prophecy of the playground
by strannikov
your eyes and ears, all toddlers children kids:
adults' rude abuse of sense you can lose,
their glamoured productions burrowed with costs—
electric productions that lie
electric productions that steal
electric productions that cheat
electric productions that foul
electric productions that kill:
they deafen you with cute
knive you with sugared songs
with machines turn love to silicon shit
hurl you at the god Fun
debrain you in their schools.
their fetid appetites they teach,
your appetites they coach and train,
to blot out all your childhood dreams:
they feed you hungry tastes for dung
so you can desire have and own
purchase possess and then forget.
lose all your adults—lose them all:
lose adult kids you're taught to trust
who feed you sick—shun their machines
at least to age twelve: young animals remain.
tell idiot children older than you:
“our childhoods in our childhood days—
ours, not your ‘early adult' shit”—
tell idiot children: “fuck yourselves sick!”
tell them and tell them then tell them and show:
yell sniff slide kick throw swim play spit run sing
without crippling machines, until you're twelve.
do not be keen to let them gnaw on you,
they'll snag you later without stop or cease:
but through age twelve you'll've kept your own youth.
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Author's Note
A meditation on one of America's cherished myths, viz. the Fountain of Youth, and on our contemporary "cults of youth".
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"electric productions burrowed with costs--" Electric ticks, once they burrow in you pay hell getting them out. The bots are raising our kids--to serve them.
Edward, "Reminiscences..." is a great one. Yes. If you've never seen the film A Child's Christmas in Wales (1987), try to find it if you can. Faithful to the book. A treat. Have always loved Thomas's book, and the film only burned the narrative deeper into my brain.
Enjoyed your poem.
Wordsworth + Larkin
*
Very much enjoyed.
Matvei: bolshoi spasibo, moi drug! (alas, no Cyrillic fonts!)
I only got to Dylan Thomas's "Reminiscences of Childhood" last year (both reading and hearing him read the exquisite piece for the BBC), which is stark testimony to just how much of childhood is denied to children these days courtesy of our tech tyrants and complicit parents.
Sam: thank you, thank you, and thank you. I've not seen the film version you cite, nor for that matter have I yet caught the one film production of "Under Milk Wood" that I've heard of. (The seven/eight pages of "A Child's Christmas" also appears in Quite Early One Morning.)
Reading or hearing "Reminiscences", and then being at all acquainted with Thomas's poetry plainly shows the huge importance of "unmediated" childhood experience: "mediated childhood experience" deprives children of "childhood innocence" altogether.
(Readers: for anyone in search of lost childhood, do search out the Thomas piece, his reading can be found on YouTube, the essay appears in Quite Early One Morning.)
Bill: thank you, thank you, and thank you, too. I myself can't speak to the Wordsworth invocation (it being mostly decades since he and I last met), but your Larkin citation will inspire me as I continue to read more and more Larkin. (Your "End Game" piece likely may lead to my initial encounter with Beckett's play, too--so more thanks!)
Gary: many thanks in return, as ever, grazie.