Transport To The Real

Huh??

Interesting! Thanks for posting this.

I'll take a ride on a cloud and meet you up there. Salud

JFW, this poem needs no critiquing. What a wonderful playground of words and images you've presented. I can read it with silly delight and leave it.

Or...

I can delve into meanings that I conjure up, but may not have been intended by you, the author.

Either way, thank you for this one.

Most of the Pre-Simulationist poetry is so deep and serious that I love it when you poke fun at yourselves! What a great way to keep the ego in check. The up ride and the down ride here feel like the inflation and deflation of our egos.

Very playful. I love it. sort of like Heisenberg, I can tell what floor you are on or how fast you are ascending John, but not both.

Ah....the righteousness of trying to get into the conscience ... dig deeper, go togather [togather...Freudian slip I'd say] together or not. I will join you, you know that:))

Wonderful. I'm likin' the bumpy ride. Whatever you're selling, flim flam man, save me some.

Invitation is accepted, dear John... really liked it! ;-)

Blessings and best wishes - S.

I love the satire. A bit of a Lenny Bruce tone. We certainly learn social manners in a crowded elevator. It's after we go down and get off that we pursue sin.
That's my take and

by the way, Pilgrim's ate peacock in 1620, not turkey.

John, I'll ride that damned elevator with you all the way down into the burning pits ... except I've been banned from eternity. Dear CEO of Lost Causes

I lay in bed this morning thinking similar thoughts. Guess I'll just keep riding that elevator with you and see if my thought balloon remains empty. Actually, we are so busy thinking that I wonder if we all shouldn't just stop thinking and learning and groping and enter the world of being at its most elemental.

I love the sounds in this. Great use of the language

Dear, dear John. It is so grand to see your name again. Loved the poem and many of the comments. Number 56? Swaying in the wind.

I focus on the number 56 as perhaps relating to historically charted panic, economic crises and volatile earth patterns when I read this for the fourth time and then smile while reflecting on the currently overused phrasing of "it's been a great or wild ride" and then follow these brilliant exclamatory directives through the shaft of attention authored after a silenced intro. We arrive in this poem after some extensive internal deep-see dives by the authored voice and those loom in this poem while not mentioned......just the opening of "Even" indicating we're late to the surgery and the biopsy has begun. The cancerous
mental infestations of a purpose and intent having been infectiously aligned in a self-socialized "rise to the top" hypnosis is strategically owned and mocked and group embraced for its perilous underpinnings of false hope. The goal itself has but abtracted "where" attainability, and the motivational outline is addressed for substantive merit. The humor that is generously veiling this catapulting scenario lightens the allusion to the great foredestined plunge where expectations, as always, do not meet with their grandiosely anticipated just rewards and a honing of values seems to be necessitated . The great plunge, into the inside heart shafts feels imminent and we're all along for the ride to address our virtual egos and identities as writers, etc. for the real purpose of our public exchanges and any "fame and fortune"aspirations. It's fine company, so I'll take this ascent and descent into the reality check zone with ease. The message within is one of geat depth but the authored lift operator feels quite accustomed to taking this elevator from the penthouse to the basement and the trip is embraced with compassion and affection, so no one gets too smashed up should a freefalll come from glitches in the mechanics....and there's company, so no one travels alone and the outreach comfortingly says, "Risk it.....let's see where we end up." Nice, nice, nice play with wrestling accountabilities and readjusting intents, dearest Poet.

hehehe.... If you write it, I'll go all the way to the top with you or ride it through the basement all the way to China.

Virtual Irrational Exuberance? This is mindless banter for the ride up; this is comedy. This is for the ride down; Stevie Plunder fell off a waterfall to his death; this is tragedy.

My DSL has been out for about 12 hours of every day - usually afternoon until midnight. I have to go now but will be back to read this and your other one, John, as soon as I can.

Maybe it's just me, John, but this seems a deeply despairing piece.

"Begoogled poesy" that you can't enact anymore. That 'your' (poem's protagonist) "poesy" is a "flamming," that it's lacking something.

In the Internet world, perhaps, if we interpret it that way, our writing is shared as if in "a virtual elevator" where we can't see each other's "thought balloons." There is a vacancy at the heart of it all. You "can't smile" and "you can't spit" either in the "virtual elevator" that rides "up, up to where there is no where there."

We are invited to a "lift party" at your "icon's behest." Where we "About to go down forever, so don't get off now."

With the physical, sensual, bodily touch, the connection between people who actually interact, what is poetry?

Where is the pulse? It's "icons" talking to other "icons." None of it is 'real.' Turn off the computer and all the "icons" are gone. You don't refer to it in the poem, but most likely most of what we have shared "virtually" will disappear since the storage mediums, the hard drives, are unstable.

It's somehow empty, void of meaning, this "virtual" world.

What we need is "Transport To The Real."

Though how? The poem doesn't tell us.

I hope you are not, yourself, feeling as despairing as the narrator of this poem!

The explosion of writing going on in the world, the explosion of creativity in blogs, websites, notes, emails, is something to laud, especially when the experts thought we would forget how to read and write as a culture with the onslaught of the visual mediums.

Though, as your poem suggests, we are all living in our separate Ivory Towers where we share the elevators with other phantoms.

Transport To The Real is intriguing, thought-provoking, emotional, and it packs a quite a punch. I'd love to hear you read this - can you upload an audio file? That's some party you're inviting us to, but I'll be there. :) xo

Oops, typo: Without the physical, sensual, bodily touch, the connection between people who actually interact, what is poetry?

What is this? After 10 votes, rating is closed?! I wanted to give this piece top rating and Gather won't let me! Boo. (hugs, & please keep writing from your virtual elevator, miss your poetry) :)

Going down? Step right in.

I love the dry humor as a device to get at something very, very serious. I'll join you!

I'm on it already and thanks for the invitiation in this satire of life that gets to us all at some point or other.

"And--hot damn!-- I thought I could at least get by
in this fashion, by flimming myself into
flamming you folks a little bit longer.
But the truth is, we´re all bored upright here."

I love this. It sums up the feeling I get every time I write something.
Great write.

I'd thought I'd chosen the other pilule. The wouge won worn by the qween of hots. Oh, well, welcome to the dessert of the unreal. -- You're in a fine light sharp word state, dear John.

All right John, I am with you. I am going also to publish my latest digital surreal collage; it's also about elevation; defeat the gravity of mater and ratio; let's dance upwards ...

The call for community in calamity, this raucous, superbly structured poem with its vaguely-guised existential pretense, is really more of the speaker's disdain for the riders of the virtual elevator, that promises to please as it dives to oblivion. No seventh floor cosmetics, or 33rd floor onotologics, for that matter, just a steady dive downward. I love how you take away the chill with your superb jibe talk. This is good!

I had to read the tags to fully understand this, but that's ok. You had me at the first few lines where the reality is told and I traveled down, down, do..........

We are all riding this elevator.
Crowded - singing, crying, laughing.
Can't dance, no room.

Love a flim flam man, married one.

Came back to this....the dark sorcery of its invitations,
demeaning value for the ride...anywhere.....this really
feels churning this time around....the speaker so disconnected
or surrendered from himself, but creating relationship through directing the
group plunge....your poems are volatile and flexible that way, their
undercurrents' flow in alignment to the reader's teased
emotional contributions, seduces with an orchestrated and calculated
mischief and very artful provocation .

Beyone all the fluff, there seems to be a dry emptyness behind your words, my friend

good imagery.

Waiting for Godot in the north tower elevator. Only, the gibberish is silence and the philosophy the anti-existance of uncomfortable quiet. I welcome the disdain of just one willing to speak, expectorate your thought bubble and we watch astounded as your humorous faceted loogie slides down the panneled wall, catching the dull light and daring us to begin a real conversation.

Just a big hello John - and hope you're day is going well. Salud

i love this, john, the wit and the weather, weird as that weather is! i'm not afraid to take that ride, mess up my virtual hair, hell i'll shave it off if it will help! so what if all the other thought balloons are empty? when does THAT ever happen. this may all be a lot of jive most of the time but indeed, it's a fine ride up, up and then a long ride down, and hell, might as well go all the way while we're there there, into the infinite abyss of our being and nothingness. rough ride on the virtual wave, bored as hell! but please, pass the jam while we wait... let's at least get a little sweetness out of this rat race, n'est-ce pas, jean? xoxoxox

I love the ride fun !

Oh John Don't tell me your wife was missing you

when you wrote to tell her this ?!!!

Hot damn????? YOu've been hanging around me too long! Salud

Reread this and this time noticed how verse flowed from verse to verse without a rest. The pace was like a leisurely stroll with words usually not used that portend alarming, but the building pessimism (political?) lets us know, at the end, clamity is like a washed out bridge in the direction our society is headed.

John,
You sounded a bit bored. It's not like you to be so cynical. I got ther satire tho'. It is winter here and the quietness drives me crazy. And the cold makes me want to daydream.
Very well done piece.

This is good.