Tuesday poem #294 : Cath Morris : New World Order

I’ve noticed lately how fast things are changing

the First and Third Worlds merging so that

it’s all becoming more streetish,

busier, more stuff, less quality

dirtier, messier, more exotic,

more carnivale,

less village square

heated up,

not so cool

less elegant,

less fair

yet I suppose this means

more sharing, caring

melding of hearts

and minds

until we all melt

together

on the sidewalk,

like butter;

the hopeful side of this, though,

and why we all love Korean Psy

is the new sense of each other

the internet has bestowed

‘we the people’ not just North American

but like-minded brothers and sisters

linked across the world

in this sense

the unsettling thing about the merge

is that this new crowded high street

shows even more graphically how

the camps are divided, not just by religion

but by money and motive

and one is either fighting for right

with web-melded hearts and minds

or worshipping material wealth of all kinds

(the dead disease global trade has spread across the world

and threatens to wipe this experiment out altogether)

the Toltec prophecies tell us, however,

that the Sun is pure intelligence

and Virginia Woolfe says “all the world is mind”;

we are all creating this dream of Earth together

and if we don’t stop the destroyers

we’ll keep filling up the streets with human waste

until we all melt together

on the hot sidewalk

like… sizzling bacon rinds….

Ottawa-born long-time Vancouver resident and member of the TADS poets group, Cath Morris has been writing stories and poetry since she was a child. Before her introduction to the Vancouver literary scene, she was a journalist for The Georgia Straight and VAM (Vancouver Area Music) Magazine. Besides her chapbook, Venus & Apollo, from Pookah Press in 2009, Cath’s poetry has been published in TADS, Urban Pie, and The Capilano Review, as well as online poetry journals, Ottawater.com (3^rd, 8^th, 10^th, and 11^th Issues), Poethia.com, and Bywords.ca. Her work was later published in Coach House Press’ special edition anthology for Poet Laureate George Bowering’s 70^th birthday, 71(+) for GB, and Corporate Watch UK’s 10^th Anniversary Anthology (2007) in Oxford, UK. In 1998, director, Irina Trouchenko, staged the experimental one-act play, An Artist’s Dream, based on the eponymous poem and others by Cath Morris and Chris Turnbull for the UBC Summer Stock Festival at UBC’s Chan Centre. Besides Venus & Apollo, Cath has a second chapbook coming out with Pooka Press on September 9^th of this year (2018). Cath’s early self-published chapbook, After the Fall, awaits publication. More recently, Cath’s work can be found in the west-coast poetry anthology, Make it True: Poetry from Cascadia, 2015 (Leaf Press, Nanaimo, B.C.). Cath works as a television researcher/writer.

The Tuesday poem is curated by rob mclennan