---

 

enjoy this writing in the 6" x 9" 2015 ISBN# paperback book the Chosen Few Click on the cover or any linked text to get a copy of the Chosen Few			Enjoy this 2015 Chicago open mic book as a snapshot of writings read on stage by assorted Chicago open mic writers as performed in shows from 2012-2015 at “the Café Gallery” open mic as a 6"x9" perfect-bound paperback ISBN# book!

Sign of The Times
(six minute distillation)

Jeff Helgeson

The “experiment” that was termed “the modern age” is said to have ended.
We’re past it now,
On to something else, something after,
Something rife for haiku:

Postmodern life echoes off like your profile in parallel mirrors.

It has become infinite,
a seemingly eternal ever-now,
in itself and of itself,
consubstantial.

It is the surface of things that is all that has come to matter.

What you see is what you get; the reflective is the real; appearance is reality.

This empty space, you in darkness – I see you seeing me; you see me, seeing you –
hyper-reality,
an enigma wrapped up somehow within the seeming paradox of a “reality show.”

It’s a sign of the times.

Zero-consciousness has replaced understanding.
Protean in nature, irrationality eclipses the Age of Reason.

In praise of folly, news is now watched for entertainment, truth substituting for illusion,
and no real distinction setting them apart.

With “Wheel of Fortune” following a few, brief commercial messages,
I zap from carpet cleaning ads to reruns of a show about nothing,
remotely in control, flickering a heap of broken images,
a cornucopia of impressions,
perceiving nothing.

The great wasteland goes click clacking ever-on before me,
offering a myriad of choices,
making it impossible to decide,
replacing anxiety with consumerist hysteria,
angst with continual distraction,
ennui with self-referential engagement.

Still, there is truth within simulation.

Those are real people whose lives are affected by what we see on TV
while eating dinner from the microwave.
There is a dark side which passeth show beneath the surface shine of things as they seem.

The “good news” of the end of history
Masks a hidden truth that both Hegel and Marx sought to ignore.

Still eyeless in Gaza, Hamas ascendant, appointments in Samara yet to be fulfilled,
the prospect promised by the end of the Cold War,
the great dialectic brought into resolution – up Shiite creek.

The wall may well have tumbled down,
But Reason did not achieve itself – in time.

The idols of the tribe,
the cave,
the marketplace,
became merely theatre.

And still,
all in all,
we remain just as we were,
desperately seeking erudition.

You see, it may well not be true that the images of things, the signs that we perceive,
are only significant to other signs within an arbitrary code.

The belief in the failure of language
leads only to somnambulism,
to a solipsism that ends
the first time you stub your toe.

A close shave with Ockham’s razor can make dunces of us all.

Everything should be as simple as possible – but no simpler.

It’s true, we all face certain challenges,
sitting as we are upon the brink of extinction.

It’s a delicate balance within our Humpty Dumpty world,
a weighing out of things so seldom weighed - your money or your life,
the high price that you are willing to pay in the future
for the things that you consume today.

Still, we wonder, we question, we ask ourselves if there isn’t something more.

With simulation replacing what once was real,
The Holocaust Museum has become a destination,
a Disneyland of horror,
an end within itself.
There is now a monument at Babi Yar,
but no one goes there any more.

Yet, I still feel the deep pulse of absent generations within the open space around me.

Husky, brawling,
laughing their Lazarus laugh,
their ever-silent Picasso-phoenix laugh,
holding the dark secret of the ever-now
buried deep within the forgotten re-collection of the ever-now.

A third-world war now replaces the threat of World War Three;

CNN has made it all so clear.

The skyline lifting around us like a man-made mountain range of steel
can come crashing down.

Not even London’s subways are safe from this blitz anymore.

Chaos, the dragon of the Apocalypse, strains wildly against its collar.
Time ever-now is an end game born of time past.

The once marginalized of history have rebounded and begun striking back.

The fatwa against fiction has become a jihad against acculturation,
Globalization fought through the World Wide Web.

A new mega-language for old ideas, new bottles for old wine,
Secularism born of reformation is ever-now under attack.

The masses opiate is reintroduced,
stimulating resurgent fundamentalism,
neo-medievalism,
the sea of faith once more run amuck
in a back-alley end of history.

You want peace,
you’ll have to share a piece of the world.

In the end is the beginning?

Perplexed by discontinuity and indeterminacy,
the center cannot hold.

Time before will engender what comes after.

As now and ever shall be, it’s a sign of the times.

Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.

Problems with this page? Then deal with it...