Technocracy — Cashless Society — Smart City
1
The City — grows like a concrete fungus
Tic tac housing slotted together
Coffin space slid in to sleep
No sunset to see — no horizon
The night sky is obliterated
False light.
2
The City — dawn revealed sky
And birdsong still
No rats or cats to kill the highrise
Look up while you can
At Heaven’s topography
O Freedom.
3
The City — you need to find some peace
A courtyard of a medieval college
Squatting beneath the philosophy
Of modern technology
Are there parks still in which
To play?
4
The City — unending growth
A giant’s hands and feet and
The heartbeat of a Tin Man
Insects pollinate the rubbish
Food scattered as carrion
To eat.
5
The City — choking the air, then lungs
Trees weakly grasping upwards
Like preachers for prayers
A small room overlooked
Sun’s rays highlighting
The peace.
6
The City — swallowing silence
A sound symphony of metal waste
Sun never setting beneath
These ancient and modern columns
Expanding, expanding into its very self
Non stop.
7
The City — taking care of loneliness
Adorning the hunched with anonymity
Blissful peace in abundance
Filling mouths and emptying bowels
Lust-pregnant and overflowing ecstasy
Adds life.
8
The City — taking care of loneliness
Everyone, everywhere locked in
To its high-tech squalor
Knowing everything about you
From your heart beat to your love life
No anonymity.
9
The City — a cashless society
Except for the drugs and weaponry
Favours expended and called in
There is nowhere you can hide
With your ‘City Phone’ and Identification
Worker drones.
10
The City — linked into the web
A spider’s imprisonment
We are fodder for human arachnids
As they pin-point our every detail
Will you discard your ‘City Phone’
For freedom?
11
The City — its elders and spawn controlling
Handing out free implants
Check out, swish of arm, paying our way
All’s for the good, including our health
In this best of all
Possible worlds.
12
The City — glorified in its supremacy
Content and magnanimous in its delight
As it does ‘what is correct for us’
We belong to it — every small detail
For without the implant and its key
Slaves exist.
13
The City — never sleeps, never closes its eye
Slaves bartering for their good-times
Some living on the periphery, unable to enter
It’s easier for a rich man — or an implanted man
Choose drugs, alcohol, vice — or an
Easy life.
14
The City — breathing in and out
Fuming with anger and advertising love
It is everything for everyone
Except those that are not defined by it
And it grows continually into the neon night’s
Starless light
15
The City — forever devouring its young
Born, raised, controlled and dispatched
By those with the City’s Badge
Keep the curtains tight
Haven’t you seen the patrols at night
Out hunting?
16
The City — renewing itself in moral fervour
Statues toppled and old buildings concreted
Clean lines framing graffiti
Cameras watching — banks noting
Not a move is made invisible
Never again.
17
The City — how to slip from its authority
Find those dusty corners beyond camera perches
Beyond the chip, a yearning for the primitive
This new religion where we kneel
And we obey the holy orders
Mouth shut.
18
The City — of the FUTURE looks down
Upon its human-blood-flows
And still further into its depths
Unknown to The City natural life begins stirring
Its taste is for concrete and metal
It destroys.
19
The City — seeds its own destruction
Cyclical, forever recurring
This man-made monster devouring its own
But fungus grows on fungus
Leaving a trail of infection
And destiny.
20
The City — of the future
Bounds us all — inside and outside
From the distance it is watched lonely
From the past it is feared
But the construction is always ours:
Be free.
This poem set to music:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mx56fDPmstE
