i’m trying to write this distraction free,
but i’m not very successful in that endeavor,
since i’m also listening to a poetry podcast
while responding to an email about purchasing brazilian coffee
and glancing at the c market price on another tab,
and occasionally roasting more coffee for a customer’s order,
though when i’m really distracted, i just scroll for hours on end
through reddit looking at everything and nothing all at once
as someone that considers themselves a poet,
i sometimes ask whether the world needs
any of my poems,
to which i suppose need is too strong of a word,
considering how much poetry existed before i was
ever conceived by minds and hands of masters
long deceased and overcrowded in the streets of cemeteries,
but then i also have to ask what i would do with my time
if i didn’t spend it writing random poems and stories,
and more than likely i would be scrolling through reddit,
or playing chess or xbox,
or maybe reading a book by or about some dead person,
or, at least at this particular moment while i write this,
i would be roasting coffee for some stranger on the internet,
all of which i do, i swear,
but sometimes i write poems in between these random assortment
of activities because…
i can, because…i like to,
despite knowing that the world would go on,
people would go on,
with or without my limited contribution of poems assembled
haphazardly on the internet,
curated by myself for a few fellow lonely
cybertravelers wondering and wandering,
spinning happily in arbitrary directions,
in one quick breath caught by the vulture’s wing,
and then gone…
i started listening to k-pop
while reading langston hughes’ poetry
in hopes that it would somehow change the meaning
behind his words
i’ve found it a bit too distracing,
but my next experiment will be to listen to justin beiber
while reading dylan thomas
Fred Aiken Writing 