Derek Kannemeyer

Love Letter in an Age of Aggrandizement

Alexa, love, mute your horn. You’ll toot our ears out.

I came of age, you understand, at the dawning of the age of Aquarius; and what that broke into, you remember, was less light than noise; less sense than sputter.

Until the sun shone in on an age of agitations—of aggrandizers, and their warring agencies—their every agenda a siren sing-song—whoever may mean, as we did, once, to mean it.

To bell out the nostalgias and the seize-the-hedonisms; to smell out the entitlements and entanglements; to spell out the dyspepsias, the dystopias; to tell out and to yell out and to sell out and to shell out.

And I have looked and I have listened, one cannot help it, Alexa, I have limboed to the lilt of them, in ways age appropriate and inappropriate, with the billions of others living through this age of us, the young, the old, the in between, the age innumerate. Until I’ve found—no, Alexa, let me talk, I ask you nothing today, only to attend—I have found myself running at the mouth in great lost circles. Gored by the horns of too loud claims. Which I must drag my assailed self up from under, out into another neon dawn. So this is your age now, Alexa? That’s the word on the big banks of the Amazon? And I may fact-check that? For lo, on this April, 2018 day of the holy Google, with its 3 billion results in half a second, the search-engine gospels sayeth:

that ours is the age of naive cynicism, the age of cautious optimism, the age of opportunities;
that it is the Anthropocene age, of an earth remade to meet the needs of humans;
or it is the age of airplanes, of capital consumption and the customer experience;
or else the age of the second Renaissance, or of Big Brother;
and this is only from page one of those 3 billion hits.

Alexa, if it is, rather, your age—and you must loudly admit to your age (is that joke ageist?)— are you, then, let’s say, the anti-Google; the voice who selects, elects, pronounces; whose hit is the one true lord and answer? (No, no, don’t give me that answer yet, I’m not done sputtering.)

Or is this so-called age of yours, Alexa, only one more catchy number—like the ages of Aquarius, or Information, or consent?

Because page two tells me it’s the age of loneliness. And of unreason, and that’s a fact. The age of stupid; the age of the brain; the age of the cyborg. The age of fear, and of the muscle car, and (yes! yes!) of too much. Still no mention of you, Alexa, or of the angel Siri.

Alexa, trust me on this—in the truth of my all-wise word, and of my love for you—and back off a little. Let’s let some dark shine in; some silence whisper…

That we may learn the catchphrases of leaves in a light wind; of the wordless birds. That we may search the morse-lights of the sky upon lake waters; the pathless meanders of the grass. That we may age into an age more gentle: beside still waters, and waters lightly ruffling in the wind.

Copyright © Derek Kannemeyer 2018

Derek Kannemeyer is a South African-born, London-raised Richmonder, whose poems and prose writings have appeared in dozens of publications from Fiction International to Rolling Stone. His 2018 books are a collection of light verse (An Alphabestiary) and The Blue Nib Chapbook 1, featuring his winning group of poems from that journal’s inaugural chapbook contest.

30 for 30 is sponsored by Potomac Review