Day 6: Poem-a-Day: Jibber Jabber barefoot

Jibber Jabber

by Therese Dawe

Love. Love and compassion.
Love and compassion and a roll of hundreds
Love and compassion, a roll of hundreds and a lavender filled pillow to lay my head on at night

I dream a world where Langston Hughes is remembered and quoted
Where children know how to be still and play by themselves
and music is played out loud, not in headphones, just for the beauty of it

I’m hankering for an adventure of some sort
Not the “Peace Corps-I want to help the world” kind
but more like an “Eat Pray Love” sort of adventure
Where all my responsibilities are magically on hold,
I’m off the grid - I run with the bulls, fish with natives in longboats
or do ayahuasca with a shaman for days on end
until I find my spirit totem

I break bread with locals, who tell me fantastic stories in broken English,
I sleep for hours under a mosquito net surrounded by wild dogs
who have decided that I am their new alpha leader

Trading in my jeans for dresses dyed with vegetable peels I go barefoot,
letting the dirt pathways take to me parts unknown

I dream a world that pushes back against the technological advances that enhance our lives
but create so much space between us that we are lost to each other
but for texts and tweets

Sisyphus, roll your rock
Springsteen, rock your roll

We are all just making our way through the matrix of the oncoming cyber cyclone
that sweeps through in the night and destroys our ability to speak

Next morning when we awake, all that is left is a landscape covered in bits and bytes
We stand mute,
forgetting the sound of our own voices

Therese Dawe is a poet and essayist who writes about the ways that we all find our path through life’s difficulties. Death, dying, the resiliency of the human spirit and the need to be connected are all topics of exploration. Also, she’s an unapologetic flaming Liberal.