30 Poems in 30 Days: Tune In And Never Tune Out (15/30)

15 June 2007

Tune In And Never Tune Out
by Daniel R Stout

The beats burn my skin.
Life at 160 BPM concludes
with people on the floor,
twitching,
from overstimulation.
We’ve been here all night
and now it’s 5 a.m.
What’s left of my brain
has been refried like so
many beans on a diet
of eurobeat and
thee infinite.
There are no answers
to life
in this warehouse tonight.
It’s just the thump of the subwoofers
and the bleary-eyed kids
searching for an escape
from the clouds
that hang permanently over
the suburbs now.
They flood into the city
from the McMansions.
And now the chill-out comes —
5 a.m. —
with its beats rolling downstream
out to sea.
I suddenly wish I could see
a sea gull. I think they’re all
dead
like the kids convulsing
from their epileptic drug-induced
catatonia. Remove the beats
from these altered landscapes
and what do they lose?
It’s the format that’s flawed.
Instead of escaping, we’ve come
here to jump closer in — to be nearer
that maelstrom of the ear. We reject
these neo-hippies
and though we may
tune in,
we never
tune out.