Screen (Ode)

O soulless sage of current age,

O heartless seer of thought gold-mined;

all the world sits on your page

coded to your unbound spine.

You, O idol, our obsessive shrine,

replete our worldwide ravenous greed;

a universe of captured thought

is ours to own with uploaded feed–

with empowered masses now self taught!

Yet my hands yearn for tactile feel

connected to each page I read;

yet I fear this thought reveals

a nostalgic antiquated need

to curtail this warp-read speed.

My soul yearns for knowledge gleaned

from digging through the finite print;

for light seen through that crystal screen

imprints with bleary optic squint.

In this current age, your visage is all the rage

through which captured trove of secret lore

illuminates this moral plagued age–

exposing hearts rotten to the core,

a Trojan horse of thought-waged war.

For I see clearly through the vail

this, our fifth dimension most foul

and we have gone beyond the pail

and tarnished mortal souls afoul.

Written for introto poetry: screen.  Ok, this is not really about a screen but more about what is through a screen.

Normally I write tongue in cheek humor odes like my priceless “Ode to the Gas We Pass”! So writing a real ode was quite a challenge as I was continually tempted to design a line with humor instead of passion.  I followed these basics:

Real Odes, written by real poets like Keats or Shelly, follow a varied beat but iambic tetrameter is most common with ABABBCDCD.  Of course, Keats and Shelly made Odes with great complexity but for my first real attempt I kept it simple and true to form.

Iambic tetrameter has four such feet, for a total of eight syllables. A line of poetry is in iambic tetrameter if it follows this pattern:

ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM ta TUM