‘A Window’ & ‘Selfie’ by Jethro Lorenzo Lising

A Window

“Look up!”, the old man says,
the young one looks at him, perplexed,
he points to the window where,
a stream of conifers, broken clouds, and traffic lines,
passed him by; unobserved

The stochastic melody of nature,
such as the tweets of spring time birds,
even the bustling city streets, and the subtle whirr of engines,
all were unlistened to; unheard

He looks down again, with a preoccupied gaze,
hunched over with rounded shoulder blades,
a stream of blue light paints his face,
as he scrolled through curated feeds,
stuck, in a digital daze,
endlessly refreshing his timeline,
packets of binary translate to dopamine treats,
his moods were dictated by soulless algorithms

The sensitive ones,
crave the refuge of solitude,
the old man tells him,
“—the secret lies in what we pay attention to!”

“So, look up and see,”
The old, the usual, the typical,
“—there’s beauty in the ordinary!”
The young one looked up and stared out the window

–

Selfie

She still lived inside of me
Though only as a simple memory
Sometimes I would by chance catch a scent of her old buttery body-wash from a passing crowd
(Never remembered its name, though I would instantly buy it if I did)
I wish I could remember everything there is in my short sighted mind,

A cold lifeless stare, a promise that she kept,
Over warnings of her fragile health,
Drama wasn’t her forte,
A straightforward gal with a prosaic tongue,
Wrote entire papers in the passive,
She never left her love; Nature, and the lab

All I have are memories
And your photograph on my shelf
I wish you took more Selfies
Because there’s nothing left that I can remember