Short Poetry — Welcome To Utopia
First read through the poem.
What do you call paradise?
Your gleaming world of desire,
Is it escaping the Monday,
Or living with your past ones again,
Or is it being the best in your class, school and state beyond achieving the alluding Chancellor’s Award?
There’s not much I can do to describe this utopia,
Which ranges from luxury chocolates to the idea of mastering eclectic poetry.
Not every paradise is the pious and precious dreams,
For some it is the dark revenge of stabbing heart and dispelling blood on one’s face,
Or burning generation and strengthening their own.
But today let’s leave Eden,
Let’s desert this mystical Arcadia,
Let’s farewell Hamlet with his skull,
And let’s desert this Adam and Eve and this Venus vs Mars.
Utopia is a dream which was created to be never fulfilled,
So, stop letting the dream of groping and eating golden apple,
Or being the father of Bill Gates or being the best in blaring the bassoon
Blink and sink yourself into desires and dreams,
For the mind is a cheeky child that will stray hither and thither,
And concoct an Impressionist artwork, at far it looks dazzling,
Nonetheless it entails the ability of a monkey.
So let the politicians squabble like inaudible pigeons,
Let shopping sprees on Black Friday craze people
And let the ice-cream van scream chimes,
And make every worth of your dimes,
All around us, everything we see is utopia.
The child with least finds utopia in the cornucopia,
The snow leopard in the deserts of Arabia is Arcadia for the cruel hunter,
And for a linguist fluent Korean is Eden.
Dreams are made to inspire and embed,
People aspire to lay on a bed of roses,
Reality is impossible, so don’t try to achieve it,
Be lit by the impossible because no one’s seen it.
Even heaven isn’t paradise with demi-gods hopping about,
When one realises not every friend was devout.
But the world asks me, “If not Utopia, then what is life being?”
Oh, mortal beings of stifling mind,
Be compassionate and kind, look carefully at the simple things,
Newton didn’t sing Specialist Mathematics, nay did he attend quantum physics lectures,
He just thought of why an apple hit his head.
Don’t sit under a coconut tree waiting,
Please don’t meditate awaiting the appearance of the god,
Live your life, but the next time something prods you,
Ponder about it deeper and deeper, like a devoted pilgrim,
Until you think the world is ready to reap and leap off your ideas.
Overcome Utopia and materialism, only then one can find gleaming glorification.
Now feel free to see my formal “inspirations”:
My slam poem is an exploration about the strong themes of materialism and how the world should not be entranced by what it brings. To further emphasise this I try to describe the various aspects in which utopia is found in our daily lives, “…which ranges from luxury chocolates to the idea of mastering eclectic poetry”, being different for every person. “…Fluent Korean is Eden”, is one of many examples I use to emphasise this. A few words were tried to somewhat describe how utopia can be reworded, with different nuances in the meanings, take these ones: Eden, Arcadia and Paradise. The way these are designed ensure that the concept of utopia, strategically takes many forms. Some literary techniques that helped embed meaning is the internal rhymes used sparingly in the poem, like ‘it’ and ‘lit’ and at times adapted my own simplistic rhyme like the last words in each line rhyming, adding somewhat flow to the poem. The idea of internal rhyme was inspired was from Shane Koyczan. I felt that at times rhyme was not something that was prerequisite in my poetry, so I used internal rhymes, which are less prominent, rather than a repetitive rhyme pattern etc. ABABABABABA …. Alliteration limited my word choices and was only used when required, as some words were better left as they were due to their meaning nuances. Metaphor however made the words alive, “…ice-cream vans screamed chimes”.
