Obsession

Information is our culture's new drug of choice.

Convinced that more will get us higher

and overdosing is impossible,

we demand ever-larger syringes-full

and smoke it like it's going out of style.

Giddy with increasingly useless varieties,

we no longer care about quality or purpose.

Self-absorbed, we are sots filled only with

the numbing repetition of data

insulating us from reality. 

Our minds and spirits saturated with trash

equivalent to Sterno strained through a loaf of bread,

we're neither capable of connecting

with narratives nor people.

All we can do is spout irrelevance in random patterns,

the synapses of communion long-since atrophied.

So insidious is this hallucinogenic that we

completely fail to appreciate the logical disconnect

between our appetite for it and our paranoia

regarding broad distribution of our personal data.

Deliver us, O Lord, from this addiction

and its accompanying implosion.

Clear our caches that we might once again

store and retrieve sagas of community.

Gather our fragmented bytes that

they might be archived by love.

Show us again the miracle of stillness,

the healing of silence, the grace of space,

that we relearn the art of interfacing

our memoirs with yours and others',

through the unifying gift of our risen storyteller.

© 2013 Todd Jenkins