To-Do List by Gary Glauber

You can plan to change the world.

It is even encouraged, against likely odds.

Consider the endgame, results achieved,

and work backwards from there.

Plan something challenging, motivational,

moving, and engaging enough to pass muster.

Seek relevance in a place that moves faster

each day, losing the past at an increased rate

as present trivialities magically

appear in a tailored online stream.

We are tethered to our phones,

addicted to the apps that power us

away from a time of simpler truths.

This ride has no line, it’s instantaneous.

So buckle up and prepare

for the rough and tumble journey,

odyssey as commercial oracle, triggering

heightened sensitivities of the newly

numbed populace when least expected.

Grab a tossed hashtag, and try your best

to keep afloat, resisting easy undertow

of the overpraised and hyper inflated,

hot air rising like evaporating ideas

in the refracted trapped carbon gases

of a climate changing beyond recognition,

in a place trading innocence for convenience,

hacking away at life’s difficulties until

recognition improves but fails to recognize

where mortality arrives up ahead,

and still we plan on planning,

one by one from now through forever.

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Gary Glauber is a widely published poet, fiction writer, teacher, and former music journalist. He has three collections, Small Consolations (Aldrich Press), Worth the Candle (Five Oaks Press), and Rocky Landscape with Vagrants (Cyberwit); and two chapbooks, Memory Marries Desire (Finishing Line Press) and The Covalence of Equanimity (SurVision Books), a winner of the 2019 James Tate International Poetry Prize. Another collection, A Careful Contrition (Shanti Arts Publishing) is forthcoming soon.