What’s the Social-ution?

PART 1

Society is remote.

Where the robots live

Estranged

In cell to cell,

Padded walls,

Talking sideways through the wire or the wave,

Satellite inn, alone.

A bleep

In the deep-black deep,

An electric sheep

Tripping, jumps, lonely

In my empty sleep,

Signalling forlorn

Through electronic,

Through the nothing black of cyber space,

White-noise

Along conveyor belts…

– This network –

…Talking via text in

Factory lines,

Picture messaging

In code,

Your solo

Selfy

S.O.S

Via

Tele graph

Tele phone

Tele vision

Tele port

To the same panic station,

Every day,

In the 9 to 5 to 9 busy body

One way rail track.

Work, work, work

Makes Jack a dull boy.

Sub ways, sub divides plus always

Playing harder

To subvert, divert, perverting

Your mind to distraction,

Your soul destruction,

Seeking

Escapist philosophy

Via consuming culture:

In drink, drugs, promiscuity,

Entertainment, holy-art-my-divinity:

The opiate of the masses of modernity.

And there, where

‘Super-stardom’ is close to post-mortem,

I discover you:

The Individual… in the concrete jungle, that you tried to intimate

With frozen, iron-plastic breath – a failed resuscitate –

Your suspension of life as you tried to

Imitate

Life’s evolved inanimate.

***

I look and can see your signals,

Your struggles… But

What am I to do?

Leave you all alone?

Tell me! For the sake of God!

Others are trying

To speak to me,

But have forgotten the meaning,

The words,

The ideas

They’re communicating…

Sirens sounds and echoes are calling

Me all around…

Face to face, we are

Minds, bodies and souls,

With words articulating inter-personal,

Punctuated with occasional silences, yes,

But for careful reflection, consideration…

Are we too late?

Are we left with only hesitation? The remains of our manufactured indecision…?

PART 2

We know, we know

There is such a thing as the Self –

But we also know there was once a Community

Of Believers

Who sought a way to commune with, revelatory…

And ‘religio’ used to mean ‘to bind [together]’,

And ‘deen’¹ means ‘the Way’ [to God]. Salvation.

***

Without them, my brothers, sisters, you have only alien-nation.

___

Arif uz Zaman

February 2014

___

1 Deen (دين) is an Arabic word to mean an all-encompassing way of life carried out under the auspices of God’s divine purpose (i.e. as expressed in the Qur’an and hadith). A.k.a ‘A complete way of life’.

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