Will Not Get With the Times by Bogdan Dragos

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he just wanted to write

Very old-school character

Used pencils and paper

But the city

wouldn’t let him. The city outside

his four walls stood like

a sea of noise

against his dreams

“Listen,” his wife said, “these days

they don’t even accept snail mail

submissions. You have to get

with the times. It’s done digitally,

by e-mail today. Can you understand

this? Are you listening?”

“Listening?” he snapped. “Oh, I am

listening, dear. I sure am.

Even when my ears are covered

and plugged. I am still

listening. Because there is no

fucking way to

evade the noise! No crevice in

this place is silent anymore. It’s

hell! Hell is the city,

hell is the noise, the screaming,

the crying, the gnashing of teeth.”

She got out of the room,

knowing that any further persuasion

would be futile,

and returned to the living room

couch where the newspaper was left

opened at the job market pages. It’s been

over twenty years since her husband

had written a good book, a book

that actually found a home with a publishing

house. Over twenty years. And he’d been

trying to

get back into the scene once more. For

over twenty years.

Perhaps the world no longer wanted

to hear stories about

how capitalism raped humanity as a whole

and anecdotes about consumerism

and the defiling of mother nature’s body

The world was

his enemy now

The city surrounding him especially

It was an enemy he could not

hope to fight physically

so he moved the battlefield to the

intellectual realm

and kept writing against

the world and

against the city

and would do so for the rest of his life

Which won’t be that long,

his wife concluded

after she found out that he’d dismembered

the computer she bought for him

and screwed the biggest screws he

could find into his eardrums

The pain and the bleeding

helped him

write even better though

-BOGDAN DRAGOS

Bogdan Dragos supervises casinos for a gambling company, working twelve-hour shifts locked in a dark office full of TV monitors. There he mostly daydreams and writes poems and stories. He also manages a poetry blog Daydreaming as a profession.

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