Transcript

I’m Major Jackson and this is The Slowdown.

On occasion, I question whether or not my desires are my desires. Or has my subconscious merely given into the massive amounts of stimuli of our modern age? For example, take this almond milk grande cappuccino with one-pump sugar-free vanilla syrup. Now that it sits on my desk, half-full and cold as a wet day on the beach, I am not convinced I really wanted an espresso drink. Plus, over several days, I guess I had been seeing them everywhere…and that made it feel like a natural need.

Frankly, sometimes I am not even sure my positions on political issues are my own. I feel uber aware, too, of how my participation on various social media platforms set me up as one big canyon of malleable data points. I find that my moods can easily be switched or manipulated by a single post or trending topic. Occasionally, I like to change my profile’s location and age, and watch FoxNews just to mess with the algorithms, processes, and classifiers — and to see how it changes my own reaction.

I’m not the first poet to want to turn all of this on its head. A group of experimental poets in the late 20th century called the Language Poets questioned whether or not even daily language could be trusted, whether it adequately conveyed any sense of authentic experience or feelings, because regular language itself had been co-opted by advertising in the interest of selling us goods. And today, of course, our phones, computers, and other screens keep the goods coming 24 hours a day.

Today’s deeply relatable poem articulates the frustrations of living in this modern age, how we exist in a vortex of digital information that potentially wipes out any notion of free will. The poem’s repetitive performance of longing reminds us that this constant state of dissatisfaction and need distracts us from our deepest desires.

The “I Want” Song
by Rachel Richardson

I just want them to stop emailing. All of them. You. The bots.
I want the kids to stop whining, the floor
to sweep itself, the sun to rise blamelessly
into the sky. In every Disney movie the main character
gets to stop, look into the camera, and howl
her “I Want” song straight into our chests. Once
it’s been laid out for all of us to hear, we know
she has to get it. But there’s so much that I want—
for the trees not to burn, or at least
not these trees, not unless they’re far away or 
beneficial to the understory. I want to stop
feeling like I’d better buy the fruit
now because maybe next year there will be
no more fruit, no more water, maybe the crops will burn
or wither or be sprayed with the chemical that kills
the bees and which studies now show
kills the bees’ children and children’s children
two bee-generations after exposure. 
I want not to think about the expiration of the world.
I want to delete my profile, I want pollination
of the blossom and the swelling of fruit. 
I want to stand inside the fog socked in under a crown
of redwoods. I want to become the fog.

"The 'I Want' Song" by Rachel Richardson. Used by permission of the poet.