR-15s driven up the I-95 Iron Pipeline,

see on TV the übermensch’s
beehive hairdo and spray-on tan,

time nanotechnologically tracked
to a billionth of a second, machine-created

networks of globally distributed
sweatshops, no human in the loop,

children splashing through the melting
snow on the street—

——————————-—O colors,

O innocent colors,

red and lavender softly blended, brown
and yellow leaves in pools of slush.

 

 

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Lawrence Joseph’s most recent book is A Certain Clarity: Selected Poems (Farrar, Straus and Giroux). A new book, Precisely Now (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), will be published this September.