In the Vestibule, Where They Do Obiesance to Tiny Gods

Bent things
crimped down
eyes turned
ever toward
their handheld
digital gods

the small gods
best worshiped
in lieu of experience
in the easy turning
away from the real,
the actual, the present
and accounted for

whole flocks of
ghosts, caught
somewhere between
the tangible and
the ethereal,
unaware of each
other as the
world swoops by,
tethered to
existence only
by their thumbs

and in me, the strange
impulse, the thought that,
with a single, violent
motion, I could sweep
them all from the
stage of life,
that they would go down
like blind fish crushed in
tunnel collapse,
unknowing, having perhaps
never known, and only
really half alive

but that is a rogue thought
a moment of my own madness,
this desire to awaken these
sleepers, to enlighten in
blood these many drones that
so blissfully serve the hive,
and perhaps I am one, and have
been, and this febrile wakefulness
serves only to torment me with
that failing that hits so close to
the heart.

Patrick M. Tracy
10/27/09